A Whole Heap of Trouble
August 6th, 2007
I’ve always had a voracious appetite for books, but I have to admit that I never read product user guides. I’ll dive head first into a new piece of technology and uncover how things work for myself rather than investing the time in reading the user documentation. I’ve noticed that this is a growing trend and that many software consumers will use the documentation only as a last resort. Obviously the price we pay for not reading the documentation is that it’s unlikely that we’re getting the full benefit the technology provides and whole areas of functionality can go undiscovered.Typically a new Ingres user will be familiar with another database technology and oftentimes won’t believe that they need to invest the time to read our documentation; instead they will use the on-line reference guides only when they need to understand specific syntax components. This causes us a problem because when Ingres was designed we assumed an educated user.
Let me provide you with an example that illustrates the point. Ingres supports an impressive variety of table and index structures. Many other DBMS technologies offer fewer choices, and some support only a single table structure; typically B-tree or ISAM. The default table structure in Ingres has historically been a heap, and for those of you unfamiliar with heap table structures: as the name suggests, when data is inserted into a heap there’s no sorting, it’s simply added to what was there previously. It’s perfect for quickly loading data, and once the table is loaded the application developer or database administrator can modify the table structure to whatever makes sense for their usage. Few new users realize that the Ingres default is a heap, or the other storage structure options available to them, so their tables remain as heaps and queries end up scanning whole tables rather than quickly pinpointing the results.
We’ve recently made some changes to Ingres to modify our defaults to take into account the fact that, like me, few people will take the time to read the documentation and would rather discover things for themselves. As is customary, we’ll provide a configuration option that will enable loyal followers to retain the old defaults.
We’re fortunate to have very talented and very technical writers at Ingres, and we’ve recently made the Ingres documentation set available in HTML format in addition to PDF and posted it here on our community web site. One of the benefits of posting the documentation in HTML format, is that it has been indexed by web search engines, so when you next you search for something relating to Ingres the documentation should be included in the results.
