Actually as great as Postgres is and as generally approachable the community is - my experience was the same a few times and I read it on the mailing list happening to others:
Someone comes along with a patch or idea. Bunch of big Postgres people come knock it and it dies right there.
Happened to me when I suggested a more multi-tenant approach back around 2010 and today we have Citus. I was told that (paraphrased) no users were asking for that sort of thing.
I see it kind of happening with the Foreign Key Array patch that the author asked for help to rebase and no one bothered to reply.
Someone suggested replacing the Postmaster with a threaded approach so it could scale better (and showed benchmarks of their implementation handling more connections). Community response was there were already 3rd party connection pools that do the job. An outsider looking in considers this nuts - most people would not run additional components if they did not need to!
Another example: NAMEDATALEN restricts every identifier to 63 bytes - a limit that causes frequent issues (more so now that we have partitioning) and also a problem for multi-lingual table names. It’s been proposed to increase this limit a few times. Every time the answer has been: abbreviate your table names or recompile your own version of Postgres.
Could name a few other examples too I’ve noticed over the years and just sighed at. I don’t expect every idea to be accepted or even welcomed - but there is that sense of bias against change.
While this can and does suck when it happens to you, this is exactly what it takes to keep products focused so they don't die death by a thousand cuts (or feature requests). For every awesome feature embarked upon, there's an opportunity cost of bug fixes, stability updates, tech debt reductions, and other inglorious but necessary work. Aggressively de-scoping is the difficult but necessary work of keeping a product alive in a competitive marketplace. And yes, it's a marketplace even if the product is open source.
Yep, I think it’s an unfortunate side effect of dealing with an onslaught of bug reports, many of which are user error or someone else’s problem. It’s common in any kind of user support, you start seeing the same report over and over.
I even saw something similar when I went to the ER recently. Even doctors will pickup on one thing you say and draw conclusions from that and dismiss everything else.
"Even doctors will pickup on one thing you say and draw conclusions from that and dismiss everything else."
This pattern seems really common, and is what scares me about the future in general. The 'experts' concentrate on the stuff they understand / are best to the detriment of where the actual focus needs to be. In a lot of cases, this is despite the insistence of the supposed non-expert who is the one suffering as a result.
Some of the worst cases are as a child, where you get in trouble twice. First for wasting adults time because you didn't tell them properly, and then again for pointing out that you did.
I've had this experience with doctors so often it is chilling.
Elderly relatives writhing in pain, only to have doctors say it's indigestion (it was a perforated ulcer and an uncle had previously died from a wrongly diagnosed ulcer perforating). My partner was misdiagnosed with flu when it was pneumonia which then developed into pleurisy (I'd never seen either of the latter, but was telling the doctor that's what the symptoms looked like - 15 years later he still suffers pain from the pleurisy). I had an arm paralyzed through severe pain and the consultant doctor planned an operation "to cut the nerve" - I said I thought it was a frozen shoulder and that such a procedure was unnecessary; 6 months later the paralysis began to subside and the consultant agreed it was a frozen shoulder). Another relative died of bowel cancer that was said to be back pain (she died in the hospital where she worked). I know of several people who were telling the doctor they had cancer, only to have the doctors dismiss it as trivial, with most of these people dying because of their untreated cancer. As a child I had joint pains for years that were diagnosed as "growing pains" but turned out to a hip disease (younger cousins ended up with the same condition and because I'd already had it, they were more readily diagnosed by family members).
In both directions (treating trivial as serious and treating serious as trivial) I've seen so many mistakes. I'd be much happier to see a doctor google the symptoms rather than jump to a conclusion about what is wrong.
There's a famous anecdote where junior doctors are taught the importance of observation, by senior doctors tricking them into tasting urine. It doesn't seem to be a lesson they learn. Even when their own objective test results are contra-indicative of their pre-judgement I've seen doctors scratch their heads but stick with their incorrect pre-judgement.
When doctors I know have a family member go into hospital, you should see how attentive my doctor friends get concerning what is being said and done to their relatives. Some doctors will not even allow relatives to go into hospital for non-emergency treatment at certain times of year (because of timetabling there can be very inexperienced doctors on duty at certain times of the year).
As someone who suffered through that on _both_ shoulders I can sympathize. For me, the doctor missed it. The chiropractor I was sent to, took one look and said it was 'frozen shoulder'. I have never even heard of such a thing before. It took nearly two years to get full movement on my right shoulder. Then the left froze :-(
I somehow responded with this to the wrong post earlier:
Honestly, if someone's spending time working on a high value open source project (which PG absolutely is), I'd rather they spend less time (than I do) crafting their internet comments to sound nice and more time contributing to society. And I hope people who actually use the product feel the same way, understand why every single use case can't be carefully considered every time it comes up, and don't take it personally.
