Hi there,
On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 10:11:09AM +0100, Dimitri Fontaine wrote:
> > I'm really not seeing the case for user-level documentation of HOT,
> > when for instance most of the planner's optimization behavior is not
> > so documented.
>
> In my POV, the case for HOT to appear in the documentation as been made by the
> PR and Presskit. They both announce HOT to be a major performance addition in
> 8.3 that users will want to benefit from. Now we have to tell some more to
> the users, I think we want to answer those two basic questions:
> - How do I check that I'm using HOT? (you don't, transparent feature, blah)
> - What's HOT is so good about compared to how PostgreSQL used to work?
>
> My proposal was about answering this without requiring the user to be capable
> of understanding internals and 'developer topics'.
Which might be pretty difficult, if it's an internal feature. But a
short HOT-FAQ would be great, something like this:
- What is HOT?
...
- How do I exploit it?
Make sure that ...
- When will HOT kick in?
If ...
and ...
and ...
> I'd also like to add that people judging documentation effectiveness by its
> length are certainly not real users of it. I've yet to meet a PostgreSQL user
> who doesn't praise the product documentation, even if newcomers often need
> some time to be able to understand where to find what. The Tsearch enabled
> website has been a huge improvement here.
Yes, I praise it, too! Even though it needs some reading and thinking
and reading and thinking to understand, e.g. the internals of VACUUM or
freeze_max_age etc., the documentation is very helpful to understand
what's going on.
> To ease PostgreSQL newbies manual grasping, I certainly don't think it will
> need shortening the documentation.
Maybe there could be quickstart chapters or HOWTOs.
Bye,
Tino.
--
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