Re: What Would You Like To Do?

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com>wrote:

>
> On 09/13/2011 10:13 AM, Michael Nolan wrote:
>
>> The lists all seem to be focusing on the things that the developers
>> would like to add to PostgreSQL, what about some things that users or
>> ISPs might like to have, and thus perhaps something that companies might
>> actually see as worth funding?
>>
>
> Well just my own two cents ... but it all depends on who is doing the
> funding. At this point 80% of the work CMD codes for Pg (or tertiary
> projects and modules) is funded by companies. So let's not assume that
> companies aren't funding things. They are.

But perhaps if a few 'commercial' features were on the wish list there would
be more companies willing to fund development? The developers get a bit of
what they want to work on, the production users get a bit of what they need,
everybody's happy.

> For example:
>>
>> A fully integrated ability to query across multiple databases,possibly
>> on multiple servers, something Oracle has had for nearly two decades.
>>
>
>
> That isn't the approach to take. The fact that Oracle has it is not a
> guarantee that it is useful or good. If you need to query across databases
> (assuming within the same cluster) then you designed your database wrong and
> should have used our SCHEMA support (what Oracle calls Namespaces) instead.

This is the difference between developers and real world users. Real world
users may not have the ability, time or resources to redesign their
databases just because that's the 'best' way to do something. Will it be
the most efficient way to do it? Almost certainly not.

I've been involved in a few corporate mergers, and there was a short term
need to do queries on the combined databases while the tiger team handling
the IT restructuring figured out how (or whether) to merge the dabases
together. (One of these happened to be an Oracle/Oracle situation, it was a
piece of cake even though the two data centers were 750 miles apart and the
table structures had almost nothing in common. Another was a two week
headache, the third was even worse!)

In a perfect world, it would be nice if one could do combined queries
linking a PostgreSQL database with an Oracle one, or a MySQL one, too.
Because sometimes, that's what you gotta do. Even something that is several
hundred times slower is going to be faster than merging the databases
together. When I do this today, I have to write a program (in perl or php)
that accesses both databases and merges it by hand.

>
>> The ability to restore a table from a backup file to a different table
>> name in the same database and schema.
>>
>>
> This can be done but agreed it is not intuitive.

Can you elaborate on tha a bit, please? The only way I've been able to do
it is to edit the dump file to change the table name. That's not very
practical with a several gigabyte dump file, even less so with one that is
much larger. If this capability already exists, is it documented?

> (SqlPlus has this, even though it isn't very pretty.)
>>
> A built-in report writer, capable of things like column totals.
>
> There are a billion and one tools that do this without us having to
> reinvent the wheel. Why would we support that?
>

There are other databases out there, too, why reinvent the wheel by working
on PostgreSQL? :-)

The question shoud be, would this be USEFUL?
--
Mike Nolan