Re: First draft of PG 19 release notes

On Thu, Apr 16, 2026 at 08:38:45AM +0200, David Geier wrote:
> Hi Bruce!
>
> On 15.04.2026 03:18, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > I have completed the first draft of the PG 19 release notes:
> >
> > https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/release-19.html
> >
> > The feature count is 212. The recent average is 200:
> >
> > https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/missing.pdf#page=3
> >
>
> How about also including the improvements we did for reducing GIN index
> build times, see [1]? Not all patches have been committed yet but the
> ones that got committed already make a meaningful difference.
>
> [1]
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/5d366878-2007-4d31-861e-19294b7a583b%40gmail.com

This is an interesting case. First, I looked at the commit logs and
didn't see anything talking about improving the speed of GIN index
builds. So then I looked at the first email in the thread and saw 3x
improvement for pg_trgm, so I looked in the commit logs for pg_trgm and
didn't see any speedup mentioned.

I then looked at the posted patches and this might be a case where there
are a number of targeted improvements that didn't specify the larger
goal, so there is no goal mentioned in the commit logs. This is an edge
case that is hard to get into the release notes.

Now that you have told me about it, here is my normal criteria for
adding performance items to the release notes:

Performance improvements are mentioned in the release notes if
they are user-visible (e.g., new syntax) or significant enough
to enable new workloads.

So, it seems there is no user-visible change, except it is faster. Does
it enable new workloads? A 3x speedup probably does. Should this be a
pg_trgm item, with a description mentioning GIN in general, or should it
be a GIN item, perhaps mentioning pg_trgm? Do you have any suggested
text and list of commits?

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

Do not let urgent matters crowd out time for investment in the future.