Re:Full text searching improved and other goodness
on
PostgreSQL 7.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, there are plans to make a native windows port -- it's actually about 75% of the way there.
The big issues now are safety. For example, sync() has traditionally been used for checkpoints to ensure everything is on disk. Windows does not seem to have an equivelant (though several close options).
If your interested in helping out, please send a note to pgsql-hackers for a list of current issues for win32.
Just like when you create an strawberry pie from scratch.
It's not like you go out and start planting wheat for flour, etc. wait 6 months harvest your goods, make the flour, churn the butter, etc. then bake the pie. The components have been premade, but you still need to select them in the right quantities, mix them at the right time and a fair number of other steps.
You are completely right. If you do not make an investment into technology it will certainly stagnate.
I was trying to say an investment made today would be trying to reduce the turn around time to Venus, Mars, or Jupitor to be a year rather than sending a single experimental craft on a thousand year journy.
How about Neo, once realizing he could accomplish anything in the matrix discovered that those same thoughts could work in the real world ala telekinesis. He moved electrons in the machines to activiate various commands in their processors -- in the real world.
Not what you want, but they did mention the humans were combined with a form of fusion. Fusion (as we do it today) tends to be large bursts of energy in very short timeframes with a long dry period in between bursts.
I've always figured the human element was simply an electrical buffer. Consider the purpose of a capacitor in a simple AC to DC converter.
As to why they used humans and not something else? Who knows... Wouldn't have been nearly as good if it was hydrogen stored in tanks that was forming the Matrix.
Funny thing, it'll only actually work for the first 100 people. After that, traffic will be substantially slower due to the lights being out of sync that it'll be slower for everyone.
Kinda like sitting in the middle of an intersection on a red. Sure, you were 20 feet ahead of those behind you but the only reason you're stuck in the intersection is the guy 3 blocks up blocking your route.
It's tough, but if everyone cleaned up their driving habits, everyone would be home 5 or 10 minutes earlier rather than just the poor drivers getting home 2 to 3 minutes earlier.
Funny thing about large timeframes and technology -- if you wait long enough you will actually be further ahead.
Exploring this solar system with experimental high-velocity nuclear engines is appropriate. But in 20 years we could probably send something to the nearest stars in 50 years. In 40 years perhaps it will only take 25 to travel -- thus we should wait 40 years before launching to arrive first:)
How about a guide on underclocking something far enough that it can be passively cooled? Most chips are so much too fast that it hardly matters. (As always, results may vary)
I've got an old BP6 motherboard. I'm wondering if I could shove a pair of 1.4Ghz Celeries into it (clocked for 1Ghz, drop the voltage a bit too) and cool it with a pair of Zallman flowers but without the fan.
it's been rumoured for some time that apple keeps an inhouse copy of osx for intel "just in case"
I would be surprised if it wasn't true, but not for a "just in case" scenario.
It is much easier to find some of those obscure difficult to debug bugs by porting (and using) the software on several hardware platforms. Things that cause a memory overwrite on one which may not be detected until later may cause an actual crash with a nice backtrace on another.
The more corner cases that cannot be ignored the better all platforms will become -- including the primary target.
I'm always impressed with vendors that don't normally support a system, but can do so with little more than a recompile. It shows the quality of the development department to produce portable code in the first place -- of course, it doesn't always work that way...
That probably wasn't Amazon. Airlines have rather unique computerized pricing systems that tend to frequently (up to 20 times a day for a given ticket!) adjust prices.
That price jump is insane, but not surprising. They probably had a hockey team or other large party order tickets. Their automated system would immediatly put in for a price change which attempts to have ~2 empty seats approx 5 minutes prior to takeoff in first class.
I'm afraid 'big features' aren't really in this release. There are a large number of small but important features but the importance list changes depending on who you are.
A number of people are happy to have decent DOMAIN support.
Others are happy to have indexes that don't grow unbounded (vacuum will clean them up now).
Developers are happy to have much improved error handling and optimizer corrections (a little smarter with some corner cases).
Folks with odd data or performance requirements are happy to have the dramatically improved ARRAY support.
My personal favorite is the Transaction safe Truncate.
This release is more about rounding off some of the sharp edges than a marketing feature box hunt.
granted, a db could try to coallesce 2 commits into one write, but that still won't fix much; furthermore, the DBs that I know of simply don't do
PostgreSQL does. Due to WAL, an fsync on a block may commit more than one transaction to disk at the same time. Of course, the second transaction STILL issues an fsync request but the kernel treats it as a NOOP.
That said, it doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference in speed -- but a few megs in battery backed write cache sure does;)
Yahoo has had for some time a Java Client... does that count?
No, it doesn't. GCC is available on many many more platforms than Java is. A C program that requires a couple of header tweeks to make it work is much preferred to writing a JVM.
