AXLE Plans for 9.5 and 9.6

I've discussed 2ndQuadrant's involvement in the AXLE project a few
times publicly, but never on this mailing list. The project relates to
innovation and improvement in Business Intelligence for systems based
upon PostgreSQL in the range of 10-100TB.

Our work will span the 9.5 and 9.6 cycles. We're looking to make
measurable improvements in a number of cases; one of those is TPC-H,
since its a publicly accessible benchmark, another is a more private
benchmark on healthcare data. In brief, this means speeding up the
performance of large queries, data loading and looking at very large
systems issues.

Some of areas of R&D are definitely on the roadmap, others are more
flexible. Some of this is in progress, other stuff is not even at the
design stage - yet, just a few paragraphs along the lines of "we will
look at these topics". If we have room, its possible we may
accommodate other topics; this is not carte blanche, but the reason
for posting here is so people know we will take input, following the
normal community process. Detailed in-person discussions at PGCon are
expected and the Wiki pages will be updated for each aspect.

BI-related Indexing
* MinMax indexes
* Bitmap indexes

Large Systems
* Freeze avoidance
* Storage management issues for very large systems

Storage Efficiency
* Compression
* Column Orientation

Optimisation
* Bulk loading speed improvements
* Bulk FK evaluation
* Executor tuning for very large queries

Query tuning
* Approximate queries, sampling
* Materialized Views

...and possibly some other aspects.

2ndQuadrant is also assisting other researchers on GPU and FPGA
topics, which may also yield work of interest to PostgreSQL project.

Couple of points: The project is time limited, so if work gets pushed
back beyond that then we'll lose the opportunity to contribute. Please
support our work with timely objections, assistance in defining the
path forwards and limiting the scope to something that avoids wasting
this opportunity. Further funding is possible if we don't squander
this. We are being funded to make best efforts to contribute to open
source PostgreSQL, not pay-for-commit.

AXLE is funded by the EU under FP7 Grant Agreement 318633. Further
details are available here http://www.axleproject.eu/

(There are also other 2ndQuadrant development projects in progress,
this is just one of the larger ones).

Best Regards

--
Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services