Let me present another “first patch” idea, related to a runtime stats on access to files storing data. Having this kind of information would be very valuable on instances with many files (which can happen for many reasons).
This is a very different area than the patch idea, which was about an extension. The runtime stats are at the core of the system, and so is the interaction with the file systems. But it’s still fairly isolated, and thus suitable for new contributors.
I’ve decided to experiment a little bit and do regular “office hours.” I’ll be available to chat about almost anything related to Postgres. It might be a technical discussion about a patch you’re working on, or a topic about the community etc.
This is not an entirely new thing. I’ve been telling people to just ping me if they want to discuss something off-list, or have a call and chat about it.
In an earlier post I mentioned I plan to share a couple patch ideas, suitable for new contributors. This is the first one, about using COPY protocol for postgres_fdw batching. This would replace the current implementation, based on prepared statements. Let me share a couple thoughts on the motivation and how it might be implemented.
A couple weeks ago I needed to move my mailing list communication to a different mailbox. That sounds straightforward - go to the community account and resubscribe to all the lists with the new address, and then import a bit of history from the archives so that the client can show threads, search etc.
The first part worked like a charm, but importing the archives turned out to be a bit tricky, and I ran into a bunch of non-obvious issues. So here’s how I made that work in the end.
Picking the topic for your first patch in any project is hard, and Postgres is no exception. Limited developer experience with important parts of the code make it difficult to judge feasibility/complexity of a feature idea. And if you’re not an experienced user, it may not be very obvious if a feature is beneficial. Let me share a couple simple suggestions on how to find a good topic for the first patch.
