Major features for 9.1 - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

All,

Here's a list of the features which seem to me to be major enough to be
headliners for 9.1.  Please mark which ones you think are major/not
major/not major and anything you think I've forgotten.

The tough part is going to be picking 5-6 items from the below.

* Synchronous Replication
Reason: obvious

* wCTE: Writeable Common Table Expressions
Reason: replace large amounts of app code with single queries.
Also, we may be the first DB to have this.  Anyone know?

* Per-column collations
Reason: fully multilingual databases now possible.
This has been a TODO for a decade.

* SSI: Serializable Snapshot Isolation
True serializability without locking.  Eliminate a lot of SELECT FOR
UPDATE code.
This might also be a PostgreSQL first.

* Unlogged Tables
Reason: allows using Postgres for not-valuable, high-performance data
like session tables instead of using a caching database

* SQL/MED with FILE_FDW
Reason: allows using PostgreSQL to query any kind of data source you can
roll a driver for.  First one shipping reads CSV files, eliminating the
need to COPY them into the database in many cases.

* KNN-GiST: K-Nearest Neighbor Indexing
Permits indexed searches of "what's near X", greatly improving the
responsiveness of PostGIS applications and allowing new application
types to be built.

* Single-command cloning, new admin tools for replication
Not sure about this one, should probably be buried in text somewhere.

* PL/Python Overhaul
Not sure what went into this, can anyone give me details?

* SEPostgres
SE-Postgres has been integrated into PostgreSQL through generic security
hooks and a contrib module.  Allows "military" level security/control
over database.

* Extensions
Optional PostgreSQL code, such as extra data types, GIS, languages, etc,
can now be packaged as pluggable extensions, greatly simplifying
installing and upgrading them.  In addition, the PGXN network will
become an online repository of these extensions.

Ones I don't think are major features but are cool anyway:

* Valid-on-creation FKs
* Checkpoint Goggles
* Extensible ENUMs
* Triggers on Views
* New Trigram implementation (text is similar to ...)
* Reduced NUMERIC size

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com