Re: Can I get some PostgreSQL developer feedback on these five general issues I have with PostgreSQL and its ecosystem?

I have to agree that pg_dump is largely a step child backup program. It has consistently been found over the years to be lacking in a number of areas. Unfortunately, working on pg_dump isn't sexy and it is difficult to get volunteers or even paid resources to do such a thing. The real solution for pg_dump is a complete refactor which includes pg_dumpall and it is not a small undertaking. It should be noted that it is also a less and less used program. On our team it is normally used for only very specific needs (grabbing a schema) and we use binary backups or logical replication to receive specific data.

3. The ability to embed PG to run in an automatic, quiet manner as part of something else. I know about SQLite, but it's extremely limited to the point of being virtually useless IMO, which is why I cannot use that for anything nontrivial. I want my familiar PostgreSQL, only not require it to be manually and separately installed on the machine where it is to run as part of some "application". If I could just "embed" it, this would allow me to create a single EXE which I can simply put on a different machine to run my entire "system" which otherwise takes *tons* of tedious, error-prone manual labor to install, set up and maintain. Of course, this is probably much easier said than done, but I don't understand why PG's architecture necessarily dictates that PG must be a stand-alone, separate thing. Or rather, why some "glue" cannot enable it to be used just like SQLite from a *practical* perspective, even if it still is a "server-client model" underneath the hood. (Which doesn't matter at all to me, nor should it matter to anyone else.)

This is really using the wrong tool for the job type of issue. PG was never designed for such a scenario.

4. There is no built-in means to have PG manage (or even suggest) indexes on its own. Trying to figure out what indexes to create/delete/fine-tune, and determine all the extremely complex rules for this art (yes, I just called index management an *art*, because it is!), is just utterly hopeless to me. It never gets any easier. Not even after many years. It's the by far worst part of databases to me (combined with point five). Having to use third-party solutions ensures that it isn't done in practice, at least for me. I don't trust, nor do I want to deal with, external software and extensions in my databases. I still have nightmares from PostGIS, which I only keep around, angrily, out of absolute necessity. I fundamentally don't like third-party add-ons to things, but want the core product to properly support things. Besides, this (adding/managing indexes) is not even some niche/obscure use-case, but something which is crucial for basically any nontrivial database of any kind!

I think you are looking at this from a very windows centric way. Open Source has its origins from the Unix paradigm where each tool was designed to solve one type of problem and you used multiple tools to create a "solution". Though we have strayed from that on some items due to the evolving nature of software needs, that is still at our core and for good reason. Having tools, flags etc... to do such things (including your point #3) creates complexity best left to "vendors" not the software project.

The practical end result of this is that I've always gone back to using the untouched default configuration file (except for the logging-related options), which, especially in the past on FreeBSD, *severely* crippled my PG database to not even come close to taking advantage of the full power of the hardware. Instead, it felt like I was using maybe 1% of the machine's power, even with a proper database design and indexes and all of that stuff, simply because the default config was so "conservative" and it couldn't be just set to "use whatever resources are available".

Not to be unkind but this does seem lazy. There are literally hundreds of "how to make postgres go fast", "how to optimize postgres" if you take 15 minutes to Google. It is true that the project (outside of the wiki) doesn't have much information in the official documentation but that doesn't mean that the information is not available.

I wish so much for PG to have a mode where it self-tunes itself as needed, over time, based on the actual workload, or at least allowed some kind of abstract "performance mode" such as: "you are allowed to use significant system resources, PG", or: "You are one of my most important applications. Just use as much power as you currently need, but at least save about 10% for the rest of the system, will you?" Maybe this is also harder than it sounds to accomplish, but for somebody like me who has zero funding, I cannot hire some professional to sit down with me and fine-tune my system for $899/hour.

See my comment about Google. The information is out there and easy to find.

Discord and Slack