Re: Book nearing final form

At 06:28 PM 07-06-2000 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>I have been told by the publisher that most changes to the book must be
>done by next week.
>
>The book is at:
>
>    http://www.postgresql.org/docs/awbook.html
>
>Again, many thanks to those that have supplied suggestions for the book.

More "typical usage" examples on commands would be helpful. For example the
cluster command may need a typical usage example. Not everyone can parse
man pages and understand the differences with stuff being between <> and []
and {} so on... Typical usage examples can help the majority actually get
things done.

Also a LIMITS section/appendix would be very useful. This should list stuff
like limits on tuples, queries, names, fields, data types, number of tables
(theoretical and practical), number of indexes, and so on. It can be rather
misleading to say that "text" has no limit and only when people bump into
the tuple limit, we tell them of the infamous 8KB row/tuple limit.
Naturally this would be out of date soon, but that just sets the stage for
the 2nd edition ;).

An example for "create user with password" would be good too - since the
web example was unclear/problematic the last time I checked - I had to do
some trial an error.

Also another thing should be made clear:

Stuff like vacuumdb, createdb etc are basically scripts, whereas the actual
commands are vacuum, create database and so on. A clear distinction should
be made between the two, I feel this would clarify things a lot, especially
when you configure Postgres in a way which some scripts aren't comfortable
with (documentation or usagewise)- access control for instance.

Should there be mention of turning off fsync for performance reasons? Or is
that a bit risky/not officially supported? I find there is a dramatic
performance difference, however I'm still a bit nervous about it :).

Cheerio!

Link.