Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

Hi,

On 2024-05-15 10:38:20 +0200, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> I disagree with this. IMO the impact of the Sawada/Naylor change is
> likely to be enormous for people with large tables and large numbers of
> tuples to clean up (I know we've had a number of customers in this
> situation, I can't imagine any Postgres service provider that doesn't).
> The fact that maintenance_work_mem is no longer capped at 1GB is very
> important and I think we should mention that explicitly in the release
> notes, as setting it higher could make a big difference in vacuum run
> times.

+many.

We're having this debate every release. I think the ongoing reticence to note
performance improvements in the release notes is hurting Postgres.

For one, performance improvements are one of the prime reason users
upgrade. Without them being noted anywhere more dense than the commit log,
it's very hard to figure out what improved for users. A halfway widely
applicable performance improvement is far more impactful than many of the
feature changes we do list in the release notes.

For another, it's also very frustrating for developers that focus on
performance. The reticence to note their work, while noting other, far
smaller, things in the release notes, pretty much tells us that our work isn't
valued.

Greetings,

Andres Freund