[Gnumed-devel] Observations & questions about GNUmed

[James Busser]

Someone I believe to have a lot of postgres experience, who has been having a 
look at GNUmed, welcomed me to pass his observations and questions along for 
comment. Karsten had earlier responded about GNUmed not yet having many tests 
of 
its software but I don't know that the first two observations have been 
previously submitted or commented on:

Begin forwarded message:

James [Jim],

This is primarily directed to you. I should probably get on the gnumed 
developer 
list...

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 ?