PostgreSQL best practices compliance

[frcroth]

The people who made PostgreSQL have created this document: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don%27t_Do_This#Text_storage

Some things I noticed

• Char should never be used -> We use it a lot
• Varchar(n) should probably not be used -> We use it

Opinions on this @fm3 ?

[fm3]

Yeah, I saw the document too yesterady, but didn’t read through it yet. We should go through it at some point and consider what we should change (and probably not just text).

I think it doesn’t have super high priority, though. After all, we’ve been sailing fairly smoothly so far with our db.

[fm3]

Looks like we are guilty of

• NOT IN (in wk app code)
• Uppercase Chars in table and column names (in our schema.sql)
• CHAR(n) (in our schema.sql)
• VARCHAR(n) (in our schema.sql) where we could use text. Consider limiting size of user-supplied strings already in Controllers/Actions instead.

I always thought that we should probably eventually move our timestamptz fields to timestamp (without timezone), as they are all utc anyway, but apparently that is not true