Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

On Thu, May 23, 2024 at 08:19:15PM -0400, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Wed, May 22, 2024 at 6:50 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> > Agreed, patch applied, thanks.
>
> The item for my commit 5bf748b8 currently reads:
>
> "Allow btree indexes to more efficiently find array matches"
>
> I think that this isn't likely to mean much to most users. It seems
> like it'd be a lot clearer if the wording was more in line with the
> beta1 announcement, which talks about the work as an enhancement to
> index scans that use an IN ( ) condition. Specifically referencing
> IN() (as opposed to something about arrays or array conditions) is
> likely to make the item much more understandable.
>
> Referencing array matches makes me think of a GIN index on an array
> column. While ScalarArrayOps do use an array under the cover, that's
> mostly an implementation detail. At least it is to users that
> exclusively use IN(), likely the majority (that's the SQL standard
> syntax).
>
> For context, the Postgres 9.2 release notes described the feature that
> my work directly built on as follows:
>
> "Allow indexed_col op ANY(ARRAY[...]) conditions to be used in plain
> index scans and index-only scans"
>
> This was a very accurate description of this earlier work. Similar
> wording could be used now, but that doesn't seem great to me either.
> Simply because this wording also doesn't reference IN() conditions in
> index quals.

Agreed. I changed it to:

Allow btree indexes to more efficiently find a set of values, such as
those supplied by IN subqueries

Is that good?

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

Only you can decide what is important to you.