On Tue, 27 Nov 2006, Karen Hill wrote:
> "Joshua D. Drake" wrote:
>
> > >> 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 :)).
> >
>
> Are any of them asking for SQL:2003 Window functions? I think having
> window functions in PostgreSQL would bridge the gap between PostgreSQL
> and DB2/Oracle significantly. I see DBAs creating window functions all
> the time for business users in Oracle. Would Window functions even make
> Postgresql viable in the data warehouse/OLAP market? If so, just
> having them would justify a version bump up to 9, wouldn't it?
>
> I do suspect that implementing them would be a challenge, aren't
> SQL:2003 Window function operations O(n^2)? If they are, I don't know
> what kind of magic Oracle performs under the hood because when I've
> stood over the shoulder of an Oracle DBA as an intern, they were quite
> snappy in returning the results.
I'm putting together a proposal for these. I cannot promise that they will
make it into 8.3 however -- not least because there's a fair bit of work
to be done. As you say, however, they're remarkably cool and very
important to Oracle data warehouse users.
If anyone else is looking at window functions, please raise their hand so
that we can coordinate a proposal to hackers.
Thanks,
Gavin