Re: What Would You Like To Do?

On 12 September 2011 05:21, David E. Wheeler <david(at)kineticode(dot)com> wrote:
> Hackers,
>
> Later this week I'm giving a [brief][] for an audience of what I hope will be corporate PostgreSQL users that covers how to get a feature developed for PostgreSQL. The idea here is that there are a lot of organizations out there with very deep commitments to PostgreSQL, who really take advantage of what it has to offer, but also would love additional features PostgreSQL doesn't offer. Perhaps some of them would be willing to fund development of the featured they need.
>
> [brief]: http://postgresopen.org/2011/schedule/presentations/83/
>
> Toward the end of the presentation, I'd like to make some suggestions and offer to do some match-making. I'm thinking primarily of listing some of the stuff the community would love to see done, along with the names of the folks and/or companies who, with funding, might make it happen. My question for you is: What do you want to work on?
>
> Here's my preliminary list:
>
> * Integrated partitioning support: Simon/2nd Quadrant
> * High-CPU concurrency: Robert/Enterprise DB
> * Multimaster replication and clustering: Simon/2nd Quadrant
> * Multi-table indexes: Heiki? Oleg & Teodor?
> * Column-leve collation support: Peter/Enterprise DB
> * Faster and more fault tolerant data loading: Andrew/PGX
> * Automated postgresql.conf Configuration: Greg/2nd Quadrant
> * Parallel pg_dump: Andrew/PGX
> * SET GLOBAL-style configuration in SQL: Greg/2nd Quadant
> * Track table and index caching to improve optimizer decisions: Robert/Enterprise DB
>
> Thanks to Greg Smith for adding a few bonus ideas I hadn't thought of. What else have you got? I don't think we necessarily have to limit ourselves to core features, BTW: projects like PostGIS and pgAdmin are also clearly popular, and new projects of that scope (or improvements to those!) would no doubt be welcome. Also, I'm highlighting PGXN and an example of how this sort of thing might work.
>
> So, what do you want to work on? Let me know, I'll do as much match-making at the conference as I can.

I have a wish-list of features, but I don't know of anyone specific
who could work on them. In addition to some you've mentioned they
are:

* Distributed queries
* Multi-threaded query operations (single queries making use of more
than 1 core in effect)
* Stored procedures
* Automatic failover re-subscription (okay, I don't know what you'd
call this, but where you have several standbys, the primary fails, one
standby is automatically promoted, and the remaining standbys
automatically subscribe to the newly-promoted one without needing a
new base backup)
* ROLLUP and CUBE
* pg_dumpall custom format (Guillaume mentioned this was on his to-do
list previously)

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Thom Brown
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