Re: Time to start drafting the 8.4 release

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 02:03:41PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 11:56 -0700, David Fetter wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 02:10:13PM -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > > Jeff Davis wrote:
> > >
> > > > WITH RECURSIVE and window functions could both fall into an
> > > > "analytics" theme of some kind. That doesn't tell the whole
> > > > story, though.
> > > >
> > > > Some of the other major features, like the Visibility Map, are
> > > > very important, but I can't think of any way to make them
> > > > sound exciting (other than a "performance" theme, which is not
> > > > exciting without numbers).
> > >
> > > VM can also be categorized as "analytics", because it makes
> > > vacuuming huge tables so much convenient.
> >
> > Is, "analytics" the latest in the DSS/OLAP/BI series of wacky
> > terms for, "system need not respond within a second?"
>
> WITH RECURSIVE and window functions both increase the expressiveness
> of PostgreSQL's dialect of SQL substantially, allowing users to ask
> interesting questions in a single query that would have been
> impossible to ask before.

Indeed.  I've been going around and boring people with this fact for
months :)

> These queries work on small data sets as well, so I don't think that
> these features are only useful for long-running queries.
>
> Do you have a word in mind that captures this benefit better than
> "analytics"? "Expressiveness" might work, but I don't think that
> people really associate that word with database systems.

Maybe that's the hook, then :)  POSTGRES, and INGRES before it, were
both from the "active database" camp, and we've taken it much further
with the PL zoo of languages to make PostgreSQL a highly capable
programming environment.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778  AIM: dfetter666  Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter      XMPP: david.fetter@gmail.com

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