Re: effective_cache_size vs units

"Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:

> Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
>> Oh, you mean MB vs Mb. Man, it had to be that simple :)
>
> ISTM we had discussed whether guc.c should accept units strings in
> a case-insensitive manner, and the forces of pedantry won the first
> round. Shall we reopen that argument?

Nope, I just checked back in the archive and that's not what happened. There
was an extended discussion about whether to force users to use the silly KiB,
MiB, etc units. Thankfully the pedants lost that round soundly.

There was no particular discussion about case sensitivity though Simon made
the case for user-friendly behaviour:

> I think we are safe assume to that
>
> kB = KB = kb = Kb = 1024 bytes
>
> mB = MB = mb = Mb = 1024 * 1024 bytes
>
> gB = GB = gb = Gb = 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes
>
> There's no value in forcing the use of specific case and it will be just
> confusing for people.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-07/msg01253.php

And Jim Nasby said something similar:

> Forcing people to use a specific casing scheme is just going to lead to
> confusion and user frustration. If there's not a very solid *functional*
> argument for it, we shouldn't do it. Wanting to enforce a convention that
> people rarely use isn't a good reason.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-07/msg01355.php

There was a lone comment from Thomas Hallgren in favour of case sensitivity in
the name of consistency. But Nasby's comment was directly in response and
nobody else piped up after that.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com