Known Issues

The following summarizes deficiencies in the current release of the Pyrseas utiltities. For further details please refer to the discussions in the pyrseas-general mailing list or the Pyrseas issue tracker. Suggestions or patches to deal with these issues are welcome.

Memory utilization

The yamltodb utility compares the existing and input metadata by constructing parallel, in-memory representations of the database catalogs and the input YAML specification. If the database has a large number of objects, e.g., in the thousands of tables, the utility's memory usage may be noticeable.

Object renaming

Pyrseas provides support for generating SQL statements to rename various database objects, e.g., ALTER TABLE t1 RENAME TO t2, using an 'oldname' tag which can be added to objects that support SQL RENAME. The tag has to be added manually to a YAML specification for yamltodb to act on it and cannot be kept in the YAML file for subsequent runs. This is not entirely satisfactory for storing the YAML file in a version control system.

Delimited identifiers

PostgreSQL supports SQL delimited identifiers, i.e., object identifiers that include special characters (e.g., spaces, minus signs) or that are SQL reserved words. Pyrseas currently supports the first type of delimited identifiers, but not the use of reserved words, such as the tables named "order" or columns named "limit." Some work is in progress to address this issue.