But messaging influences public perception influences inclination of future potential contributors to participate influences quality of the software. As we see here.
People like to think they can escape politics. They can’t. Any group of >1 humans will involve politics.
Learning how to be respectful and polite is like learning how to touch type: it’s a small, painful price to pay once, for a lifetime of copious reward.
The less value you provide, the more important politics are. If you aren't doing much, then you damn well better have great messaging. If you're doing a lot, and people are banging on your doors to get what you're selling or giving away, then don't waste your time being polite. Nobody cares. They just want you to do what you do.
> I patched my own systems (wrap the calls in a loop as per standard practice) and then proceeded to run literally hundreds of thousands of PostgreSQL instances on NFS for many more years with no problems.
-georgebarnett
> Actually as great as Postgres is and as generally approachable the community is - my experience was the same a few times and I read it on the mailing list happening to others:
- jarym
It seems that despite things not being perfect (and they never are), these people are still having positive experiences with the product and the community overall. So, to restate, some people care enough to post about it on HN, but nobody (who continues to use PG, and there are a lot of us) cares all that much.
I disagree that this is required. You can see from Linus Torvald's backtracking on decades of abrasive behavior that it was never an important part of Linux after all, so an abrasive experience for people trying to help other open source projects is probably going to be superfluous too. You can still reject ideas without disregarding them or the person.
"We don't support running Postgres on NFS" isn't the same thing as "fuck you Intel ACPI team; you're dumber than a chimpanzee". Equating disagreement and criticism with Linus-isms is why the relationship between users and developers is such a mess to begin with. Being a maintainer requires you to say "no" sometimes, but it doesn't require you to be a jerk.
Linus was trying to make things work, with profanity. Postgres couldn't be bothered.
Sure, performative profanity isn't everyone's cup of tea, but milquetoast passive-aggressive dismissals of people like OP who ARE TOTALLY RIGHT aren't actually nice.
I’m not sure if that logic holds. Who’s to say Linux would not have been more or less successful if Linus had behaved differently? For all we know, Linux may have succeeded despite his behavior, rather than because of it.
That said, I feel that a strong and positive community around a project is always an asset. I’ve seen many more projects fail due to community interaction being bad than I have from it being good.
The patch author is doing the work. Telling them “no” isn’t going to make them focus instead on the project leadership’s other priorities like it would in a corporate team.
There is another scenario, I submitted a Pull Request to a OSS project, the authors discussed it and rejected it and then implemented it in the exact same way as I did. That was hurtful.
>Telling them “no” isn’t going to make them focus instead on the project leadership’s other priorities like it would in a corporate team.
No one is asking them to. An open source project is not a corporation, it has no shareholders who require growth at all costs. So someone doesn't contribute to the project, if there's enough other contributors to keep it healthy then who care? No need to try and get every single potential contributor to contribute code to the project.
You can’t pay an opportunity cost on an opportunity you don’t have. Whatever the reason for rejecting the patch in this case, it is not a missed opportunity to work on bugs and tech debt as suggested by the parent.
Honestly, if someone's spending time working on a high value open source project (which PG absolutely is), I'd rather they spend less time (than I do) crafting their internet comments to sound nice and more time contributing to society. And I hope people who actually use the product feel the same way, understand why every single use case can't be carefully considered every time it comes up, and don't take it personally.
One thought. Perhaps it comes easier to you than it does to other folks. We all have different skills, and sometimes what looks like malice is really just incompetence. I find that assuming positive intent adds more value to my life than doing the opposite.
A second, separate thought. Perhaps it's not quite as easy as you think it is, and perhaps you're not as good at it as you think you are. Case in point, the comment you just made was not exactly the nicest I've read today.
IMHO it's way more complicated than it seems, because of a mix of technical, cultural and personal reasons.
- technical: E-mail is not a particularly good medium to convey emotions (in either way). For example someone with a naturally terse communication style may be perceived as harsh, while in person he's actually a very friendly bloke. And there's no way to communicate this impression back.
- cultural: Often what is quite polite in one culture may be seen as quite impolite or even rude in another. It's not just country vs. country, but even region vs. region (like for example East Coast vs. West Coast).
- personal: People in the community may know each other pretty well, in which case the communication style may be quite a bit more direct. But others may lack the context.
It's almost impossible to get it right all the time, without resorting to entirely mechanical corporate communication style. Which is not fut at all.
Of course, this does not mean there are no truly harsh / rude / WTF posts (even on PostgreSQL lists). But I'd say most of the time it's not meant that way.
