Sobota srpen 12, 2006

The Freeze Elephant

The Freeze Elephant is not next volume of the Disk world book series from Terry Pretchet. It is not historical discovery as well. How many of you know Elephant is Postgres logo and August 1st was date for new release feature freeze. All patches received before this date will be processed and integrated after their review to the release 8.2. And what will be new in the 8.2? This question is heavy discussed in the hacker mailing list, because there are many improvements and small enhancements, but there are only few new major features. However, some hackers and users expect more. It triggered discussion about release cycle, because Postgres has the fastest release cycle in the database market and major features request more time for implementation.

I think that sometime is good to take time for improvements and cleanup in the old functionality than create new and new features. Some new features from 8.0 will be not until fully functional in the incoming version. It is probably necessary, because TODO list contains a lot of new major features, but many of them request a lot of time and high experience. The time for full implementation is in many cases longer than release period. Partial implementation makes possible fast integration into main branch. Review of this code is much easier and developer has fast feedback. It avoids a lot of problem with the source code merge as well. I expect a lot of major features in the 9.0. And when we will expect it? Nobody knows it.

And when and what will be in 8.2? Bruce expects that Postgres 8.2 will be released in October or November, but it depends on speed of stabilization process. We can expect following major features:

• GIN (General INverse index)
• bitmap index
• udatable view
• PL/SQL debugger infrastructure

Most of them are not committed yet and some of them should be still rejected.

Somebody may ask what Sun brings to the new release? The Sun announced support of Postgres in the December 2005 and the new support team has established. This team (yes I member of this team) started integration Postgres with solaris and has helped community implement some items from TODO list. The short list of our work you can see bellow:

• D-Trace
• Kerberos support on Nevada
• Improvement in GUC (Genereal User Configuration) module
• The 64 bit integer support in some SQL commands

Someone can say that it is not too much, but I think the D-Trace is Sun's big contribution for Postgres. Community started to use it immediately for searching concurrence locks problem on multiprocessor machine with more than four CPUs and it will be useful in many other cases as well.

I think it is good start and Sun has big power to bring more in the future. Now we do not have to wait until elephant will defrost and we can continue in participation on the Postgres development.