Re: Call for 7.5 feature completion

Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> Or, slightly different, what are people's most wanted features?

Things I would have found useful in the past year or so include:

Standards stuff:

  * Updateable views (easier to use Ruby/Rails's ActiveRecord on legacy data)
  * The elementary OLAP stuff

Contrib related stuff:

  * Contrib/xml2 working with XML Namespaces.
  * Some sort of GIST index for querying XML data (XPath? SQL/XML?)

  * The array functions and indexes from contrib/intarray
    and contrib/intagg made more general to work with other
    data types. (I find these contrib modules quite useful)

Annoyances:

  * more sane math with intervals. For example, try:
    select '0.01 years'::interval, '0.01 months'::interval;

Ease of use:

  * Nice defaults for autovacuum and checkpoints and bgwriter
    that automatically avoid big I/O spikes by magically
    distributing I/O in a nice way.

Easier COPY for client library authors:

  * A way to efficiently insert many values like COPY from STDIN
    from client libraries that don't support COPY from STDIN.
    Perhaps it could happen through the apparently standards
    compliant
    "INSERT INTO table VALUES (1,2),(3,4),(5,6)"   [feature id F641]
    or perhaps through a new
    COPY tablename FROM STRING 'a big string instead of stdin'
    feature that would be easier for clients to support?

    It seems in most new client libraries COPY FROM STDIN
    stays broken for quite a long time.  Would a
    alternative COPY FROM A_BIG_STRING be easier for them
    to support and therefore available more often?

Meta-stuff

  * A failover plus load-balancing (pgpool+slony?)
    installer for dummies that handles simple cases.

  * A single place to find all the useful non-core stuff
    like projects on pgfoundry, gborg, contrib, and
    various other places around the net (PL/R PL/Ruby Postgis).
    Perhaps if the postgresql website had a small wiki
    somewhere where anyone could add links with a short
    description to any such projects it'd be easier to
    know what's out there...

  * Nice APIs and documentation [probably already exists]
    to continue encouraging projects like PostGIS and PL/R
    that IMHO are the biggest advantage of postgresql over
    the commercial vendors' offerings.

Oh, and seeing everyone else's response, I suppose I should
add MERGE though I haven't actually noticed a need yet. :-)