Re: Pet Peeves?

Gregory Stark wrote:

> So, what do people say? Is Postgres perfect in your world or does it do some
> things which rub you the wrong way?

The few things that used to really bug me have gone away between 8.1 and
8.3. The big one is that there are no longer issues with temp tables in
PL/PgSQL functions or any of the other problems related to the lack of
automatic plan invalidation for functions.

I could go on forever about the things I LIKE about Pg.

There are a few niggles I have noticed, though:

- VACUUM FULL is rather slow and often leaves indexes badly bloated.
This is a usability issue for new admins, too, who won't know they're
usually better off using CLUSTER. That in its self suggests something's
not right, IMO.

- There's no REINDEX CONCURRENTLY.

- There are no built-in ways for admins to easily discover, be alerted
to, or manually check for index and table bloat. We NEED a
pg_catalog.pg_bloat view IMO, as well as NOTICE level warnings from
VACUUM when very bloated indexes and tables are discovered. This is a
mainly a usability issue for new admins.

- Bytea's literal format is wasteful and is painful to work with.
Supporting something reasonably compact and commonly understood by most
tools and libraries (like, say, base64) would be really nice. It'd also
be useful for backup/restore.

- The problems involved in restoring/upgrading a database to a newer
major version when extensions like PostGIS are in use. Argh.

- Table partitioning is effective, but somewhat clumsy, and would really
benefit from some automatic management tools.

- No column-level triggers and, thus, no way to attach a trigger to a
domain type.

- The need for a dump and restore for major version upgrades. I
understand why, but ...

--
Craig Ringer