On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 01:40 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > Ron Mayer wrote:
> >> My reasoning why I thought the log file was more useful was
> >> that only an admin with access to the log files could really
> >> do anything about the message anyway.
>
> > The log file is useful, but I think showing the VACUUM user is _more_
> > useful than the log file.
>
> I think that reasoning is fundamentally unsound, because (a) a lot of
> people already do vacuuming via a cron job or autovacuum, and (b)
> autovacuum is definitely the wave of the future. So it's foolish
> to design this messaging around the assumption that there will be
> a human attentive to the on-line output from VACUUM. We should be
> ensuring that the message gets into the postmaster log --- whether
> it gets sent to the client is secondary.
Personally, I prefer the postmaster log as the place for this.
However, whilst vacuum exists as a separate command, there will be an
argument to return a message back to the person running it; we cannot
assume that people would be inattentive.
Possibly the deciding factor should be whether autovacuum makes it fully
into becoming a special backend anytime soon, since in that case only
the log would remain as an option for reporting this message, in that
case.
Can we have both?
Best Regards, Simon Riggs