Re: 7.4 Wishlist

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Just out of interest, if someone was going to pay you to hack on Postgres
> for 6 months, what would you like to code for 7.4?
> 
> My ones are:
> 
> * Compliant ADD COLUMN
> * Integrated full text indexes
> * pg_dump dependency ordering
> 
> What would you guys do?  Even if it isn't feasible right now...

Well, I might as well join in the fun. Here's my personal TODO for 7.4 (with 
much wishing that I'll actually have the time to do most if not all of it ;-))

* continue to improve usability of bytea datatype  - easier explicit casting between bytea and text
* stored procedures (procedures not functions)  - no return value, but allow projection of results similar to SHOW ALL
 (i.e. also similar to MSSQL and Sybase)  - CREATE PROCEDURE sp_my_stored_proc() AS '...' LANGUAGE '...';  - CALL
sp_my_stored_proc;
* array related improvements (note: some of this may exist in contrib as    I haven't looked too close yet, but I'm
aimingfor these to be internal    backend functions)  - function to return users in a group as rows instead of as an
array - generic table function to unspool an array into rows [and columns for    2 dim array]  - split --  split string
intoarray on delimiter  - implode -- join array elements into a string using given string delimiter  - array_contains
--Return TRUE if a value exists in an array  - array_search -- Searches the array for a given value and returns the
correspondingkey if successful
 
* PL/R  - new PL interface to R (statistical analysis package based on the S    language)
* improvements to contrib/tablefunc  - enhanced crosstab functionality  - possibly enhanced connectby functionality
(maynot be worth it if    RECURSIVE JOIN functionality makes it into 7.4)
 
* improvements to dblink  - see details on other recently sent message (ability to connect to    non-PostgreSQL
databases)
* revisit table function scan issues (i.e. tuplestore vs streaming vs  portal based)

Things not on my list, but that I'm keenly interested in (in no particular order):
- native win32 port
- two-phase commit
- PITR
- replication
- recursive joins (CONNECT BY PRIOR ... START WITH ...)

Joe