Would you pay for better DB progress reporting?

by dawids

Hey all,
I was recently building PostgreSQL based project at work and while I love the database, I feel developer experience related to reporting progress from long running operations could be improved (cluster, copy, create index, vacuum).

For example, I had to run create index and it'd be great if I could get a text when it's done.

Seeing how far (%) it is would also be nice, as well as a list of operations running right now.

I'm thinking about building a service with these features. I want it to be small and affordable while doing its job well. But the question is:

would you as a dev pay for such a service?

I imagine it would cost around $3 for a pack of notifications (pay-as-you-go) or $5 for monthly subscription

Thanks for all the comments

dawids

posted to

Developers

on March 13, 2024

Say something nice to dawids…

Post Comment

1

For me, no.

ServBay

·
a month ago
·
Reply
1

I wonder why a developer needs notifications about the progress of "create index" or any other provisioning process. Isn't it taken care of by tools like Terraform?

hnvcam

·
2 months ago
·
Reply
1

So firstly I think there are technical issues, because you eventually will slowdown the process of inserting/creating, or whatever function is called. And how would you measure % of inserting operation for example?

You know, as a devs we don't really need a lot.
Most of us are fine with hackernews website design, so I think we'll wait just till function is completed. All in all, it is displaying and that's only I care about.

Qniwwwerss

·
2 months ago
·
Reply
1

But I'd need to give your service access to the database just for these messages?...

I'm pretty noob in posgresql but know it's usually ahead of others, I'd be surprised there is nothing useful to query progress? Getting an email is just a cron querying the status of the DB and sending no?

Are there any posgresql db managers that already offer something similar?

hatkyinc

·
2 months ago
·
Reply
1. 1
  Thanks for commenting! Yes, there would be an agent: a small docker image that you drop on your server/run in your cloud and give it access to your database (but you can restrict it to only pg_stat tables, which don't store your data). This is how DataDog and others do it.
  
  Right now if you want to know the progress, you have to:
  
  find the right pg_stat table here https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/progress-reporting.html
  
  know which columns you want
  
  pick two columns: one *_total and another *_done
  
  calculate the % manually
  
  Regarding the email - technically yes, but I'm not sure if there's a way to ask postgres if it's done with the task. So it seems you'd have to write a custom function with notification, then start it manually after you know the task pid and write something that would listen for the notification and pass it to the outside world.
  
  So technically you can do it, but if you have a ton of work you probably don't want to. That was my case.
  
  I tried to find such a service, but I can't really. Most tools focus on "monitoring the db", which means reporting on memory, storage, connections etc. I'm sure you can set up some custom alerts in DataDog, but it's 1) manual work 2) expensive (if you only use it for such notifications)
  dawids
  
  ·
  2 months ago
  ·
  Reply
  1. 1
    
    Is this a high searched term? How are the current answers? Can you interest some of the current answer writers in this tool?
    
    hatkyinc
    
    ·
    2 months ago
    ·
    Reply