Re: Time to start drafting the 8.4 release

On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 11:56 -0700, David Fetter wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 02:10:13PM -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > Jeff Davis wrote:
> >
> > > WITH RECURSIVE and window functions could both fall into an
> > > "analytics" theme of some kind. That doesn't tell the whole story,
> > > though.
> > >
> > > Some of the other major features, like the Visibility Map, are
> > > very important, but I can't think of any way to make them sound
> > > exciting (other than a "performance" theme, which is not exciting
> > > without numbers).
> >
> > VM can also be categorized as "analytics", because it makes
> > vacuuming huge tables so much convenient.
>
> Is, "analytics" the latest in the DSS/OLAP/BI series of wacky terms
> for, "system need not respond within a second?"

WITH RECURSIVE and window functions both increase the expressiveness of
PostgreSQL's dialect of SQL substantially, allowing users to ask
interesting questions in a single query that would have been impossible
to ask before. These queries work on small data sets as well, so I don't
think that these features are only useful for long-running queries.

Do you have a word in mind that captures this benefit better than
"analytics"? "Expressiveness" might work, but I don't think that people
really associate that word with database systems.

Regards,
Jeff Davis