On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 2:35 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 11:10 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> >> There is a finite limit to how much stuff we can maintain as part of core.
>
> > I don't agree with that at all.
>
> Really? Let's have a discussion of how thermodynamics applies to
> software management sometime.
Sounds like an interesting discussion, perhaps for PGCon, but what I
was actually disagreeing with was the idea that we should add a table
AM interface and then not accept any new table AMs, which I think
would be silly. And if we're going to accept any, a columnar one
seems like a strong candidate.
> Yeah, and that's something I've regretted more than once; I think SP-GiST
> is a sterling example of something that isn't nearly useful enough in the
> real world to justify the amount of maintenance effort we've been forced
> to expend on it. You might trawl the commit logs to get a sense of the
> amount of my own personal time --- not that of the original submitters ---
> that's gone into that one module. Then ask yourself how much that model
> will scale, and what other more-useful things I could've accomplished
> with that time.
Yep, that's fair.
> We do need to limit what we accept into core PG. I do not buy your
> argument that users expect everything to be in core. Or more accurately,
> the people who do think that way won't be using PG anyway --- they'll
> be using MSSQL because it comes from their OS vendor.
I agree that we need to be judicious in what we accept, but I don't
agree that we should therefore accept nothing. There are lots of
things that we could put in core and users would like it that I'm glad
we haven't put in core.
I think you might be surprised at the number of people who normally
want everything from a single source but are still willing to consider
PostgreSQL; vendors like my employer help to smooth the road for such
people. Still, I don't think there is any major database product
other than PostgreSQL that ships only a single table storage format
and just expects that it will be good enough for everyone. Like
640kB, it just isn't.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company