Re: Read/Write block sizes

> of effort reinventing the wheel ... but our time will be repaid much
> more if we work at levels that the OS cannot have knowledge of, such as
> join planning and data statistics.

    Considering a global budget of man-hours which is the best ?

1- Spend it on reimplementing half of VFS in postgres, half of Windows in
postgres, half of FreeBSD in postgres, half of Solaris in Postgres, only
to discover you gain a meagre speed increase and a million and a half bugs,

2- Spending 5% of that time lowering the impedance between the OS and
Postgres, and another 5% annoying Kernel people and helping them tweaking
stuff for database use, and the rest on useful features that give useful
speedups, like bitmap indexes, skip scans, and other features that enhance
power and usability ?

If you're Oracle and have almost unlimited resources, maybe. But even
Microsoft opted for option 2 : they implemented ReadFileGather and
WriteFileScatter to lower the syscall overhead and that's it.

And point 2 will benefit to many other apps, wether 1 would benefit only
postgres, and then only in certain cases.

I do believe there is something ineresting to uncover with reiser4 though
(it definitely fits point 2).

I'm happy that the pg team chose point 2 and that new versions keep coming
with new features at an unbelievable rate these times. Do you guys sleep ?