Yea, that's definitely something that happens. Partially due to some conservatism, partially due to having way more patches than review bandwidth, ...
> Another example: NAMEDATALEN restricts every identifier to 63 bytes - a limit that causes frequent issues (more so now that we have partitioning) and also a problem for multi-lingual table names. It’s been proposed to increase this limit a few times. Every time the answer has been: abbreviate your table names or recompile your own version of Postgres.
I think if it were easy, it'd immediately be fixed, but there's a fair bit of complexity in fixing it nicely. For partially historical and partially good reasons object names are allocated with NAMEDATALEN space, even for shorter names. So just increasing it would further waste memory... We're going to have to fix this properly one of these days.
Re NAMEDATALEN specifically - you at least acknowledge it eventually needs fixing. On the mailing list there were a lot of important Postgres people who don’t seem to agree.
Agreeing that there is something worthy of fixing is a first step. It should have happened with this NFS patch and imo some other stuff. The considerations for how and when should be dear with separately.
> Agreeing that there is something worthy of fixing is a first step. It should have happened with this NFS patch and imo some other stuff. The considerations for how and when should be dear with separately.
But there were like multiple people agreeing that it needs to be changed. Including the first two responses that the thread got. And there were legitimate questions around how interrupts need to be handled, about errors ought to be signaled if writes partially succeed and everything. Do you really expect us to integrate patches without thinking about that? And then the author vanished...
> Do you really expect us to integrate patches without thinking about that?
Whoa! You made huge leap there. At what point was it suggested that patches be recklessly applied?
That didn't happen. Your quote actually suggests a reasonable progression and at no point is there any suggestion, implied or otherwise, that changes be integrated without due consideration.
Not irrationally dismissing criticism != abandoning sound design and development.
Multiple people on this thread have expressed the opinion that the patch was "too perfect" or that the only reason that the patch wasn't simply accepted was that the maintainers "feel weird when there's nothing to criticize".
"Multiple people" were left with nothing better to which to attribute maintainer decisions. See the dysfunction there? Don't address the problem, or the proposed solution; just leave it to fester and create discontent.
Well, that's the thing - changing NAMEDATALEN is a seemingly small change, but it'll require much more work than just increasing the value. Increasing the value does not seem like a great option, because (a) how long before people start complaining about the new one and (b) it wastes even more memory. So I assume we'd switch to a variable-length strings, which however affects memory management, changes a lot of other stuff from fixed-length to variable-length, etc. So testing / benchmarking needed and all of that.
Which is why people are not enthusiastic about changing it, when there are fairly simple workarounds (assuming keeping the names short is considered to be a workaround).
> Very likely many years, or even never. People don't use large names because they like it, they always prefer small ones.
Well, we don't have exactly a barrage of complaints about the current limit either.
> How much memory are we talking about?
Good question.
The thing is - it's not just about table names. NameData is used for any object name, so it affects pretty much any system catalog storing name. A simple grep on the repo says it affects about 40 catalogs (out of 80), including pg_attribute, pg_class, pg_operator, pg_proc, pg_type (which tend to be fairly large).
So the amount of additional memory may be quite significant, because all of this is cached in various places.
Yea, I think pg_attribute is likely to be the main issue here. For one, it obviously exists many times per table, and there are workloads with a lot of tables. But also importantly it's included in all tuple descriptors, which in turn get created during query execution in a fair number of places. It's currently ~140 bytes, with ~64bytes of that being the column name - just doubling that would increase the overhead noticeably, and we already have plenty of complaints about pg_attribute. I think it'd be fairly useless to just choose another fixed size, we really ought to make it variable length.
Is it ~140 bytes? pahole says it's 112 (without CATALOG_VARLEN).
The impact of doubling NameData size would be quite a bit worse, though, thanks to doubling of chunk-size in allocset. At the moment it fits into a 128B chunk (so just ~16B wasted), but by doubling NameData to 128B the struct would suddenly be 176B, which requires 256B chunk (so 80B wasted). Yuck.
> Is it ~140 bytes? pahole says it's 112 (without CATALOG_VARLEN).
Well, but on-disk varlena data is included. pg_column_size() averages 144 bytes for pg_attribute on my system.
> The impact of doubling NameData size would be quite a bit worse, though, thanks to doubling of chunk-size in allocset. At the moment it fits into a 128B chunk (so just ~16B wasted), but by doubling NameData to 128B the struct would suddenly be 176B, which requires 256B chunk (so 80B wasted). Yuck.
I'm not sure that actually matters that much. Most attributes are allocated as part of TupleDescData, but that allocates all attributes together.
> Well, but on-disk varlena data is included. pg_column_size() averages 144 bytes for pg_attribute on my system.
