Re: Need for "Getting Started" Tutorial

On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 07:06:32PM -0400, Chris Browne wrote:
> FYI, I left ~250 copies of a 2 page PostgreSQL brochure at local
> LUG's booth at the IT360 show today. <http://www.it360.ca/> (This
> used to be the show known as RealWorldLinux.)
>
> I'll find out tomorrow how many copies survived, or if they went
> fast...

How'd that go?

> The *other* thing needing followup was that someone observed that
> they had some problems getting PostgreSQL to work properly, based on
> some of the "default" documentation. This probably represents the
> fact that different flavours of Linux behave a little bit
> differently, and when people are new to Unix, in general, they may
> not have sufficiently fine-tuned problem-solving skills to get past
> this "speed bump."
>
> Seems to me that there is a need for a "getting started with
> PostgreSQL on {flavours of Linux}" sort of tutorial.

Basically, such a tutorial would consist of, "familiarize yourself
with your distribution's packaging and init systems, then use them to
install and start PostgreSQL."

> Those of us that build our own installs from scratch are probably
> incompetent to prepare this; we are *way* too knowledgeable to even
> notice the little speed-bumps that others are getting stuck on.

The first speed bump after installation is PostgreSQL's very secure
defaults in postgresql.conf and pg_hba.conf. The next one is
frequently user management. After that, there's the fact that the
rest of the defaults in postgresql.conf are still too conservative,
and there is no automated way to get suggestions for what parameters
to change and what to set them to based on, say, the amount of main
memory in the machine.

> This may well be a "recognize your Linux flavour" talk that applies to
> various services; that's fine...

Yep.

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666
Skype: davidfetter

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