Greg Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Jun 2008, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> > Who said anything about loops? What I am talking about is what happens
> > during
> > set memory_usage = X; // implicitly sets work_mem = X/100, say
> > set work_mem = Y;
> > set memory_usage = Z;
> > What is work_mem now, and what's your excuse for saying so, and how
> > will you document the behavior so that users can understand it?
> > (Just to make things interesting, assume that some of the above SETs
> > happen via changing postgresql.conf rather than directly.)
>
> People are already exposed to issues in this area via things like the
> include file mechanism. You can think of that two ways. You can say,
> "there's already problems like this so who cares if there's another one".
> Or, you can say "let's not add even more confusion like that".
>
> Having a mini programming language for setting parameters is interesting
> and all, and it might be enough to do a good job of handling the basic
> newbie setup chores. But I don't think it's a complete solution and
> therefore I find moving in that direction a bit of a distraction; your
> concerns about ambiguity just amplify that feeling. It's unlikely that
> will get powerful enough to enable the "one true config file" that just
> works for everybody. There's too many things that depend a bit on both
> data access pattern and on overall database size/structure no matter what
> you do.
You are right that the complete solution is going to have to ask users
questions, and my idea of using variables is not going to get us that
far.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