Ugh.. Using Bioware for identification isn't going to work any better. Just imagine when someone does manage to lift and reproduce your fingerprints (easy), eyescan (give it a decade) and a DNA sample (if you can clone a single cell....).
Now what? You can't change those items either.
Sure, might reduce the amount. But even at a 0.001% rate it is way too high to risk losing your identity permenantly.
I'm not sure how many people have tried this, but you really should put your mouse on the left, that's where it belongs.
Ok.. Did that, but now whenever I go to use my mouse I have to cross my arms. The solution? Use the mouse like a pedal. Put it into the floor and move it around with your foot. Now your hands never need to leave the keyboard!
In the future, all traffic will be port 80. I'm being partly facetious with this predication.
It has been in many companies for quite a while, proxies setup for all kinds of strange services. Instant Messaging was a big one for port 80 proxy a few years ago.
Whats that mean? Worms target individual programs on port 80, and all ISPs start buying layer 7 firewalls to block everything that doesn't have a signature of a webbrowser.
Large corporate filestores spend more time doing hierarchial searches looking for related information than actually retrieving files.
Many are database oriented simply because finding the information is orders of magnitude faster, even though there is a small penalty for the actual save.
Aside from that, who hasn't wanted to say they have a 5TB database installation?
Would it be difficult to rip the SQL parser out of Postgres and plug it into linux?
Well.. Probably not too bad actually. The storage manager in PostgreSQL was designed in such a way that it could be replaced (a WORM was in use at one point). It does have some bitrot, database structure is created directly, and some other items bypass the interface but those could be cleaned up.
However the Optimizer in PostgreSQL does make a number of assumptions about ease of access to data at specific times. A little work might be needed to teach it the new cost of accessing various components. Cost of an index read, sequential scan, likelyhood of data being in memory, sorts, etc.
It's not appropriate for this code to be in the kernel, as it can be quite memory intensive for complex queries -- but a thin storage manager in the kernel may be doable.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there are plans to make a native windows port -- it's actually about 75% of the way there.
The big issues now are safety. For example, sync() has traditionally been used for checkpoints to ensure everything is on disk. Windows does not seem to have an equivelant (though several close options).
If your interested in helping out, please send a note to pgsql-hackers for a list of current issues for win32.
Indeed.. According to the schedule the tree is to be frozen today.
Typing this from FreeBSD 4.9 on a Thinkpad X20 while pointing around the screen with a USB mouse.
Some IBM laptops are ok.
Just like when you create an strawberry pie from scratch.
It's not like you go out and start planting wheat for flour, etc. wait 6 months harvest your goods, make the flour, churn the butter, etc. then bake the pie. The components have been premade, but you still need to select them in the right quantities, mix them at the right time and a fair number of other steps.
Agreed.. Same idea but FreeBSD for the OS. Gnome is Gnome...
You are completely right. If you do not make an investment into technology it will certainly stagnate.
I was trying to say an investment made today would be trying to reduce the turn around time to Venus, Mars, or Jupitor to be a year rather than sending a single experimental craft on a thousand year journy.
How about Neo, once realizing he could accomplish anything in the matrix discovered that those same thoughts could work in the real world ala telekinesis. He moved electrons in the machines to activiate various commands in their processors -- in the real world.
Princeton ENgineering Anomalies Research
Not what you want, but they did mention the humans were combined with a form of fusion. Fusion (as we do it today) tends to be large bursts of energy in very short timeframes with a long dry period in between bursts.
I've always figured the human element was simply an electrical buffer. Consider the purpose of a capacitor in a simple AC to DC converter.
As to why they used humans and not something else? Who knows... Wouldn't have been nearly as good if it was hydrogen stored in tanks that was forming the Matrix.
Funny thing, it'll only actually work for the first 100 people. After that, traffic will be substantially slower due to the lights being out of sync that it'll be slower for everyone.
Kinda like sitting in the middle of an intersection on a red. Sure, you were 20 feet ahead of those behind you but the only reason you're stuck in the intersection is the guy 3 blocks up blocking your route.
It's tough, but if everyone cleaned up their driving habits, everyone would be home 5 or 10 minutes earlier rather than just the poor drivers getting home 2 to 3 minutes earlier.
Funny thing about large timeframes and technology -- if you wait long enough you will actually be further ahead.
:)
Exploring this solar system with experimental high-velocity nuclear engines is appropriate. But in 20 years we could probably send something to the nearest stars in 50 years. In 40 years perhaps it will only take 25 to travel -- thus we should wait 40 years before launching to arrive first
Oh.. doh!
Nobody local is selling slower chips.
Thanks for the note.
