Re: Call for 7.5 feature completion

Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> Or, slightly different, what are people's most wanted features?

Things I would have found useful in the past year or so include:

Standards stuff:
 * Updateable views (easier to use Ruby/Rails's ActiveRecord on legacy data) * The elementary OLAP stuff

Contrib related stuff:
 * Contrib/xml2 working with XML Namespaces. * Some sort of GIST index for querying XML data (XPath? SQL/XML?)
 * The array functions and indexes from contrib/intarray   and contrib/intagg made more general to work with other
datatypes. (I find these contrib modules quite useful)
 

Annoyances:
 * more sane math with intervals. For example, try:   select '0.01 years'::interval, '0.01 months'::interval;

Ease of use:
 * Nice defaults for autovacuum and checkpoints and bgwriter   that automatically avoid big I/O spikes by magically
distributingI/O in a nice way.
 

Easier COPY for client library authors:
 * A way to efficiently insert many values like COPY from STDIN   from client libraries that don't support COPY from
STDIN.  Perhaps it could happen through the apparently standards   compliant   "INSERT INTO table VALUES
(1,2),(3,4),(5,6)"  [feature id F641]   or perhaps through a new   COPY tablename FROM STRING 'a big string instead of
stdin'  feature that would be easier for clients to support?
 
   It seems in most new client libraries COPY FROM STDIN   stays broken for quite a long time.  Would a   alternative
COPYFROM A_BIG_STRING be easier for them   to support and therefore available more often?
 

Meta-stuff
 * A failover plus load-balancing (pgpool+slony?)   installer for dummies that handles simple cases.
 * A single place to find all the useful non-core stuff   like projects on pgfoundry, gborg, contrib, and   various
otherplaces around the net (PL/R PL/Ruby Postgis).   Perhaps if the postgresql website had a small wiki   somewhere
whereanyone could add links with a short   description to any such projects it'd be easier to   know what's out
there...
 * Nice APIs and documentation [probably already exists]   to continue encouraging projects like PostGIS and PL/R
thatIMHO are the biggest advantage of postgresql over   the commercial vendors' offerings.
 

Oh, and seeing everyone else's response, I suppose I should
add MERGE though I haven't actually noticed a need yet. :-)