pg_hexedit VS pg_auto_failover

I am the author of a tool that generates wxHexEditor tags and annotations for Postgres relation files -- pg_hexedit:

https://github.com/petergeoghegan/pg_hexedit

I've invested quite a lot of effort in it, and it would be nice to have support for multiple hex editors. That was anticipated to some degree:

https://github.com/petergeoghegan/pg_hexedit#supporting-othe...

I understand why you favor a declarative template format for describing files with tags -- that probably scales really nicely. What I'm doing is pretty grotty, but works surprisingly well in practice. I procedurally generate a description of each file in a shell script, and then open the file in wxHexEditor. I'm generating huge XML files, which is slow, but there are simple workarounds to get acceptable performance.

wxHexEditor doesn't support declarative tags. But even if it did I might not want to use them; the on-disk format of PostgreSQL is much more complicated than most file formats, and isn't supposed to be consumed by third party tools. Writing a C program that uses the struct definitions from the server itself makes the complexity quite manageable -- the tool is basically feature complete, even though I haven't spent a huge amount of time on it.

That said, it would be great if I could adapt pg_hexedit to a hex editor that had some kind of "best of both worlds" support for tags - tags that can be generated lazily and on-demand, when a portion of the file needs to be drawn or redrawn. This would be easy to adapt to -- Postgres relation files always consist of a series of 8KiB blocks/pages. My tool can easily generate tags for any single block without knowing any special context or having any expensive-to-generate state -- I just need a block number (i.e. an 8KiB-aligned byte offset).

pg_auto_failover makes it an absolute breeze. I cannot understand how it's not mentioned in the article.

I've been runnning it for 3 years with great success - https://github.com/hapostgres/pg_auto_failover/discussions/6...

Simplified and probably OK: pg_auto_failover - One Monitor/Witness node and minimum services otherwise. Good documentation to get started and not nearly as complex as Patroni.

There are tools that make managing such a system easier. Check out patroni, pg_auto_failover or PAF

This is /extremely/ uncharitable. It depends more on the project.

For example, both Go and .NET are very well written with comprehensible documentation. Many projects have also been absorbed by the Apache Foundation or other FOSS initiatives.

Every FANG has boat loads of teams working on umpteen different open source packages. The quality naturally varies.

Let me pick two more esoteric projects as a point of comparison.

Yandex Odyssey (https://github.com/yandex/odyssey) an advanced multi-threaded PostgreSQL connection pooler and request router. Figuring out how exactly and when to use this is not quite clear. There is no "getting started" guide for this package. There is barely any explanation for how it works or what it does.

pg_auto_failover (https://github.com/citusdata/pg_auto_failover) run by Citus (owned by Microsoft) monitors and manages automated failover for a Postgres cluster. This repo even has diagrams explaining the workflow and complete instructions.

Right, https://github.com/citusdata/pg_auto_failover has been on my reading list

My go to for this is https://github.com/citusdata/pg_auto_failover set up with ansible https://github.com/neuroforgede/pg\_auto\_failover\_ansible