On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 12:10 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:
> Someone (can't remember who) suggested a good time is to do it when we can
> allow actual zero-or-close-to-zero-downtime upgrades.
>
> While having parallelism is awesome, it's only going to affect a (arguably
> small or big depending on your viewpoint) subset of users. It's going to be
> massive for those users, but it's not going to be useful for anywhere near
> as many users as streaming replication+hot standby+pg_upgrade in 9.0, or
> pitr+windows in 8.0. And yes, the vacuum freeze thing is also going to be
> great - for a small subset of users (yes, those users are in a lot of pain
> now).
>
> I had a discussion with Marko T just a couple of weeks back, and the
> conclusion then was that at the time, 9.6 had almost nothing that would even
> make the cut for a press release. We now have these two features, which are
> great features, but I'm not sure it's enough for such a big symbolical bump.
This release includes, so far, three things that I think are pretty
significant. One is parallel query, now including target list, join,
and aggregate pushdown. The second is the freeze map, which is surely
the largest vacuum improvement since 8.4. The third is the
enhancements to postgres_fdw, which can now push down joins, sorts,
and DML. There are still some other very good features under
consideration, like Tomas Vondra's multivariate statistics work. I
think that saying we have nothing that would make the cut for the
press release is awfully pessimistic, considering that in 9.4 I got a
major feature credit for adding an API that could be used only by
writing C code. Compared to that, all of these features are pretty
fantastic.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company