Eric Grinstein <eric@aluno.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> I would be very interested in tracking the staleness of the MV.
> You see, I work in a research group in database tuning, and we
> have implemented some solutions to take advantage of MV's and
> speed up queries.
Please be sure, right up front, that there are no intellectual
property issues for what you pick. We're happy to give credit
where credit is due, but we can't accept contributions which have
any license restrictions incompatible with the PostgreSQL License:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/
> The query rewrite feature would be extremely desirable for us.
> Do you think that implementing the staleness check as suggested
> by Thomas could get us started in the query rewrite business?
There are many aspects related to the definition, maintenance, and
use of MVs that need work; it seems to me that many of them can be
pursued in parallel as long as people are communicating. Staleness
tracking is definitely one aspect that is needed. If you want to
put forward a proposal for that, which seems to be of a scope that
is possible in the context of GSoC, that would be great. If there
is any other aspect of the MV "big picture" that you can think of
that you would like to tackle and seems of appropriate scope,
please don't feel constrained to "staleness" as the only possible
project; it was just one suggestion of something that might be of
about the right size.
> Do you think I should make a proposal or there are more
> interesting subjects to GSoC? I'd be happy to hear project
> suggestions, especially related to the optimizer, tuning, etc.
If you can find a project in any of those areas that is of interest
to you and of a scope that allows a deliverable within the time
frame of a GSoC project, go for it! The optimizer seems like a
pretty challenging place for a first contribution, though; I would
recommend looking back through recent git history at a few
optimizer changes to get a feel for what that looks like.
--
Kevin Grittner
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company