Postgres Index Advisor status and GSoC (was: Re: Returning to Postgres community work)

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 10:02 AM Gurjeet Singh <gurjeet(at)singh(dot)im> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 8:04 AM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> wrote:
>
> > You know what I've heard? That your index advisor module languishes
> > unmaintained and that there's no shortage of people wishing to use it.
>
> Now there's a masterclass in making someone feel great and guilty in
> the same sentence ;-)
>
> > Heck, we spent a lot of back-and-forth in the spanish mailing list
> > with somebody building a super obsolete version of Postgres just so that
> > they could compile your index advisor. I dunno, if you have some spare
> > time, maybe updating that one would be a valuable contribution from
> > users' perspective.
>
> Aye-aye Capn' :-)

As part of helping the GSoC contributor getting onboard (see below), I
went through a similar process and had to figure out the Postgres
version, system packages, etc. (all ancient) that were needed to build
and use it. It's no fun having to deal with software from over a
decade ago :-(

> EDB folks reached out to me a few months ago to assign a license to
> the project, which I did and it is now a Postgres-licensed project
> [1].
>
> Given the above, it is safe to assume that this tool is at least being
> maintained by EDB, at least internally for their customers. I would
> request them to contribute the changes back in the open.

After over a year of conversations and follow-ups, a couple of months
ago EnterpriseDB finally made it clear that they won't be contributing
their changes back to the open-source version of Index Advisor. With
that avenue now closed, we can now freely pursue

> Regardless of that, please rest assured that I will work on making it
> compatible with the current supported versions of Postgres. Lack of
> time is not an excuse anymore :-)

Oh, how wrong was I :-)

I have a few updates on the current state and plans around the Index
Adviser extension.

I proposed Index Adviser as a potential project for GSoC 2023 [1].
Ahmed (CCd) has signed up as the contributor. The project has now been
accepted/funded by GSoC. The primary goal of the project is to support
all the active versions of Postgres. The extended goal is to support
additional index types. The extension currently supports Postgres
version 8.3, and BTree index type.

[1]: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC_2023#pg_adviser_.2F_index_adviser:_Recommend_Potentially_Useful_Indexes

Best regards,
Gurjeet
http://Gurje.et