Re: 9.0: Too many features. Help us choose!

> I don't remember what I put in for that, but here's how I thought on a
> number of cases. The LISTEN/NOTIFY improvements are important to
> people who have been using postgresql for a long time, and use it in a
> way that's not all that common these days (look, ma, no ORM!). For an
> *outsider*, it's completely irrelevant - they didn't know there was a
> problem before (unlike vacuum which people have heard of forever,
> nobody has heard of issues with listen/notify), so it looks more like
> trying to push something because we didn't have enough relevant.

Yeah, I guess my perspective is different. From where I sit,
LISTEN/NOTIFY was a useless feature before: it didn't carry messages, it
had severe performance limitations. Suddenly, with the overhaul
, PostgreSQL has built-in transactional message queueing.

In other words, previously most people were unaware that LISTEN/NOTIFY
existed and I wouldn't have recommended it to them. Now it's a useful
tool which users can use to build new kinds of applications. HStore is
the same ... we had it in 8.4, but it wasn't useful. Now you can build
an application around it, as long as you don't use "=>".

Contrast this with the additional windowing functions, which received a
about an equal number of votes. In my experience, most of the public
doesn't even know what windowing functions are, and could care less that
we implemented 5 more of them. As far as the casual user is concerned,
we implemented windowing functions in 8.4 and we're done now.

From my perspective, the press release should focus on features which
answer the question "Why would I use PostgreSQL instead of another
databse?". I think that people here on the list agree in principle but
nevertheless tend to focus on features which support incremental
improvements of existing functionality over features which support
entirely new applications, if about half the votes are anything to go by.

Anyway, the voting did let me get a list of 5 "don't bother" features
and 5 "must have" features, which then means that the rest can be based
on PR discussion, and is what I expected. And let me settle the release
notes, where our space constraints are less.

The only question is ... should I broadcast this survey on -general to
try to get the perspective of more casual PostgreSQL users? Over half
of the current survey respondants called themselves "Experienced
PostgresQL Users" which is, I think, where part of the voting skew comes
from.

--
-- Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com