Hi, Kang and everyone in this thread.
I'm planning to present the online course "Hacking PostgreSQL: data
access methods in action and under the hood" on edX on June 1st. It's
not announced yet, links will be available later.
This course I'm describing information that was crucial for me to
start hacking. Currently, my knowledge of technologies behind Postgres
is quite limited, though I know the border of my knowledge quite well.
Chances are that description from my point of view will not be helpful
in some cases: before starting contributing to Postgres I had already
held PhD in CS for database technology and I had already implemented 3
different commercial DBMS (all in different technologies, PLs,
paradigms, focuses, different prbolems being solved). And still,
production of minimally viable contribution took 3 months (I was
hacking for an hour a day, mostly at evenings).
That's why I decided that it worth talking about how to get there
before I'm already there. It's quite easy to forget that some concepts
are really hard before you get them.
The course will cover:
1. Major differences of Postgres from others
2. Dev tools as I use them
3. Concept of paged memory, latches and paged data structures
4. WAL, recovery, replication
5. Concurrency and locking in B-trees
6. GiST internals
7. Extensions
8. Text search and some of GIN
9. Postgres community mechanics
Every topic will consist of two parts: 1 - video lectures on YouTube
(in English and Russian, BTW my English is far from perfect) with
references to docs and other resources, 2 - practical tasks where you
change code slightly and observe differences (this part is mostly to
help the student to observe easy entry points).
Best regards, Andrey Borodin, Octonica.