How about a guide on underclocking something far enough that it can be passively cooled? Most chips are so much too fast that it hardly matters. (As always, results may vary)
I've got an old BP6 motherboard. I'm wondering if I could shove a pair of 1.4Ghz Celeries into it (clocked for 1Ghz, drop the voltage a bit too) and cool it with a pair of Zallman flowers but without the fan.
it's been rumoured for some time that apple keeps an inhouse copy of osx for intel "just in case"
I would be surprised if it wasn't true, but not for a "just in case" scenario.
It is much easier to find some of those obscure difficult to debug bugs by porting (and using) the software on several hardware platforms. Things that cause a memory overwrite on one which may not be detected until later may cause an actual crash with a nice backtrace on another.
The more corner cases that cannot be ignored the better all platforms will become -- including the primary target.
I'm always impressed with vendors that don't normally support a system, but can do so with little more than a recompile. It shows the quality of the development department to produce portable code in the first place -- of course, it doesn't always work that way...
That probably wasn't Amazon. Airlines have rather unique computerized pricing systems that tend to frequently (up to 20 times a day for a given ticket!) adjust prices.
That price jump is insane, but not surprising. They probably had a hockey team or other large party order tickets. Their automated system would immediatly put in for a price change which attempts to have ~2 empty seats approx 5 minutes prior to takeoff in first class.
Google search on Airline Ticket Pricing
I'm afraid 'big features' aren't really in this release. There are a large number of small but important features but the importance list changes depending on who you are.
A number of people are happy to have decent DOMAIN support.
Others are happy to have indexes that don't grow unbounded (vacuum will clean them up now).
Developers are happy to have much improved error handling and optimizer corrections (a little smarter with some corner cases).
Folks with odd data or performance requirements are happy to have the dramatically improved ARRAY support.
My personal favorite is the Transaction safe Truncate.
This release is more about rounding off some of the sharp edges than a marketing feature box hunt.
granted, a db could try to coallesce 2 commits into one write, but that still won't fix much; furthermore, the DBs that I know of simply don't do
;)
PostgreSQL does. Due to WAL, an fsync on a block may commit more than one transaction to disk at the same time. Of course, the second transaction STILL issues an fsync request but the kernel treats it as a NOOP.
That said, it doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference in speed -- but a few megs in battery backed write cache sure does
Yahoo has had for some time a Java Client... does that count?
No, it doesn't. GCC is available on many many more platforms than Java is. A C program that requires a couple of header tweeks to make it work is much preferred to writing a JVM.
Funny, I don't seem to recall the line after "Our home and native land" being "w00t".
;)
You obviously don't go to enough hocky games. For years I thought the rest of the anthem was 'Woo', 'Cheer', 'Scream', 'Woot woot woot', etc.
Like any OS actually knows about the physical location anymore.
cylinder 34, track 32, block 23 is simply what the harddrive uses for the interface, but the data is probably elsewhere.
Ugh.. Using Bioware for identification isn't going to work any better. Just imagine when someone does manage to lift and reproduce your fingerprints (easy), eyescan (give it a decade) and a DNA sample (if you can clone a single cell....).
Now what? You can't change those items either.
Sure, might reduce the amount. But even at a 0.001% rate it is way too high to risk losing your identity permenantly.
I'm not sure how many people have tried this, but you really should put your mouse on the left, that's where it belongs.
Ok.. Did that, but now whenever I go to use my mouse I have to cross my arms. The solution? Use the mouse like a pedal. Put it into the floor and move it around with your foot. Now your hands never need to leave the keyboard!
In the future, all traffic will be port 80. I'm being partly facetious with this predication.
It has been in many companies for quite a while, proxies setup for all kinds of strange services. Instant Messaging was a big one for port 80 proxy a few years ago.
Whats that mean? Worms target individual programs on port 80, and all ISPs start buying layer 7 firewalls to block everything that doesn't have a signature of a webbrowser.
Turning lead into gold is easy.
Turning lead into gold profitably at current gold prices is not so easy.
You get it back when things get bigger though.
Large corporate filestores spend more time doing hierarchial searches looking for related information than actually retrieving files.
Many are database oriented simply because finding the information is orders of magnitude faster, even though there is a small penalty for the actual save.
Aside from that, who hasn't wanted to say they have a 5TB database installation?
Would it be difficult to rip the SQL parser out of Postgres and plug it into linux?
Well.. Probably not too bad actually. The storage manager in PostgreSQL was designed in such a way that it could be replaced (a WORM was in use at one point). It does have some bitrot, database structure is created directly, and some other items bypass the interface but those could be cleaned up.
However the Optimizer in PostgreSQL does make a number of assumptions about ease of access to data at specific times. A little work might be needed to teach it the new cost of accessing various components. Cost of an index read, sequential scan, likelyhood of data being in memory, sorts, etc.
It's not appropriate for this code to be in the kernel, as it can be quite memory intensive for complex queries -- but a thin storage manager in the kernel may be doable.