Subject: survey summary

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 93 17:32:23 CDT

I got only two replies to my message.  Both were negative on accessing a
database by several users.  Any other experiences?  Any comments?
-David

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Reply 1:

We've used postgres for over a year.  When we tried to have two users 
accessing and modifying the same table in the same database, problems
arose.  (I can't remember what exactly happened, either the program crashed,
the postgres backend crashed, or the data became corrupted--in any case,
unacceptable behavior occurred so we now don't allow two users to access
the same database at the same time.)

Before we adopted the one user rule, postgres wasn't reliable.  We were
always having to rebuild the database (you should be prepared to 
re-create your database and re-populate it).
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Reply 2:

I've been trying to get multiple processes to access shared
postgres classes without success. Previous versions of postgres
usually crashed (never detected a pattern) after a few processes
were added. With Version 4.1, a simple program updating one
class within a transaction causes a deadlock when multiple
instances are executed.
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Part of original post:

If you have used Postgres for 6+ months and several people have been using
your databases please email me.  If you want to add anything else about
your experiences (like reliability) I would be happy to receive that as
well.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 93 09:29:02 -0400

> If you have used Postgres for 6+ months and several people have been
> using your databases please email me.

Assuming that this is referring to concurrent access, then I can claim
that 4.0.1 fails when several processes are accessing the same
table(class) (some writing and some reading), resulting in the tuples
mysteriously dissapearing.

I haven't tried this with 4.1 yet.

What would help is if someone could post a test program stressing this
area of postgres that we could all run, and post the results here...

Alternatively, if the Dear Developers know of something wrong or
something that can be fixed in 4.1, I would *love* to hear about it...

Thanks!

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 Robert Withrow, Tel: +1 617 598 4480, Fax: +1 617 598 4430, Net: [email-masked]
 R.W. Withrow Associates, 21 Railroad Ave, Swampscott MA 01907-1821 USA