Re: Multi-xacts and our process problem

On 05/11/2015 04:18 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:
> On 11 May 2015 at 23:47, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us
> <mailto:bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 03:42:26PM -0700, Joshua Drake wrote:
> > >The releases themselves are not the problem, but rather the volume of
> > >bugs and our slowness in getting additional people involved to remove
> > >data corruption bugs more quickly and systematically. Our reputation
> > >for reliability has been harmed by this inactivity.
> > >
> >
> > What I am arguing is that the release cycle is at least a big part
> > of the problem. We are trying to get so many new features that bugs
> > are increasing and quality is decreasing.
>
> Now that is an interesting observation --- are we too focused on patches
> and features to realize when we need to seriously revisit an issue?
>
>
> I think we are unused to bugs. We have a much lower bug rate than any
> other system.

True we are used to having extremely high quality releases but if you
look at the release notes since say 9.2, we are seeing a much larger
increase in bug rates.

It is true that generally speaking our bug rate is low in comparison to
other databases. That said, I think we are also resting on some laurels
here per my previous paragraph.

>
> I think we seriously need to review our policy of adding major new
> features and have them enabled by default with no parameter to disable
> them. In the early years of PostgreSQL everything had an off switch,
> e.g. stats, bgwriter and even autovacuum defaulted to off for many years.

That's interesting although I am unsure of the cost of such a thing.

JD

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