Re: pg_walinspect - a new extension to get raw WAL data and WAL stats

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 9:55 PM Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Feb 6, 2022 at 7:45 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > For what it's worth, I am generally in favor of having something like
> > this in PostgreSQL. I think it's wrong of us to continue assuming that
> > everyone has command-line access. Even when that's true, it's not
> > necessarily convenient. If you choose to use a relational database,
> > you may be the sort of person who likes SQL. And if you are, you may
> > want to have the database tell you what's going on via SQL rather than
> > command-line tools or operating system utilities. Imagine if we didn't
> > have pg_stat_activity and you had to get that information by running a
> > separate binary. Would anyone like that? Why is this case any
> > different?
>
> +1. An SQL interface is significantly easier to work with. Especially
> because it can use the built-in LSN type, pg_lsn.
>
> I don't find the slippery slope argument convincing. There aren't that
> many other things that are like pg_waldump, but haven't already been
> exposed via an SQL interface. Offhand, I can't think of any.

On Sat, Feb 12, 2022 at 4:03 AM Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
>
> Almost completely off topic, but this reminded me of an incident about
> 30 years ago at my first gig as an SA/DBA. There was an application
> programmer who insisted on loading a set of values from a text file into
> a temp table (it was Ingres, anyone remember that?). Why? Because he
> knew how to write "Select * from mytable order by mycol" but didn't know
> how to drive the Unix sort utility at the command line. When I was
> unable to restrain myself from smiling at this he got very angry and
> yelled at me loudly.
>
> So, yes, some people do like SQL and hate the command line.

Thanks a lot for the comments. I'm looking forward to the review of
the latest v4 patches posted at [1].

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CALj2ACUS9%2B54QGPtUjk76dcYW-AMKp3hPe-U%2BpQo2-GpE4kjtA%40mail.gmail.com

Regards,
Bharath Rupireddy.