Re: 9.0: Too many features. Help us choose!

> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 09:55:50AM +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 1:47 AM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>>> All,
>>>
>>> So I'm compiling this, and I was surprised to see that a lot of people
>>> didn't consider the overhauled LISTEN/NOTIFY to be a major feature. For
>>> those who voted "not a major feature", what was the reasoning? I'm curious.
>>
>> I don't remember what I put in for that, but here's how I thought on a
>> number of cases. The LISTEN/NOTIFY improvements are important to
>> people who have been using postgresql for a long time, and use it in a
>> way that's not all that common these days (look, ma, no ORM!). For an
>> *outsider*, it's completely irrelevant - they didn't know there was a
>> problem before (unlike vacuum which people have heard of forever,
>> nobody has heard of issues with listen/notify), so it looks more like
>> trying to push something because we didn't have enough relevant.
>>
>> The insiders will read the release notes and the details. The press
>> release needs to capture new people.

The one argument argument I would make towards mentioning LISTEN/NOTIFY is that there is a big push on the development side to do more evented-programming. While it is not a new feature, I think you could attract a new set of developers by showing what LISTEN/NOTIFY can do. One of the most requested features for the new version of Redis was a similar publish/subscribe type system, but of course in this case it was new.

Now while I understand that this is not a new feature, a good way to capture some of the evented-programming interest is to make some follow-up blog posts after the announcement showing some examples of using LISTEN/NOTIFY and perhaps mentioning the improvements.

Jonathan