8.4 new features - Last Night's meeting Recap

Hello!

Next month's meeting will be folded in with the Winter Coder's Social,
Tuesday December 9, 2008.

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We had ten or so people turn out for a noisy meeting at the Lucky Lab.

Two people compiled and ran 8.4Dev while we were there, and we covered
quite a bit of territory on features that are slated for 8.4 release.
The current plan is to release 8.4 in March 2009.

I pulled up the commitfest wiki page:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/CommitFestInProgress
David pulled up depesz's Waiting for 8.4 blog entries:
http://moourl.com/depesz_waiting

So, via a stream of tweets, here's what we covered:

* generate subscripts
* pass HINT, DETAIL, ERRCODE with RAISE
* enum type for gut params (thx @magnushagander)
* EXPLAIN VERBOSE,
* \l+ show size of databases
* \l shows access privs
* CASE in pl/pgsql
* SQL standard interval format
* pg_conf_load_time
* generate_series that works with time
* VARIADIC functions (so perlish! yay!)
* ability to apply triggers to TRUNCATE
* londiste is awesome
* timing on/off
* new user defined function stats: tracks runtime of user defined
functions, number of calls, total time
* citext (Shout out to David Wheeler)
* free space map improvements (REMOVING fsm GUCS!!!)
* RETURNS TABLE
* CTEs
* array_accum and friends
* Hot Standby
* in-place upgrades
* suppress redundant UPDATE

8.4 is going to be a VERY EXCITING release for Postgres! We only
covered a fraction of the new stuff.

-selena

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Selena Deckelmann
Open Source Bridge - http://www.opensourcebridge.org
PDXPUG - http://pugs.postgresql.org/pdx
Me - http://www.chesnok.com/daily