Re: Call for 7.5 feature completion

On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 07:13:18PM -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Bruce, on May 17, 2004, you wrote:
>
> > So, yea, I am frustrated. I know these features are hard and
> > complex, but I want them for PostgreSQL, and I want them as soon
> > as possible. I guess what really bugs me is that we are so close
> > to having these few remaining big features, and because they are
> > so complex, they are taking a lot longer to arrive than previous
> > features, and sometimes see a year pass without progress on some
> > items, and that bugs me.
>
> This discussion was taking place as we closed the 7.5 development
> cycle, and we weren't getting PITR, tablespaces, nested
> transactions, 2PC, the Win32 port, in the release. We have all
> those things now.
>
> 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?
>
> Has PostgreSQL started slowing down in getting new features, and
> concentrating mostly on performance issues?

Along with all the other cool stuff people have already mentioned, I'd
like to see composite types handled better--they're not quite
first-class objects yet. Also nice to have:

* optional interface which sends a row typeoid along with each row in a result set
* more visibility from RULEs into the expression tree generated by the parser and/or other RULEs
* SQL/MED (or at least things that would make it easier to implement)
* Debugging hooks into all the PLs
* Some way of estimating a "query progress meter" for long-running queries
* MULTISET, COLLECT, UNNEST, FUSION, INTERSECT

oh, and

MERGE! MERGE! MERGE! MERGE! MERGE! MERGE!

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter david(at)fetter(dot)org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 510 893 6100 mobile: +1 415 235 3778

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