Re: 9.5 release notes

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
>> Below performance improvement in the "General Performance" category is missing:
>>
>>     Reduce btree scan overhead for < and > strategies
>>
>>     For <, <=, > and >= strategies, mark the first scan key
>>     as already matched if scanning in an appropriate direction.
>>     If index tuple contains no nulls we can skip the first
>>     re-check for each tuple.
>
> While this is a nice 9.5 feature, it really is "btree is faster", and
> users usually don't need to know that, unless the change is massive that
> they would change their use of the feature.

I think that Rajeev is entitled to be credited for his work,
especially as a less experienced contributor.

Sure, users are not likely to care too much about incremental progress
like this (however, I would be willing to bet that more users care
about this item than about existing items like "Make initdb issue a
warning about placing the data directory at the top of a file system
mount point"). IMV it is the role of the release notes to document
what went into a release fairly methodically. I often look at release
notes to determine what might have gone wrong in a part of the code
that I'm less familiar with, for example.

Users mostly only specifically care about one or two big ticket items,
and in any case are not likely to learn about them from the release
notes. The release notes seem shorter than previous years, and I don't
think it's because 9.5 is a smaller release.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan