Unanswered questions about Postgre - Mailing list pgsql-general

Sorry if this is a repost, but it appears the postgre mailing list
filtered my original mail without warning.

I have a bunch of questions, and I've looked through the documentation
without any answers. I also looked in the FAQ.. I'm guessing that most
of these questions -are- FAQs, so maybe they should be put there after
some answers are assembled.  Also, have you guys considered a searchable
version of your documentation, or a version of your documentation all on
one page, so it can be searched in the browser?

1)  in psql, if I make a typeo, the transaction is automatically
aborted.  For example:

----

apollodemo=# \d
  List of relations
 Name | Type  | Owner
------+-------+-------
 boo  | table | kislo
(1 row)

apollodemo=# begin;
BEGIN
apollodemo=# create table moo (i int);
CREATE
apollodemo=# Oops this is a typeo;
ERROR:  parser: parse error at or near "oops"
apollodemo=# insert into moo values (1);
NOTICE:  mdopen: couldn't open moo: No such file or directory
NOTICE:  RelationIdBuildRelation: smgropen(moo): No such file or
directory
NOTICE:  mdopen: couldn't open moo: No such file or directory
NOTICE:  mdopen: couldn't open moo: No such file or directory
NOTICE:  mdopen: couldn't open moo: No such file or directory
NOTICE:  current transaction is aborted, queries ignored until end of
transaction block
*ABORT STATE*
apollodemo=# \d
NOTICE:  current transaction is aborted, queries ignored until end of
transaction block
No relations found.
apollodemo=# \d
NOTICE:  current transaction is aborted, queries ignored until end of
transaction block
No relations found.
apollodemo=# commit;
COMMIT
apollodemo=# \d
  List of relations
 Name | Type  | Owner
------+-------+-------
 boo  | table | kislo
(1 row)

apollodemo=#

---

        Arr, that's really annoying when you're in Psql, and you just
trashed your entire transaction because you made a type-o.  It's even
more rediculous when your application is acctually doing a transaction,
and because an error occoured, the entire transaction is now trashed.
Why exactly does Postgre abort the transaction is there is an error?  It
doesn't have to, and no other RDBMS's do it AFAIK (interbase/oracle).
for example:  if you start a transaction, do some work, then try to
insert a record which violates a dataintegrity constraint, the ENTIRE
transaction is now wiped out.  Instead, the application should be able
to parse the integrity contraint problem, and keep on going, or -choose-
to rollback the transaction.  I assume this -must- be user settable, how
do I do this?  And what was the rationale behind automatically aborting
at the first sign of imperfection?

2) In the above example, when I issue the "insert into moo values
(1);",PostGre spews out all manners of errors.  Should one of the
following happen?:
   a) Given that the transaction is ABORTed, shouldn't it just entirly
ignore the insert request (as advertised), and thus NOT even bother
querying the operating system for the database file?
   b) Given that the transaction has been ABORTed, it shouldn't bother
querying the OS for the table, since it knows it doesn't exist
   c) Given that the table does not exist, and this is what you would
expect, not spew operating system errors to the screen

3)  You have some nice documentation describing transaction isolation;
but you fail to follow through in saying how to CHANGE the transaction
isolation mode.  The dox are here:
http://postgresql.readysetnet.com/users-lounge/docs/v7.0/user/mvcc4564.htm

How do you change the isolation mode?

4) I was doing some testing of my Database Abstraction layer, and I was
running the same code between MySQL, Postgresql, and Interbase.  I made
an interesting discovery.  After running the test sequence once on
Postgre, each sucsessive run of the test suite (or "benchmark" since I
was timing it.. but it really wasn't a benchmark) postgre's number's got
progressivly worse.  Infact, on -each- sucsessive run, postgre's
time-to-completion -doubled-.  This was across the boards, on selects by
key, selects not by key,  inserts, updates...  Dropping the table, and
recreating it got postgre back to square one again... I assume this has
to do with the fact that about 1000 records were inserted, and about a
1000 rows were deleted (over the course of the test)... Is this -normal-
for postgre?  I realize that maybe some sort of transaction audit needs
to be stored, but these transactions are committed... Do we need that
audit anymore?  Plus, should that "audit" so -massivly- effect the
entire database's operational speed?  Why should running a query on a
table be -so- -so- much slower if there have been repeated inserted and
deleted records in it?  We're talking about a massive slow down here,
this test originally ran in about 7 seconds.. After a few runs, it was
taking 2 minutes.  There are no rows left in the table at the end...
Shouldn't pgsql just overwrite the dead space, and why is the dead space
effecting performance?  ( I don't care about disk space concerns).  I
did notice vaccuming the database between runs kept postgre working at a
reasonable pace.  Do people need to vaccume their databases hourly?  Can
you vaccume while a database is in use?  Any discussion on this curious
phenomenon would be appreciated.  It still boggles me.

5) BLOB Support.  Ugh?  I cannot find anything in any of the manuals
about BLOBs, yet I know PGsql supports them because I've found lots of
people in the mailing list yelling at people to use BLOBs when they
complain that the max row size is 8k.  Yet no dox (that I can find!).  I
did find -one- piece of documentation.  However it only described how to
load a BLOB from -the harddrive of the server-, and how to retrieve a
BLOB -directly onto the harddrive of the server-.  This, ofcourse, is
entirly useless in a client/server application.  Does PGSQL have BLOB
support which can work over the wire?  If so, where are the dox?  If
not, isn't this an incredibly massive limitation?  How do people work
around this?

6) Two things about the JDBC Driver for postgre.  First, If you create a
Prepared Statement, and are populating the fields, if you try to use
setObject to store an object, the JDBC driver will crash if the object
is null.
So if you write something like this:

void sillyFunction  (Integer i, Integer ii) {
[..]
  preparedStatement.setObject(1,i);
  preparedStatement.setObject(2,ii);
}

And some wise ass passes in a null Integer, the JDBC driver will crash
with a NullPointerException.  Instead you must first test to see if the
object is null, and if not, then insert it using setObject, otherwise
insert it using setNull.  Is this right? I've used quite a few other
JDBC drivers, and none of them seem to crash in this manner if you pass
in a null.  I've never had to use setNull explicitly before.

Two, if you have a resultset, and try to fetch an int (or anything) from
column 0, the entire JVM goes down.  I am entirly baffled by how the
entire JVM could crash (with a seg fault).  Does your JDBC code use
native code?  I tried two different JVMs (IBM JDK1.3 and Blackdown
1.2.2), both with and without JITs active.  I also tried the JDBC driver
fresh off the site, aswell as the one shipped with postgre 7.0.3.. All
combinations crash..  Do you guys know why this might be?  What error
checking do you have for this case?


Thanks guys,

-Joe