1. Postgres doesn't really didn't want to be statically compiled, according to [1].
2. Messing with LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to an embedded glibc and openssl when running the heremetic postgres binaries.
3. Postgres will absolutely refuse to run the server process as root. That's sensible for a production environment but a pain in CI because it would require setting up another user on machines. I patched away the problem to allow Postgres to run as root.
On the bright side, with some minor tweaking, Postgres can start a fresh database in 300 ms which is plenty fast for tests and you avoid spinning up Docker containers. I ended up using template databases to only spin up the database once per test suite. Each tests then copies the database template for each test in the suite which reduced the setup time per test to ~20 ms.
Instead of using rules_foreign_cc to build Postgres from source with Bazel, I ended up building Postgres outside of Bazel with Docker and zipping it up by target platform (linux|darwin)_(arm64|amd64).
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/4E0DE1B6.6070600@postn...
I'm guessing it's not open source - as I couldn't find it on your Github account or your company's account. If that's the case, would you be able to create a quick gist with a copy/paste of any of the code you can share? If you have the time I'd appreciate it!
Related links for anyone interested: - dataform uses bazel for ci tests. They builds redis from source, but run postgres as a container. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/bazel/comments/kcmbwb/how_to_run_se...
Right. There's a lot of features that'll flat out not work if you somehow compile it statically. I don't think it's a useful thing to run tests with a version of postgres built like that. Nor does it really solve anything - postgres will still require a bunch of on-disk files.
You shouldn't need have to do so anyway - you can relocate the postgres installation itself when compiled normally. Binaries like postgres will try to find the files they need relative to their own location if not found at the builtin location.
Of course, libraries that PG binaries dynamically link to need to be somewhere in the library path. If you need to adjust that you can do it by adding rpaths to the binaries/libraries to additional locations, so you don't need to adjust LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
WRT "embeddable postgres":
Postgres relies on having multiple processes that collaborate on making database access fast. And it requires there to be only a single instance of postgres that can access the data. There's some inherent increase in difficulty of embedding something like that compared to something with sqlite's architecture.
Until recently PG didn't have a way to provide non-tcp access on windows, which made embedding on windows a bit more problematic. But since Win 10 unix domain sockets are available on windows, so things have gotten better.
I'd guess that after that the fact that a postgres installation consists out of many files, instead of a shared library or two, is the biggest difficulty. Those files are relocatable at least, but it's still far less convenient.
I don't know how much of a relevant factor the layout of the "data directory" is - for some database embedding scenarios it sure is convenient to only have to deal with a file or two. But moving a directory around isn't that much harder...
My guess is that somebody with interest could improve the situation measurably within a reasonable timeframe...
I agree it could be better packaged, but it's actually not impossible to ship a Postgres with your program.
What do you mean? It's not like postgres is bundled by default with most distros.
Yes, the OS doesn't impose any opinion. It's just a matter of what application developers do, and the developers of Linux applications tend to write code that doesn't require installing. As an example, there's Postgres :)
There is nothing about linux that makes postgres more or less portable than on windows or osx, and I'd be interested if you have any examples of postgres being used in a non-packaged way (outside of development tools like postgresapp.com).
Besides that, one of the strengths of most linux distros is that they provide a centralized way to install/upgrade packages like apt/yum/dnf/pacman and don't have to rely on third party tools like homebrew.