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From: lowe@rust.zso.dec.com
Subject: some questions from a new user
To: postgres@postgres.berkeley.edu
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Date: Fri, 15 Jan 93 10:42:40 -0800
From: lowe@rust.zso.dec.com
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I am a software developer with DEC, with experience in commercial Ingres 
application development (I grew up on version 5 using QUEL). I have recently
downloaded and installed Postgres and have been doing a little experimenting
with it.

I have a few questions for anyone who might know and answer:

- The biggest obstacle I have found for getting good use from Postgres is the
  apparent lack of a facility for retrieving status/error information. There
  is a reference in the file "c.h" about future plans for a global variable
  to contain the status of the last operation (retrieving from the ERROR 
  relation is mentioned, but I can find no such relation). My question is
  this: is there a way that the status/error state for the last operation can
  be manually retrieved from some system relation (ala INQUIRE_INGRES)? Could
  error text info by subsequently looked up?

- Has anyone written an embedded quel preprocessor ?

- Has anyone done any porting work to OSF ? Specifically OSF running on a DEC
  Alpha box ? Would there be any significant difficulties due to 32/64 bit
  issues ?

- How about NT ? I gather that the port to NT would by of much
  greater difficulty since the sockets and shared memory mechanisms are so 
  different.

I will look forward to any replies. THank you.

-Bruce Lowe