Re: CommitFest 2011-11 Update

It's time for another one of these again. We're now just past the
nominal 1 month goal of each CommitFest, and as you can obviously see
from my list traffic I'm trying to close things up.

One of the CF goals is to give everyone who submits something a fair
review. There are a few patches that haven't gotten any full review yet.

"Collect frequency statistics and selectivity estimation for arrays":
this area is tough to find help on. I've been in touch with Nathan
Boley recently and he does intend to get to this one soon. Not chasing
this down earlier is my bad. If anyone else is interested in this area,
please let me know. I hope we get something soon from Nathan, but would
like to have a backup plan in case he continues to be too busy to work
on it.

Neither of the two pg_stat_statements enhancement patches have gotten a
review yet. The one Peter G has been working on has gotten regular
updates during the CF but hasn't been reviewed yet. Daniel Farina has
only had a few days where it was in a state he could do that against the
last update, and there's been of system updates at Heroku keeping away
during most of that. This I intend to keep nudging forward myself.

A fourth patch is better but not treated well yet:

"Allow substitute allocator for PGresult": Due to some mishandling on
my side this didn't make it though a second pass of review yet, so it's
state is a bit unknown still.

Then there are also another 5 patches that have been updated recently
enough they might be ready to commit, but we're still looking for a
final review on them first. They are:

"pgsql_fdw contrib module" and the related "Join push-down for foreign
tables". I don't have a good feel for the order these two need to be
applied in, or exactly where they stand right now.

"Fix Leaky Views Problem, again": Robert is planning to look at this more

"avoid taking two snapshots per query": Dimitri is done with this one
now. I think that moves this toward Ready for Committer, which in
theory Robert could do himself now. Playing around with this area seems
complicated enough that it would be nice to have another committer look
at this though.

"splitting plpython into smaller parts": This was still being worked on
by Peter E as of yesterday, so I'm assuming it's still viable to commit
soon.

On a positive note, I seem to have unstuck two of the long running
arguments this week. "unite recovery.conf and postgresql.conf" has a
potential path forward again. I don't think we can just forget about
executing on that until the last minute before the final CommitFest.
Nailing down who is working on each of those moving parts is something
we should do, but that seems unlikely to move until the other CF work is
closed up though.

pg_last_xact_insert_timestamp thread has taken an odd turn from ready to
commit back to receiving a set of alternate proposals. The "primary
keepalive" patch and "archive_keepalive_command" design proposal from
Simon pair seem to add up to something that addresses the concerns I
raised about computations from a single system and differences between
transaction and WAL timing. I'm finding myself on the hook for this
area, so I'll try myself to help keep it from stalling again.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us