Re: Where to find information on the new HOT tables? - Mailing list pgsql-admin

From Tino Schwarze
Subject Re: Where to find information on the new HOT tables?
Date
Msg-id 20080206102008.GD16997@easy2.in-chemnitz.de
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Where to find information on the new HOT tables?  (Dimitri Fontaine <dfontaine@hi-media.com>)
List pgsql-admin
Hi there,

On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 10:11:09AM +0100, Dimitri Fontaine wrote:

> > I'm really not seeing the case for user-level documentation of HOT,
> > when for instance most of the planner's optimization behavior is not
> > so documented.
>
> In my POV, the case for HOT to appear in the documentation as been made by the
> PR and Presskit. They both announce HOT to be a major performance addition in
> 8.3 that users will want to benefit from. Now we have to tell some more to
> the users, I think we want to answer those two basic questions:
>  - How do I check that I'm using HOT? (you don't, transparent feature, blah)
>  - What's HOT is so good about compared to how PostgreSQL used to work?
>
> My proposal was about answering this without requiring the user to be capable
> of understanding internals and 'developer topics'.

Which might be pretty difficult, if it's an internal feature. But a
short HOT-FAQ would be great, something like this:

- What is HOT?
...
- How do I exploit it?
  Make sure that ...
- When will HOT kick in?
  If ...
  and ...
  and ...


> I'd also like to add that people judging documentation effectiveness by its
> length are certainly not real users of it. I've yet to meet a PostgreSQL user
> who doesn't praise the product documentation, even if newcomers often need
> some time to be able to understand where to find what. The Tsearch enabled
> website has been a huge improvement here.

Yes, I praise it, too! Even though it needs some reading and thinking
and reading and thinking to understand, e.g. the internals of VACUUM or
freeze_max_age etc., the documentation is very helpful to understand
what's going on.

> To ease PostgreSQL newbies manual grasping, I certainly don't think it will
> need shortening the documentation.

Maybe there could be quickstart chapters or HOWTOs.

Bye,

Tino.

--
www.craniosacralzentrum.de
www.spiritualdesign-chemnitz.de

Tino Schwarze * Lortzingstraße 21 * 09119 Chemnitz

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