Re: What Would You Like To Do?

On 09/13/2011 10:13 AM, Michael Nolan wrote:
> The lists all seem to be focusing on the things that the developers
> would like to add to PostgreSQL, what about some things that users or
> ISPs might like to have, and thus perhaps something that companies might
> actually see as worth funding?

Well just my own two cents ... but it all depends on who is doing the
funding. At this point 80% of the work CMD codes for Pg (or tertiary
projects and modules) is funded by companies. So let's not assume that
companies aren't funding things. They are.

>
> For example:
>
> A fully integrated ability to query across multiple databases,possibly
> on multiple servers, something Oracle has had for nearly two decades.

That isn't the approach to take. The fact that Oracle has it is not a
guarantee that it is useful or good. If you need to query across
databases (assuming within the same cluster) then you designed your
database wrong and should have used our SCHEMA support (what Oracle
calls Namespaces) instead.

>
> Complete isolation at the user level, allowing an ISP to support
> multiple independent customers on a server without having to fiddle with
> multiple back ends each running on a separate port, a feature that MySQL
> has had for as far back as I can recall, and one of the reasons ISPs are
> more likely to offer MySQL than PostgreSQL.

Now this would definitely be nice. It is frustrating that we don't have
per database users.

>
> The ability to restore a table from a backup file to a different table
> name in the same database and schema.
>

This can be done but agreed it is not intuitive.

> A built-in report writer, capable of things like column totals.
> (SqlPlus has this, even though it isn't very pretty.)

There are a billion and one tools that do this without us having to
reinvent the wheel. Why would we support that?

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake
--
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