Re: 9.3 Beta 1 Coming Soon!

On 2013-04-16 09:45:17 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
>
> >> * declarative matviews
> >> * event triggers
> >
> > Regrettably the state of both of those features is nowhere near
> > complete enough for wide production use.
>
> Per Dimitri that's true of Event Triggers, but per my prior post on the
> topic on this mailing list, it's not true of Materialized Views.   As
> I've said before, we get one, and only one, chance to promote a new
> feature and that's when the feature first appears in a PostgreSQL
> release *however incomplete it is*.  If we try to promote it in a
> successive release when it's "more finished", we will get zero traction
> with the press.  It's not news.

We had CREATE FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER without it doing much and added stuff
later. And we still can now promote postgres_fdw. We had views before,
but they weren't auto-updateable. We can promote that now...

> Aside from that, the MatView feature in the state it's in now is useful
> to *me*, even if it's not useful to *you*.  And I think that my
> use-cases represent some hundreds or thousands of DBAs, so it's worth
> promoting so that they will know about it.
>
> Lets not let the perfect be the enemy of the good here.

I think that will lead to a future where we can't commit intermediate
states of work since we now it will be used for PR regardless of its
state. I am pretty sure several people would have voiced loud(er)
objections for matviews to be commited if they would have known the end
result of it being rather incomplete and promoted anyway. And that will
hurt postgres.

> > Regexp indexing is big enough to be there, I think.
> >
>
> Ooooh!  That got in?

Yup, Tom committed it on the 9th. Really rather cool stuff.

> > Custom background worker processes ?
> >
> > Definitively not a top 3 feature but it's promising and it could be
> > interesting to attract some developer attention on this feature...

> Seems to me that becomes a feature once we have at least one example
> useful worker.  Any idea if someone is building one before 9.3.0?

We are actively using it for the development of BDR, not sure if thats
an interesting enough example because the whole thing is far bigger than
that piece.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

--
 Andres Freund                       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
 PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services