Re: On How To Shorten the Steep Learning Curve Towards PG Hacking...

On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 10:47 AM, Andrew Borodin <borodin(at)octonica(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi, Kang and everyone in this thread.
>
> I'm planning to present the online course "Hacking PostgreSQL: data
> access methods in action and under the hood" on edX on June 1st. It's
> not announced yet, links will be available later.
> This course I'm describing information that was crucial for me to
> start hacking. Currently, my knowledge of technologies behind Postgres
> is quite limited, though I know the border of my knowledge quite well.
>
> Chances are that description from my point of view will not be helpful
> in some cases: before starting contributing to Postgres I had already
> held PhD in CS for database technology and I had already implemented 3
> different commercial DBMS (all in different technologies, PLs,
> paradigms, focuses, different prbolems being solved). And still,
> production of minimally viable contribution took 3 months (I was
> hacking for an hour a day, mostly at evenings).
> That's why I decided that it worth talking about how to get there
> before I'm already there. It's quite easy to forget that some concepts
> are really hard before you get them.
>
> The course will cover:
> 1. Major differences of Postgres from others
> 2. Dev tools as I use them
> 3. Concept of paged memory, latches and paged data structures
> 4. WAL, recovery, replication
> 5. Concurrency and locking in B-trees
> 6. GiST internals
> 7. Extensions
> 8. Text search and some of GIN
> 9. Postgres community mechanics
> Every topic will consist of two parts: 1 - video lectures on YouTube
> (in English and Russian, BTW my English is far from perfect) with
> references to docs and other resources, 2 - practical tasks where you
> change code slightly and observe differences (this part is mostly to
> help the student to observe easy entry points).
>

Thanks Andrey in advance. I am looking forward to meetingyou there at Edx.
Regards,
Zeray