On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure I really want to make it that flexible :-)
>
> To deal with the issue Tom's referring to, I think it would be sufficient if
> we just allowed users to suppress production of certain columns (as long as
> we never do anything so evil as to add a new column in the middle).
>
> There are some other issues with the format. I know Josh has bitched about
> the presence of command tags in certain fields, for example.
If there is going to be any change, how about using fixed columns (an
possibly allowing them to be empty for stuff that's expensive to
create/write), but adding a 1st column that contains a "version"
identifyer. And to make it easy, maybe the PG major version as the
version value.
If the 1st column is always the version, tools can easily know if
they understand all the columns (and what order they are in) and it'
easy to write a "conversion" that strips/re-aranges columns from a
newer CVS dump to match an older one if you have tools that don't know
about newer column layouts..
Personally, I'm not worried about the CSV logs being backwards
compatible as long as there's a very easy way to know what I might be
looking at, so conversion is easy...
But then again, I don't have multiple gigabytes of logs to process either.
a.
--
Aidan Van Dyk Create like a god,
aidan@highrise.ca command like a king,
http://www.highrise.ca/ work like a slave.