<story><title>Hacking on PostgreSQL is hard</title><url>http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2024/05/hacking-on-postgresql-is-really-hard.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ncann</author><text>Could it be that RDBMS is just inherently very complex? Reminds me of this classic comment about Oracle Database:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=18442941&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=18442941&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;To quote part of it&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Oracle Database 12.2.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It is close to 25 million lines of C code.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; What an unimaginable horror! You can&amp;#x27;t change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousands of flags. The whole code is ridden with mysterious macros that one cannot decipher without picking a notebook and expanding relevant pats of the macros by hand. It can take a day to two days to really understand what a macro does.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Sometimes one needs to understand the values and the effects of 20 different flag to predict how the code would behave in different situations. Sometimes 100s too! I am not exaggerating.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests!</text></comment>
<story><title>Hacking on PostgreSQL is hard</title><url>http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2024/05/hacking-on-postgresql-is-really-hard.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>avi_vallarapu</author><text>A few things to note&lt;p&gt;- Postgres documentation is one of the well maintained database documentations. This also means that developers, committers ensure changes to documentations for every relevant patch.&lt;p&gt;- talk about bugs in postgres compared to MySQl or Oracle or etc databases. Nugs are comparatively lesser or generally rare even if you are supporting postgres  services as a vendor with lots of customer. the reason is the efforts  involved by a strong team of developers in not accepting anything and everything, there are strict best practices, reviews, discussions, tests, and a lot more that makes it difficult to pass to a release.&lt;p&gt;- ultimately, more easy is the acceptance of a patch, more the number of bugs.&lt;p&gt;I love Postgres the way it is today and it still is the dbms of the year and developers most loved database.&lt;p&gt;I wish we have more Contributors  committers, developers and also users and companies supporting Postgres so that the time to push a feature gets more faster and reasonable easier with more support.</text></comment>