[GENERAL] The Contractor Conundrum - Mailing list pgsql-general

This article is written as my experience as a PostgreSQL contractor and to all those that that think
they might want to be one.

It all began about 4 years ago when, oddly enough, I retired. Shortly after I moved to my new,
and final home ( I hope), I began recieving calls from headhunters wanting to place me in companies
that required me to relocate. Having had to relocate 4 times in 8 years due to a bad job market,
I was in no mood to due it again, so I politely informed them I was not interested and hung up
the phone. That  was until I recieved a call that advised me I only had to be on site for two
days and then I could work remotely from home. I was asked what my hourly rate would be and I
just threw something out there, not expecting them to be ok with it, but they were. So I took
the job (and trip) and was impressed with the company and personnel I was working with. The
database was well designed and I was given a laptop to connect from my home with. I was given
the task of testing new auxillary software for PostgreSQL and writing bash scripts to insure
backups and restores were being done and were reliable. That position lasted 6 months and I left
with a feeling of having completed a job well done. However, my next contract was a nightmare.
The database was poorly designed. Instead of a simple scaled database, each customer was given
their own schema, with a copy of each table in it. What was really bad was they had put an index
on every column of every table, only a few of which were actually used in queries. I begged them
to let me drop the unused indexes so they could save space and optimize inserts, updates & deletes, but they refused because "they had higher priorities".
Now, my latest commitment is somewhat better, but not without it's own annoyances. Primarily,
despite my repeated attempts to convince them otherwise, the developers at that site seem to feel
it is essential to constantly issue queries of "SELECT 1;", so that they do not lose the connection
to the database. That of course, has resulted at times in no connection being available for other
users/developers. Let alone the fact that developers should not be allowed on production systems.
I have advised them they are much better off using a connection manager like PgBouncer, but they apparently do not understand the concept or benefit. In summary, I can only advise that aspiring contractors find out as much about a system/schema/policies before commiting to a contract, no matter how much they offer to pay.

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