Re: 7.4 Wishlist

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> Just out of interest, if someone was going to pay you to hack on Postgres
> for 6 months, what would you like to code for 7.4?
>
> My ones are:
>
> * Compliant ADD COLUMN
> * Integrated full text indexes
> * pg_dump dependency ordering
>
> What would you guys do? Even if it isn't feasible right now...

Well, I might as well join in the fun. Here's my personal TODO for 7.4 (with
much wishing that I'll actually have the time to do most if not all of it ;-))

* continue to improve usability of bytea datatype
- easier explicit casting between bytea and text
* stored procedures (procedures not functions)
- no return value, but allow projection of results similar to SHOW ALL
(i.e. also similar to MSSQL and Sybase)
- CREATE PROCEDURE sp_my_stored_proc() AS '...' LANGUAGE '...';
- CALL sp_my_stored_proc;
* array related improvements (note: some of this may exist in contrib as
I haven't looked too close yet, but I'm aiming for these to be internal
backend functions)
- function to return users in a group as rows instead of as an array
- generic table function to unspool an array into rows [and columns for
2 dim array]
- split -- split string into array on delimiter
- implode -- join array elements into a string using given string delimiter
- array_contains -- Return TRUE if a value exists in an array
- array_search -- Searches the array for a given value and returns the
corresponding key if successful
* PL/R
- new PL interface to R (statistical analysis package based on the S
language)
* improvements to contrib/tablefunc
- enhanced crosstab functionality
- possibly enhanced connectby functionality (may not be worth it if
RECURSIVE JOIN functionality makes it into 7.4)
* improvements to dblink
- see details on other recently sent message (ability to connect to
non-PostgreSQL databases)
* revisit table function scan issues (i.e. tuplestore vs streaming vs
portal based)

Things not on my list, but that I'm keenly interested in (in no particular order):
- native win32 port
- two-phase commit
- PITR
- replication
- recursive joins (CONNECT BY PRIOR ... START WITH ...)

Joe