Re: [CORE] RC1 blocker issues

Tom Lane wrote:
> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:
>> 1. 8.1 is good enough ;) To be perfectly honest, I haven't looked at 8.2 
>> *at all* except for the few extremely minor things I did for contrib. 
>> There is nothing in it that my customers *need*.

Note, I said need, not want.

> 
> None of your customers do multiple outer joins?

Of course they do but refer to the above.

>  Nobody has a use-case
> for INSERT RETURNING, such as wanting to fetch the value assigned to a
> serial column?

currval()? lastval()?

>  Nobody has a use for CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY?'

Of course they do, again need not want. CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY is a 
great feature but it isn't something that is whiz, bang, pow (such as 
the enormous performance increase between 7.4/8.0 and 8.1).

Our most active customers, even those with many hundreds of millions of 
rows per table, can create an index reasonably quick based on the 
hardware they run. They just schedule it to run after hours or on off peak.

> Nobody needs an order-of-magnitude speedup in large sorts?  Nobody's
> hit a context swap storm that might be fixed by 8.2?  I could go on
> like this for awhile.

Don't take it personally Tom, I wasn't knocking the hard work. I was 
simply stating what I see, which is 8.1 is pretty darn good. It should 
be considered a compliment.

Of course every feature in 8.2 is appreciated, but that doesn't mean I 
have customers clamoring for them. I am just now getting most of our 
customers to move to 8.1. I still have many customers on 7.3.

Just because something *can* do something, doesn't mean that customers 
*need* it to do so. There are certainly many users/customers that will 
benefit from 8.2 but many of my customers will never even install it.

If I tell a customer 8.2 is out and we get these great features and then 
I saw, but 8.3 is less than 9 months away. You can kiss the upgrade to 
8.2 goodbye.

Especially since many of my customers are now running multi-hundred 
gigabyte databases. They need a serious reason to upgrade because it 
will be a long outage.

> 
> If you are unexcited by 8.2, I'm not entirely sure what we might
> accomplish in 8.3 that *would* draw your attention.
> 

Not unexcited, just happy with 8.1 :).

>> However I know that a lot of people are trying to do *alot* of work for 
>> 8.3. I have had conversations with several individuals who want:
> 
>> Recursive queries
>> Multi table indexes
>> GROUP BY/WITH
>> Further HOT Standby Work
> 
>> These all seem like pretty big projects to do with a short lifecycle?
> 
> Indeed, and if not one of them appears in 8.3, I won't be very surprised
> nor shed any tear.  The point of the short 8.3 dev cycle is (a) to try
> to align ourselves with a better time of year for beta/release cycle,
> and (b) to push out several big improvements that are already nearly done
> but missed 8.2, such as bitmap indexes.  Any other big projects that can
> be done by March will be nice gravy, but they aren't going to get to
> dictate the schedule.

Which pushes them to 8.4 potentially, which makes things even more 
interesting because what I list above, is what *my* customers want and 
have wanted for a long time (and yes, I tell them the same thing 
everytime... any time you want to cough up some money, I will put 
developers on it :)).

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake



> 
>             regards, tom lane
>