Re: 9.6 -> 10.0

On Mar 22, 2016 5:53 PM, "Robert Haas" <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 12:10 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>
wrote:
> > Someone (can't remember who) suggested a good time is to do it when we
can
> > allow actual zero-or-close-to-zero-downtime upgrades.
> >
> > While having parallelism is awesome, it's only going to affect a
(arguably
> > small or big depending on your viewpoint) subset of users. It's going
to be
> > massive for those users, but it's not going to be useful for anywhere
near
> > as many users as streaming replication+hot standby+pg_upgrade in 9.0, or
> > pitr+windows in 8.0. And yes, the vacuum freeze thing is also going to
be
> > great - for a small subset of users (yes, those users are in a lot of
pain
> > now).
> >
> > I had a discussion with Marko T just a couple of weeks back, and the
> > conclusion then was that at the time, 9.6 had almost nothing that would
even
> > make the cut for a press release. We now have these two features, which
are
> > great features, but I'm not sure it's enough for such a big symbolical
bump.
>
> This release includes, so far, three things that I think are pretty
> significant. One is parallel query, now including target list, join,
> and aggregate pushdown. The second is the freeze map, which is surely
> the largest vacuum improvement since 8.4. The third is the
> enhancements to postgres_fdw, which can now push down joins, sorts,
> and DML. There are still some other very good features under
> consideration, like Tomas Vondra's multivariate statistics work. I
> think that saying we have nothing that would make the cut for the
> press release is awfully pessimistic, considering that in 9.4 I got a
> major feature credit for adding an API that could be used only by
> writing C code. Compared to that, all of these features are pretty
> fantastic.

Most of that was committed *after* our discussion. It's definitely a very
solid release now. (and I agree that was a somewhat weird feature credit in
9.4,but hey, we also got most of our json publicity for the one in 9.2, not
the really useful one in 9.4. Our track record with these things isn't
really the best..).

Is it enough for 10.0? I'm still doubtful. If more of the stuff that's in
the queue now gets committed, there's definitely a chance I'll change my
mind. But we shouldn't decide on version numbers based on what might
happen, only on what actually happens.

/Magnus