Re: 8.4 release planning (was Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Automatic view update rules)

Dave Page wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
> <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> I'm sure it depends on the user. Users that are more interested in the
>> features we already have in the bag like window functions and WITH-clause,
>> will obviously prefer to release earlier without hot standby. And users that
>> want hot standby (or SE-postgresql) will prefer to delay the release and
>> have those features included.
>
> At LinuxLive (UK) the overwhelming majority of people I spoke to over
> three days wanted hot standby and replication (preferably
> multi-master, but thats another story). Window functions, recursive
> queries, SE PostgreSQL, updatable views and other new features were
> barely mentioned.

I'd say the FSM rework is the largest feature in 8.4 that most of my
customers would have immediate use for. With visibility map not far
behind. It's not a "sexy" feature, it's removing a piece of annoyance.
So it's not something people would think of when you say "what feature
are you looking for in the next version". But it will help pretty much
all users, and that's certainly more than hot standby for example. And
the longer we push that back for some other feature, the more these
users suffer.

That said, I've certainly got a fair number of places where hot standby
would be very popular. More than most others on your list above. And I'm
not making a comment as to how ready hot standby is - I haven't kept up
enough to comment on that.

> As I've pointed out before, we're not a commercial company working for
> our shareholders, we're a FOSS project working for our end users. If
> we can include an important and popular feature like this at the
> expense of a few weeks extra wait for the release, it seems to me that
> we'll be serving our users far better overall than making a fair
> percentage of them wait another 12 months for work that is more or
> less complete.

Just playing the devils advocate here, but you can turn that argument
around easily. We're not a commercial company who need to release a
feature just because marketing said it'd be there...

//Magnus