I’ve seen the inside of quite a few commercial database products, and imho PostgreSQL’s code is cleaner and better-organized than all but one of them. That one retained PostgreSQL for parsing and semantic analysis, but replaced the optimizer, execution engine, and storage layer in C++.
…and as far as the interest and enthusiasm of the PG community, I’ve never seen anything like it. My only complaint is that pgsql-hackers keeps blowing out my Outlook file size limit. :^)
From: <pgsql-hackers-owner@postgresql.org> on behalf of Kang Yuzhe <tiggreen87@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 4:33 AM
To: Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] On How To Shorten the Steep Learning Curve Towards PG Hacking...
Thanks Craig for teaching me a lot of things. I am just learning a lot why PG hacking/development is the way it is.
Regarding interest and enthusiasm, no problem. Whats is lacking is the skill-sets and I believe having interest and enthusiasm and with your support, we will expand PG hacking/devs/usage in Africa and other continents.
People here in Africa using Oracle/SQL Server/IBM products(generally commercial products) even for which PG is more than enough.
I want to change this scenario and trend and I hope one day in the future there will be PG conference in Africa/Ethiopia which is my country.
Thanks,
zeray
On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 10:54 AM, Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
On 18 April 2017 at 15:41, Kang Yuzhe <tiggreen87@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Simon for taking your time and trying to tell and warn me the harsh
> reality truth:there is no shortcut to expertise. One has to fail and rise
> towards any journey to expertise.
Yeah, just because Pg is hard doesn't mean it's notably bad or worse
than other things. I generally find working on code in other projects,
even smaller and simpler ones, a rather unpleasant change.
That doesn't mean we can't do things to help interested new people get
and stay engaged and grow into productive devs to grow our pool.
> Overall, you are right. But I do believe that there is a way(some
> techniques) to speed up any journey to expertise. One of them is mentorship.
> For example(just an example), If you show me how to design and implement FDW
> to Hadoop/HBase., I believe that I will manage to design and implement FDW
> to Cassandra/MengoDB.
TBH, that's the sort of thing where looking at existing examples is
often the best way forward and will stay that way.
What I'd like to do is make it easier to understand those examples by
providing background and overview info on subsystems, so you can read
the code and have more idea what it does and why.
> But almost nothing about The Internals of PostgreSQL:
Not surprising. They'd go out of date fast, be a huge effort to write
and maintain, and sell poorly given the small audience.
Print books probably aren't the way forward here.
--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services
