Re: 8.4 release draft in progress ...

Josh,

> Looking good so far!  Threw in a couple more cents myself,

Thanks.

and included
> improved deadlock reporting as an administrative feature (at least it
> seems important enough to me; I could be wrong.) :)

Yes, but it's one of 50-or-so features which matter to existing
production Postgres DBAs, and not to people who haven't used it before.
  We want to keep the features oriented towards people who aren't
already intimate with PostgreSQL; those will read the internal release
and the release notes.

> Are you sure about leaving the performance features out entirely?
> Granted there might not be enough benchmark numbers for the general use
> case, but the topic of performance seems conspicuously absent as it is
> now.

I thought about that some, but I really think it's the best thing to do.
  Our two main performance features are Visibility Map, new Hash Indexes
and Improved Hash Joins, and all of those are "special-case"
improvements.  As new features, they're not nearly as compelling as
Windowing aggregates or column permissions.

And the release has three sections as it is: delvoper, administrative,
ongoing work on big features.  It doesn't need a 4th section; brevity is
the soul of wit.  ;-)

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com