Meeting wrap-up, Next meeting: TUESDAY December 11 @ CubeSpace

Hello!

Last night's meeting was about ptop and Mark Wong's efforts to make an
interactive, command-line tool for monitoring the current status of a
PostgreSQL database.

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Before we dive into the meeting notes, some group business:

Thank you Mark & Gabrielle for sending out meeting announcements this month.

NEXT MEETING: DIFFERENT DATE AND TIME!

December Coders Bash
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
CubeSpace, 622 SE Grand Ave., Portland OR 97214

Sam from the PHP Users group started organizing a group event in
December, inviting folks from all the different users groups to come
and socialize.

See link for details:
http://pdxgroups.pbwiki.org/2007%20December%20Coders%20Social

ALSO a HACKATHON:
Gabrielle, Mark and I thought it would be awesome to have a ptop
HackAThon the weekend after Thanksgiving. Some possible features we'd
work on are below. Anyone interested? Get in touch. I was thinking
the early afternoon on Saturday, or early evening on Sunday.

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For our meeting, Mark set up a test operating system on a USB drive,
and bravely demo'd his new software.

Mark got the idea for ptop a few months ago, and went looking for the
source code to top to get started. After a few days of hacking, he had
a some useful features he wanted to share. So, he's set up a project
and started gathering developers:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/ptop

The features currently supported include displaying:

- Current queries
- Query plans
- Locks
- User table statistics
- User index statistics

One feature I particularly liked was showing deltas of statistics over
time. So you set your ptop sampling interval to some value (i.e. 5
seconds) and then you can see, for example, user table statics
changing over time. This is something I wrote some perl scripts for,
but would love to have as a standard utility. Particularly if I could
log/graph it.

Currently, ptop is only compiling on Linux. I really want it on Mac OS X.

We came up with a short list of desired features for the next revision of ptop:

* Change command line options to match psql (-U for user, -p for port, etc)
* Add command to show table (basically \dt [tablename]) for non-query processes
* Enable arrow keys to move around in the content to select, instead
of cut/paste process ID
* Log the stats deltas over time (i would be very interested in this)
* Change lock query to use an OUTER JOIN to show "waiting" locks that
aren't granted

And just a general question that came up:
* Is it possible to peek at a currently executing SELECT statement's plan?
- We all agreed that this would be awesome.

Thanks for a great meeting.

--
Selena Deckelmann
PDXPUG - Portland PostgreSQL Users Group
http://pugs.postgresql.org/pdx
http://www.chesnok.com/daily