James [Jim]
This is primarily directed to you...
Looking at the gnumed server code I find it both brilliant and
questionable at the same time.
1) The use of XMIN for detecting concurrent updates. In general
using any system column from another piece of infrastructure is
fragile. The semantics of XMIN is part of postgresql it should not
be part of gnumed. The postgresql developers are free to change the
semantics of XMIN as they wish. They are saving 1 integer column,
or timestamp column to do this properly. Is it worth it ?
2) Using updateable views is also very "correct" however has anyone
tested this on a huge database ? All those foreign keys are
wonderful, but will take forever to rebuild. I've seen foreign key
checks on a restore take a few hours to run through.
...
3) Where are the test cases ? Are there any regression tests ?