Re: Do we want a hashset type?

On 2023-06-11 Su 16:15, Joel Jacobson wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 11, 2023, at 17:03, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>> On 6/11/23 12:26, Joel Jacobson wrote:
>>> I think there are some good arguments that speaks in favour of including it in core:
> ...
>> I agree with all of that, but ...
>>
>> It's just past feature freeze, so the earliest release this could appear
>> in is 17, about 15 months away.
>>
>> Once stuff gets added to core, it's tied to the release cycle, so no new
>> features in between.
>>
>> Presumably people would like to use the extension in the release they
>> already use, without backporting.
>>
>> Postgres is extensible for a reason, exactly so that we don't need to
>> have everything in core.
> Interesting, I've never thought about this one before:
> What if something is deemed to be fundamental and therefore qualify for core inclusion,
> and at the same time is suitable to be made an extension.
> Would it be possible to ship such extension as pre-installed?
>
> What was the json/jsonb story, was it ever an extension before
> being included in core?

No, and the difficulty is that an in-core type and associated functions
will have different oids, so migrating from one to the other would be at
best painful.

So it's a kind of now or never decision. I think extensions are
excellent for specialized types. But I don't regard a set type in that
light.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB:https://www.enterprisedb.com