Re: GUC with units, details

Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> I'd imagine that one of the first things someone will want to try is
> something like SET work_mem TO '10MB', which will fail or misbehave
> because 10000000 bytes do not divide up into chunks of 1024
> bytes.  Who
> wants to explain to users that they have to write '10MiB'?

How about this:

INFO: Your setting was converted to IEC standard binary units. Use KiB,
MiB, and GiB to avoid this warning.

>
> Since about forever, PostgreSQL has used kB, MB, GB to
> describe memory
> allocation.  If we want to change that, we ought to do it across the
> board.  But that's a big board.

The standard hasn't been around forever; some incarnation of PostgreSQL
certainly pre-dates it. But it was created to reduce confusion between
binary and decimal units.

The Linux kernel changed to the standard years ago. And that's just a
few more lines of code than PostgreSQL. ( http://kerneltrap.org/node/340
and others )

Regards,
Paul Bort