Re: 9.5 release scheduling (was Re: logical column ordering)

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 7:37 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> 2. It's not clear that we're going to have a particularly-impressive
> list of major features for 9.5. So far we've got RLS and BRIN. I
> expect that GROUPING SETS is far enough along that it should be
> possible to get it in before development ends, and there are a few
> performance patches pending (Andres's lwlock scalability patches,
> Rahila's work on compressing full-page writes) that I think will
> probably make the grade. But after that it seems to me that it gets
> pretty thin on the ground.

I'm slightly surprised that you didn't mention abbreviated keys in
that list of performance features. You're reviewing that patch; how do
you feel about it now?

> Are we going to bill commit timestamp
> tracking - with replication node ID tracking as the real goal, despite
> the name - as a major feature, or DDL deparsing if that goes in, as
> major features? As useful as they may be for BDR, they don't strike
> me as things we can publicize as major features independent of BDR.
> And it's getting awfully late for any other major work that people are
> thinking of to start showing up.

Version 1.0 of INSERT ... ON CONFLICT UPDATE was posted in August -
when development launched. It still doesn't have a reviewer, and it
isn't actually in evidence that someone else has so much as downloaded
and applied the patch (I'm sure someone has done that much, but the
fact is that all the feedback that I've received this year concerns
the semantics/syntax, which you can form an opinion on by just looking
at the extensive documentation and other supplementary material I've
written). It's consistently one of the most requested features, and
yet major aspects of the design, that permeate through every major
subsystem go unremarked on for months now. This feature is
*definitely* major feature list material, since people have been
loudly requesting it for over a decade, and yet no one mentions it in
this thread (only Bruce mentioned it in the other thread about the
effectiveness of the CF process). It's definitely in the top 2 or 3
most requested features, alongside much harder problems like parallel
query and comprehensive partitioning support.

If there is a lesson here for people that are working on major
features, or me personally, I don't know what it is -- if anyone else
knows, please tell me. I've bent over backwards to make the patch as
accessible as possible, and as easy to review as possible. I also
think its potential to destabilize the system (as major features go)
is only about average. What am I doing wrong here?

There is an enormous amount of supplementary documentation associated
with the patch:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/UPSERT
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Value_locking

Both of these pages are far larger than the Wiki page for RLS, for
example. The UPSERT wiki page is kept right up to date.

--
Peter Geoghegan