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Interesting. I'm not a fan of emoji (or memes for that matter) in general, but I realize they're part of the tech culture now and try not to let them bother me

by grzm 10y ago

Interesting. I'm not a fan of emoji (or memes for that matter) in general, but I realize they're part of the tech culture now and try not to let them bother me too much. The first shrug emoji was after the 9.2 data corruption bug. I took that one to mean "Yup. What are we going to do? There was a bug, and we fixed it as quickly as we correctly could. Incredibly regrettable, but that kind of stuff is going to happen." There are bugs in software. Knowing the Postgres developer community, they take correctness very seriously. The second one is after the Uber quote which describes their tolerance for developer's holding open transactions and blocking I/O operations, which they do so from a position of inexperience because they're not database experts. I understood this one to mean "If you're going to use handle transactions in this manner, that's not something Postgres itself is going to be able to help you with." The third was in response to the Uber quote regarding Uber application bugs which resulted in open idle connections. I took this shrug to mean that if this is an issue, it likely can (and should) be fixed in the Uber applications. It's not really a Postgres issue. The fourth (and last) was in response to the lack of quantitative information regarding their Postgres issues (which makes honest, in-depth third-party investigation difficult), Uber's decision to go schema-less, and that MySQL is more tolerant of the bugs in Uber software. I took this one again to mean that there's little that Postgres itself is responsible for, or can do anything about here. A question I always like to ask myself when someone has issues with something a third party is responsible for is what is a realistic and reasonable response from the third party. That often makes me realize that there's little they can be expected to do or are really responsible for, at least for some of the issues. For the most part, I think these shrugs reflect that. If the shrug emojis were removed, would it be okay? Anything else?

foldr 10y ago
The issue is that it's rude to quote someone and then respond with an emoji. If what they're saying is relevant then it merits a proper response. If it isn't relevant, or you don't have anything to say in response, then you shouldn't quote it in the first place. You're welcome to come up with your own theories of what the emojis mean, but I don't see any point in doing so.
- grzm 10y ago
  This is a slide deck from a presentation at Percona Live 2017. https://www.percona.com/live/17/sessions/postgresql-response-uber https://www.percona.com/live/17/sessions/postgresql-response... We're missing everything that was said by the presenter. I would strongly suspect that the presenter said something about the slide.
  - foldr 10y ago
    Yeah that's a fair point. I’d suggest that’s a reason to think carefully before posting a slide deck, though. If essential points are left off the slides entirely, then it may not be such a good idea to post the slides by themselves.
    - grzm 10y ago
      I think many people haven't had the issues you personally do with the presentation. That said, other comments in this thread make clear that you are not the only one to have read them as snarky. It's very useful to be charitable and give people the benefit of the doubt when reading their communication. I think there's a lot of useful information in the slide deck presented in a succinct way, and publishing them as-is is a useful and efficient way to do so. I think with very little effort it's easy to interpret the shrugs as I did above, and there's little if any additional information that needs to be address along with the final shrug. I wouldn't have presented it this way, but I don't see any malevolence or negative intent on the part of the author.
- jldugger 10y ago
  There's kinda two audiences for this paper: Uber, the engineering team that migrated away from psql, and the tech community at large, which saw Uber's technical decision as a signal about the quality of psql. IMO, the shrug emoji is fine. If it were the only response, that'd be a problem but the author gives a proper response in the following slide: it was a short lived bug, and it's not like MySQL is objectively better. I can think of a few MySQL problems I've run into, like fixing a data loss bug in the rollback code by refusing transactions larger than 10 percent of the rollback buffer until a real fix can be published, making backups, restores and migrations pretty much impossible. But the tl;dr here is that psql will continue to get a black eye in the tech community as long as slony exists and is useful.

by grzm 10y ago

foldr 10y ago

The issue is that it's rude to quote someone and then respond with an emoji. If what they're saying is relevant then it merits a proper response. If it isn't relevant, or you don't have anything to say in response, then you shouldn't quote it in the first place. You're welcome to come up with your own theories of what the emojis mean, but I don't see any point in doing so.

grzm 10y ago
This is a slide deck from a presentation at Percona Live 2017. https://www.percona.com/live/17/sessions/postgresql-response-uber https://www.percona.com/live/17/sessions/postgresql-response... We're missing everything that was said by the presenter. I would strongly suspect that the presenter said something about the slide.
- foldr 10y ago
  Yeah that's a fair point. I’d suggest that’s a reason to think carefully before posting a slide deck, though. If essential points are left off the slides entirely, then it may not be such a good idea to post the slides by themselves.
  - grzm 10y ago
    I think many people haven't had the issues you personally do with the presentation. That said, other comments in this thread make clear that you are not the only one to have read them as snarky. It's very useful to be charitable and give people the benefit of the doubt when reading their communication. I think there's a lot of useful information in the slide deck presented in a succinct way, and publishing them as-is is a useful and efficient way to do so. I think with very little effort it's easy to interpret the shrugs as I did above, and there's little if any additional information that needs to be address along with the final shrug. I wouldn't have presented it this way, but I don't see any malevolence or negative intent on the part of the author.
jldugger 10y ago
There's kinda two audiences for this paper: Uber, the engineering team that migrated away from psql, and the tech community at large, which saw Uber's technical decision as a signal about the quality of psql. IMO, the shrug emoji is fine. If it were the only response, that'd be a problem but the author gives a proper response in the following slide: it was a short lived bug, and it's not like MySQL is objectively better. I can think of a few MySQL problems I've run into, like fixing a data loss bug in the rollback code by refusing transactions larger than 10 percent of the rollback buffer until a real fix can be published, making backups, restores and migrations pretty much impossible. But the tl;dr here is that psql will continue to get a black eye in the tech community as long as slony exists and is useful.