Re: 9.6 -> 10.0

On 22 March 2016 at 16:10, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 3:11 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 04:07:42PM +0200, Devrim Gunduz wrote:
>> >
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I've been ranting about this on Twitter for a while, and now blogged
>> about it:
>> >
>> >
>> http://people.planetpostgresql.org/devrim/index.php?/archives/89-9.6,-or-10.0.html
>> >
>> > There are major changes in 9.6 (some of them are listed in the blog
>> post), and
>> > I think they are good enough to call this 10.0.
>> >
>> > A counter argument might be waiting for pglogical for inclusion, but I
>> think
>> > the current changes are enough to warrant a .0 release.
>> >
>> > What do you think?
>>
>> I think a big question is whether we want to save 10.0 for some
>> incompatibility changes, though we didn't do that for 8.0 or 9.0.
>>
>>
> Someone (can't remember who) suggested a good time is to do it when we can
> allow actual zero-or-close-to-zero-downtime upgrades.
>

My understanding was that we would wait for a disk format change that has
been brewing sometime now, which then also requires zero downtime upgrades.
We don't have either of those things in 9.6.

It would make more sense to declare a release 10.0 in advance at the May
dev meeting, then work to put in a whole load of incompatibilities all into
one release. i.e. a planned compatibility break, which is what everybody
will think we have done if we declare 10.0. They will then be surprised if
that all happens in 10.1 or some other time.
My list of incompatibilities would be
* SQL compliant identifiers
* Remove RULEs
* Change recovery.conf
* Change block headers
* Retire template0, template1
* Optimise FSM
* Add heap metapage
* Alter tuple headers
et al

> While having parallelism is awesome, it's only going to affect a (arguably
> small or big depending on your viewpoint) subset of users. It's going to be
> massive for those users, but it's not going to be useful for anywhere near
> as many users as streaming replication+hot standby+pg_upgrade in 9.0, or
> pitr+windows in 8.0. And yes, the vacuum freeze thing is also going to be
> great - for a small subset of users (yes, those users are in a lot of pain
> now).
>

We don't yet have full parallel query, we only have parallel scan and
parallel aggregation. Getting too excited about that doesn't really help
and I'm not keen on the idea of an explicit disconnect between marketing
and engineering suggested elsethread.

I had a discussion with Marko T just a couple of weeks back, and the
> conclusion then was that at the time, 9.6 had almost nothing that would
> even make the cut for a press release. We now have these two features,
> which are great features, but I'm not sure it's enough for such a big
> symbolical bump.
>

My impression is that 9.5 had more major features than 9.6. 9.6 feels just
like 7.4 or 8.4.

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