Re: Pet Peeves?

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 01:16:17PM +0000, Gregory Stark wrote:
>
> I'm putting together a talk on "PostgreSQL Pet Peeves" for
> discussion at FOSDEM 2009 this year.  I have a pretty good idea what
> some them are of course, but I would be interested to hear if people
> have any complaints from personal experience.  What would be most
> interesting is if you can explain an example of when the problem
> caused real inconvenience to you, since sometimes it's hard to see
> from a theoretical description where the real harm lies.
>
> So, what do people say?  Is Postgres perfect in your world or does
> it do some things which rub you the wrong way?
>
> Feel free to respond on-list or if you prefer in personal emails.  I
> do intend to use the ideas you give in my presentation so mark
> anything you wouldn't be happy to see in a slide at a conference
> some day.

* No built-in ways to get the information psql gets.  "See what psql
  is doing" isn't an option when somebody doesn't have psql on hand.

* No deferrable UNIQUE constraints.

* No man pages for the internals.

* Letter options in psql, pg_dump[all], pg_restore aren't consistent
  and can easily steer you very wrong.  I'm looking at you, -d.

* CTEs not yet integrated into the adjacency lists in pg_catalog, etc.

The following aren't problems with the PostgreSQL core engine itself,
but they're nearby, so they catch ire:

* Neither pgAdmin nor phpPgAdmin includes any facilities for
  extracting ERDs.

* Neither of them let you set up Slony (or any other replication
  system) to start with.

--
David Fetter <david@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778  AIM: dfetter666  Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter      XMPP: david.fetter@gmail.com

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