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I'll second the praise for the Postgres documentation. I learned a lot about Postgres simply by looking through the documentation and reading the parts that loo

I'll second the praise for the Postgres documentation. I learned a lot about Postgres simply by looking through the documentation and reading the parts that looked interesting.

djk447 5y ago
Same here. I feel like I built several years of my career on reading that documentation and knowing where to find things when other folks didn't, so they'd come and ask me and I'd just send them to the right place.
mjw1007 5y ago
Parts of the documentation are very good. For example https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/wal-configuration.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/wal-configuration.html is done properly: it describes what that part of the program actually does, with the settings that affect it introduced at the appropriate point, separately from the reference documentation which lists the same settings in alphabetical order. But not all aspects of Postgres get this quality of documentation. It would be good to see a similar treatment of the checks the planner or executor performs to decide whether to permit access to a particular table and column and row, rather than having to deduce it from the separate descriptions of the security features. (For example, the basic fact that a VIEW accesses a table using the privileges of the view's owner, not those of the user executing the query, is very hard to find in the documentation.)
p_l 5y ago
Not just about postgres internals, but generally about SQL in my case. Interestingly enough the competition for "biggest impact on my SQL Knowledge"... Is a book about MS Access 97 which taught me enough about how SQL actually works that I could understand Postgres docs.
funcDropShadow 5y ago
It is great that you can switch on any page in the documentation to the documentation of another release of PostgreSQL. That is extremely helpful if you are working with different versions.

I'll second the praise for the Postgres documentation. I learned a lot about Postgres simply by looking through the documentation and reading the parts that looked interesting.

djk447 5y ago

Same here. I feel like I built several years of my career on reading that documentation and knowing where to find things when other folks didn't, so they'd come and ask me and I'd just send them to the right place.

mjw1007 5y ago

Parts of the documentation are very good. For example https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/wal-configuration.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/wal-configuration.html is done properly: it describes what that part of the program actually does, with the settings that affect it introduced at the appropriate point, separately from the reference documentation which lists the same settings in alphabetical order. But not all aspects of Postgres get this quality of documentation. It would be good to see a similar treatment of the checks the planner or executor performs to decide whether to permit access to a particular table and column and row, rather than having to deduce it from the separate descriptions of the security features. (For example, the basic fact that a VIEW accesses a table using the privileges of the view's owner, not those of the user executing the query, is very hard to find in the documentation.)

p_l 5y ago

Not just about postgres internals, but generally about SQL in my case. Interestingly enough the competition for "biggest impact on my SQL Knowledge"... Is a book about MS Access 97 which taught me enough about how SQL actually works that I could understand Postgres docs.

funcDropShadow 5y ago

It is great that you can switch on any page in the documentation to the documentation of another release of PostgreSQL. That is extremely helpful if you are working with different versions.