Re: Call for 7.5 feature completion

On Thu, 25 Aug 2005, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> Bruce, on May 17, 2004, you wrote:
>
> > So, yea, I am frustrated. I know these features are hard and complex,
> > but I want them for PostgreSQL, and I want them as soon as possible. I
> > guess what really bugs me is that we are so close to having these few
> > remaining big features, and because they are so complex, they are taking
> > a lot longer to arrive than previous features, and sometimes see a year
> > pass without progress on some items, and that bugs me.
>
> This discussion was taking place as we closed the 7.5 development cycle,
> and we weren't getting PITR, tablespaces, nested transactions, 2PC, the
> Win32 port, in the release. We have all those things now.
>
> We have gone a long way now, even though it was only a year ago. My
> question for everyone on this list is: What are the "few remaining big
> features" that you see missing for PostgreSQL?
>
> Or, slightly different, what are people's most wanted features?

SQL:

Grouping sets
Recursive queries
Window functions
Updatable views
Updatable cursors
Materialised views
Debug-able PL/PgSQL -- EXPLAIN [ANALYZE] functionality, step through?
Cost estimation for functions -- perhaps a pipe dream, I know

Performance:

Better bulk load
'Continuous' vacuum at a fraction of the IO cost of normal vacuum
Multimaster replication
General OLTP throughput improvements -- where and how, I'm not sure.

Indexes:

Bitmap indexes (as opposed to bitmap scans)

---

There are other things which would be cool to see, but these are high on
the list.

Thanks,

Gavin