Re: PostgreSQL 17 release announcement draft - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Thu, Sep 5, 2024 at 5:22 AM Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> wrote:
> On 04.09.24 23:05, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
> > Attached is the draft of the PostgreSQL 17 release announcement. This is
> > a draft of the text that will go into the press kit, with the key
> > portions to review starting from the top of the document, up until the
> > "About PostgreSQL" section.
>
> I noticed that we don't yet have a list of major features in the PG17
> release notes.  We should probably put that in soon, so that what we
> list there and what is in the announcement are consistent.

+1.

> On the actual list, there will be lots of opinions to be had, but I'll
> just offer one:  I don't think the MERGE RETURNING clause deserves twice
> as much space as incremental backup.

I agree with that, although obviously I'm biased.

I also feel like this whole thing could just be shorter. If it were
half as long and mentioned fewer things and those more briefly, would
we be worse off? I think we might be better off, because it just feels
wordy to me right now. For example:

A foundational feature of PostgreSQL is
[vacuum](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/routine-vacuuming.html),
which is used to reclaim storage from data that was marked as removed.
Reducing resources required for vacuuming directly helps other areas
of PostgreSQL, particularly on very busy systems. PostgreSQL 17
introduces a new internal memory structure for vacuum that's shown up
to a 20x reduction in memory and improvements in overall vacuuming
speed. This release also removes the  `1GB` limit on the memory it can
use (controlled by
[`maintenance_work_mem`](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/runtime-config-resource.html#GUC-MAINTENANCE-WORK-MEM)),
letting users apply more resources to vacuuming, which is beneficial
for systems with lots of changes.

It seems to me that the first two sentences could just be completely
nuked, and everything from "letting users" to the end could also be
nuked. At least to me, all of that stuff reads as unnecessarily
filler. I'm not at all sure that removing the 1GB limit on
maintenance_work_mem is important enough that it needs to be in the
release announcement -- I agree it's a good improvement, but to have
it be one of the first things in the press release seems like an odd
choice from my perspective. Nobody's going to look back on this
release years from now and say "oh, that was the release where could
finally set maintenance_work_mem=4GB, that was so much better". If
they think about VACUUM, they'll think about the 20x memory reduction
stuff which made the ability to configure values larger than 1GB
irrelevant in the first place. So I'd probably delete the part about
lifting the 1GB cap entirely. But even if you don't do that, the
paragraph could be half as long without losing anything, from my
perspective.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com