Re: temporary statistics option at initdb time

On Saturday 09 August 2008 21:31:28 Euler Taveira de Oliveira wrote:
> Hi,
>
> After the Magnus patch [1], that make it possible store statistics files
> at another (RAM-based) disk, I was thinking that would be useful to add
> an option at initdb time to do the symlink as we already do with xlog.
> Maybe it could be documented in monitoring.sgml too. Comments?
>
> [1] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-08/msg00176.php

I find Magnus's approach to be admin un-friendly, and your patch a
re-enforcement of that feeling. Forcing people to fall back on the OS tools
(which may not be terribly good on systems like win32) when we could provide
a consistent way for postgres to handle this itself seems backwards. I
believe this would be much simpler for DBA's if we simply give them a GUC for
stat file location, and allow them to set the location that way. Ideally this
could be done as PGC_SIGHUP, and a change to the location would move the
file "on-the-fly" as they say. (There might be practical limitation to making
that work, but it would certainly be simpler for admins, imho)

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter LAMP :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL