Re: GSoC

On Mon, 2010-03-29 at 19:08 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> To be really useful, this would probably need
> some kind of index support, maybe based on GIN.

Yes.

> You're not going to
> get that done by August even if you start now and don't sleep.

The extensibility mechanism is designed so that an expert in one field
can add interesting operators and indexing strategies with a reasonable
amount of effort. If he already understands the image processing aspect
well (and has at least some working code somewhere), I would like to
think that it's possible to develop very basic support in postgresql in
a few months.

It doesn't need to be as complete as PostGIS after one summer of work.
It just needs to be able to search images with basic functionality, and
the rest can be added later after he's already hooked on PostgreSQL ;)

> Even
> if you did, my guess is that this is the sort of thing that the PG
> community would prefer to see maintained as a separate project that
> integrates with PG, rather than a part of core PG.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. PostGIS is an incredibly successful
extension that is developed outside the project. It may be a problem
with GSoC unless we have some sort of community buy-in, but from a
technical standpoint I don't see a problem here.

Regards,
Jeff Davis