Sure, but I thought we're talking about in-memory stuff as you've been talking about tuple descriptors. I don't think the on-disk size matters all that much, TBH, it's likely just a tiny fraction of data stored in the cluster.
> I'm not sure that actually matters that much. Most attributes are allocated as part of TupleDescData, but that allocates all attributes together.
> I don't think the on-disk size matters all that much, TBH, it's likely just a tiny fraction of data stored in the cluster.
I've seen pg_attribute take up very significant fractions of the database numerous times, so I do think the on-disk size can matter. And there's plenty places, e.g. catcache, where we store the full on-disk tuple (rather than just the fixed-length prefix); so the on-disk size is actually quite relevant for the in-memory bit too.
> Could name a few other examples too I’ve noticed over the years and just sighed at. I don’t expect every idea to be accepted or even welcomed - but there is that sense of bias against change.
not just bias against change. while there are some very talented and friendly people in the pg community, there are a few bad actors that are openly hostile and aggressive, that feel that they must be part of every discussion. it gets worse when it is a change that they made that is causing an issue, as ego takes a front seat.
unfortunately, these few bad actors make dealing with the pg mailing lists in general very unpleasant, and have made myself (a popular extension maintainer) and others try to keep interaction to an absolute minimum. that's not good for the community.
I'm honestly curious who are those bad actors, and examples of such behavior. I'm not trolling you, I really am curious - because that does not match my experience with the community at all.
I'm sure there were cases of inappropriate / rude communication, but AFAICS those were rare one-off incidents. While you're apparently talking about long-term and consistent behavior. So I wonder who you're talking about? I can't think of anyone who'd consistently behave like that - particularly not among senior community members.
I know that you read the mailing lists, just spending a week on bugs, or following any major or minor discussions on hackers should be enough for you to figure a couple of them out, but I'm not going to personally call anyone out by name on hacker news.
my comment, which is based on the multiple interactions I've had with the community, stands as is: some fantastic people, and a few aggressive bad actors that spoil things.
I don't think this is really limited to Postgres. Any relatively big OS project the core committers they tend to do what they do. I submitted a patch to a pretty big OS project and pinged the person assigned to the area. That person pretty much wrote his own version of my patch. I guess it got fixed so that was good. I guess the good thing about open source is if you want you can just build your own version with whatever you want. However smaller projects are more receptive since they want all the attention and help they can get.
I think the "big project" angle is that maintainability is of higher priority than for smaller project. So more minor things need to to be addressed than in smaller projects. And that then either leads to being very nitpicky in reviews (which costs both sides cycles), or polishing patches pretty liberally (which costs the submitter experience, but reduces the time required for both sides).
Yes 63 Identifier limit is a real pain, especially for constraint names, where a long name can convey a lot of valuable info.
NOT IN FKs ie opposite of current FK’s for IS IN, would be useful for XOR constraints I would guess they could be implemented quite easily using existing FK infrastructure.
Not the worst thing in the world. I have trouble reading code with very long identifiers. Conventionally, a line of code should not exceed 80 characters or so. That's pretty hard if identifers are 60+ characters by themselves. If your project has standard abbreviations for things, "63 characters ought to be enough for anybody"
I had a project last year where DB names were autogenerated per tenant, with the tenant ID being a UUID, so you're left with 63-36=27 characters. Starts to feel narrow.
(Putting tenant_id as a column was not an option because for each tenant, a third-party software was started that wanted to have its own DB.)
I kind of wish the pg community came and read this. I guess this is one of the reason why MySQL were much more dominant in the early days and pg had relatively small usage.
Someone comes along with a patch or idea. Bunch of big Postgres people come knock it and it dies right there.
Happened to me when I suggested a more multi-tenant approach back around 2010 and today we have Citus. I was told that (paraphrased) no users were asking for that sort of thing.
I see it kind of happening with the Foreign Key Array patch that the author asked for help to rebase and no one bothered to reply.
Someone suggested replacing the Postmaster with a threaded approach so it could scale better (and showed benchmarks of their implementation handling more connections). Community response was there were already 3rd party connection pools that do the job. An outsider looking in considers this nuts - most people would not run additional components if they did not need to!
Another example: NAMEDATALEN restricts every identifier to 63 bytes - a limit that causes frequent issues (more so now that we have partitioning) and also a problem for multi-lingual table names. It’s been proposed to increase this limit a few times. Every time the answer has been: abbreviate your table names or recompile your own version of Postgres.
Could name a few other examples too I’ve noticed over the years and just sighed at. I don’t expect every idea to be accepted or even welcomed - but there is that sense of bias against change.