Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>

From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
Cc: Melanie Plageman <melanieplageman@gmail.com>, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2024-05-21T16:40:28Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →
  1. Revert support for ALTER TABLE ... MERGE/SPLIT PARTITION(S) commands

  2. When creating materialized views, use REFRESH to load data.

  3. Revert temporal primary keys and foreign keys

  4. Avoid needless large memcpys in libpq socket writing

  5. Enhance nbtree ScalarArrayOp execution.

  6. Introduce a non-recursive JSON parser

  7. Combine freezing and pruning steps in VACUUM

  8. Allow SIGINT to cancel psql database reconnections.

  9. Provide API for streaming relation data.

  10. Add hash support functions and hash opclass for contrib/ltree.

  11. Pull up ANY-SUBLINK with the necessary lateral support.

  12. Read WAL directly from WAL buffers.

  13. Introduce the dynamic shared memory registry.

  14. Add macros for looping through a List without a ListCell.

  15. Support +/- infinity in the interval data type.

  16. Extend ALTER OPERATOR to allow setting more optimization attributes.

  17. Consider cheap startup paths in add_paths_to_append_rel

Hi,

On 2024-05-18 11:13:54 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Please see the email I just posted.  There are three goals we have to
> adjust for:
> 
> 1.  short release notes so they are readable
> 2.  giving people credit for performance improvements
> 3.  showing people Postgres cares about performance
> 
> I would like to achieve 2 & 3 without harming #1.  My experience is if I
> am reading a long document, and I get to a section where I start to
> wonder, "Why should I care about this?", I start to skim the rest of
> the document.

I agree keeping things reasonably short is important. But I don't think you're
evenly applying it as a goal.

Just skimming the notes from the end, I see
- an 8 entries long pg_stat_statements section
- multiple entries about "Create custom wait events for ..."
- three entries about adding --all to {reindexdb,vacuumdb,clusterdb}.
- an entry about adding long options to pg_archivecleanup
- two entries about grantable maintenance rights, once via pg_maintain, once
  per-table
- separate entries about pg_stat_reset_slru(), pg_stat_reset_shared("slru"),

If you're concerned about brevity, we can make things shorter without skipping
over most performance imporvements.


> I am particularly critical if I start to wonder, "Why
> does the author _think_ I should care about this?" becasue it feels like
> the author is writing for him/herself and not the audience.

FWIW, I think it's a good thing for somebody other than the author to have a
hand in writing a release notes entry for a change. The primary author(s) are
often too deep into some issue to have a good view of the right level of
detail and understandability.

Greetings,

Andres Freund