* Naming of new behavior You named this optimization "Direct Update", but I'm not sure that this is intuitive enough to express this behavior. I would like to hear opinions of native speakers.
How about "batch foreign update" or "batch foreign modification"? (Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker either.)
I think direct update sounds pretty good. "Batch" does not sound as good to me, since it doesn't clearly describe what makes this patch special as opposed to some other grouping of updates that happens to produce a speedup.
I agree with Robert on that point.
Another term that might be used is "update pushdown", since we are pushing the whole update to the remote server instead of having the local server participate. Without looking at the patch, I don't have a strong opinion on whether that's better than "direct update" in this context.
"Update Pushdown" is fine with me.
If there are no objections of others, I'll change the name from "Direct Update" to "Update Pushdown".
I like "Update Pushdown" - it is simple without other semantic