Re: Release Note Changes - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Gregory Stark wrote:
> "Bruce Momjian" <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
> 
>> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>
>>> Note that I am not arguing one way or the other, but I find the 
>>> distinction between a individual who is a contributor and a company that 
>>> is a contributor interesting.
>> Individual mentions are only so we know who did the work.  Company names
>> are for advertizement, and that doesn't belong in the release notes.
> 
> I think it would be kind of neat to see all the sponsored work somewhere. Only
> I think it may be a bit repetitive with Redhat sponsoring most of the best
> stuff... :)

Hah!

> It's certainly possible for performance improvements to affect that. I think
> "multiple space reductions, especially (but not only) for text, numeric and
> other variable sized data" could easily be something which particular DBAs
> would have noticed was a problem they needed to deal with.

Well let's take it a step back because I think you are on to something here.

Our customers will "directly" see a benefit from the changes Greg made 
for 8.3 on the space reductions. Not only is a benefit for on disk 
storage but it is also a direct performance benefit. When my customers 
say... why does 8.3 take so much less space than 8.2, I will tell them 
and further expound on it being one of the key components to their 
greater performance.

Most of out customers however will not notice one of our key 
contributions which was the multi-worker autovacuum. Yes it is 
important. Yes we have specific customers that will benefit greatly from 
it but the mass majority will not.


> 
> I understand the thinking but I disagree that "various optimizations speeding
> up merge sort, reducing contention at transaction start and end, ..." is
> entirely content-free. I agree that nobody is really going to be specifically
> saying "gee, i wish we could use postgres but merge-join is just too slow".

Right.

> However as a user I find it helpful to get a kind of overview of the kinds of
> invisible changes there were so I can get a feel for the magnitude of the
> improvements between versions.
> 

I agree with this as well. However, I am starting to wonder if the 
"release notes" is the place for this. I am starting to think that 
instead we need a white paper on the release (or each release) that is 
categorized and reasonably in depth on "why" 8.3 (or 8.4 etc..).

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake