Greg Smith wrote:
> On 11/21/2011 11:40 AM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > I think a question is how often people are waiting for features that
> > actually can be addressed in a contrib/plugin way. My gut feeling is
> > that most missing features have to be added to the server core (e.g.
> > index-only scans) and are not possible to add in a contrib/plugin way.
> >
>
> Good question; let's talk about 9.0. We were building/distributing
> three things for that version that poked into the server:
>
> -Replication monitoring tools that slipped from the 9.0 schedule,
> similar to what became pg_stat_replication in 9.1
> -An early version of what became hot_standby_feedback in 9.1.
> -pg_streamrecv
>
> While these weren't all packaged as extensions per se, all of them used
> the PGXS interface. And they all provided deployment blocking features
> to early adopters before those features were available in core, in some
> cases after the issues they address had been encountered in production
> deployments. As I was ranting on my blog recently, I'm seeing more
> complaints recently about monitoring and management features--exactly
> the sort of thing that you can improve as an extension, and that the
> extensions I've proposed provide--than I am over missing big features.
>
> Index-only scans are a good example, as one of the most requested
> performance feature you can only get in core (I'd put them at #2 behind
> materialized views for the customers I talk to). I wouldn't bet that
> they are considered more important by a typical deployment than good
> built-in query profiling though. I get complaints about query
> monitoring from every single PostgreSQL install, while complaints about
> not having index-only scans only come from the bigger installations.
> Note how demand is high enough that we have two pg_stat_statements
> replacements submitted right now.
Agreed much of the edge stuff, e.g. monitoring, can be done as plugins.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +