Re: Call for 7.5 feature completion

On N, 2005-08-25 at 19:13 -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> We have gone a long way now, even though it was only a year ago. My
> question for everyone on this list is: What are the "few remaining big
> features" that you see missing for PostgreSQL?
>
> Or, slightly different, what are people's most wanted features?

my pet wishes are :

24/7 OLTP related things

* vacuums that ignore other vacuums when deciding what tuples to free
(should be mostly done, my patch wasleft to 8.2 due to some doubts by
Tom)
* non-blocking CREATE INDEX / REINDEX (so indexes can be added to huge
tables on busy databases without downtime)
* related to last one - command to promote UNIQUE INDEX to PRIMARY KEY.
* multiple WAL's, assignable to objects (similaŕ to tablespaces).
* better 64-bit support inside db engine.
* real background vacuuming, using something like FSM, may be integrated
with background writer.
* VACUUM FULL/CLUSTER added behaviour of leaving pages half-empty (or
any.other-percentage-empty) for good update behaviour.

OLAP stuff

* table partitioning to move forward.
* archive tables (append (==insert) only, only one writer at a time,
vacuum needed after rollbacked insert, visibility determined by "last
valid ctid" marker, so will not need most of header fields either).
* index-only scans over archive tables (possible without altering
current index structure, as visibility can be determined by ctid which
is already present in index leaf).

> Has PostgreSQL started slowing down in getting new features, and
> concentrating mostly on performance issues?

I can't think of this as new features vs. performance thing as many of
the new features *are* largely about performance, both on database
engine and on user side.

--
Hannu Krosing <hannu(at)skype(dot)net>