Josh said nearly the same in core's discussion, but come now. The
updateable-view patch (in its current form) does not offer *one single
thing* you can't do today, indeed for many PG releases past; it just
saves writing out some tedious rules.
Sure, I can write the rules, you can write the rules but we can do
rollup queries using unions too, but we still don't have rollup :)
Perception is everything and we don't have Updateable views until we
don't have to write those rules (yes, its stupid)...
If that's the most marketable
feature in 8.2 we're already in trouble. I don't think it is anyway.
Looking at the CVS logs I see
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE RETURNING
VALUES lists
CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY
constraint exclusion works on UPDATE/DELETE queries
multiple-argument aggregate functions
SQL2003-standard statistical aggregates
COPY (SELECT ...) TO ...
pg_dump selectivity options
customizable timezone names
GIN indexes
FILLFACTOR for indexes and tables
Let's take multiple-argument aggregate functions for example... The
marketable portion of that is limited. 85% of the people we are
marketing too don't even know what that means. Heck, I haven't even run
into the pervious limitation :)
Versus SQL2003-standard statistical aggregates. That wins hands down
just because of the SQL2003-standard part of the string :)
COPY (SELECT...) TO, is only marketable to current PostgreSQL users.
Those who are not users don't know the limitation and it is likely not
something they would look for when evaluating PostgreSQL.
For my current customers the things that are the most marketable (note
current customers) is probably:
* CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY (this is a huge in production boon)
* GIN indexes (after explanation)
* constraint exclusion works on UPDATE/DELETE queries (We are using
alot of tp now, so this is great)
* Bitmap Indexes
It does not mean all those features are useful, they definitely are. I
am just trying to look at it from at:
WHIZ* BANG* POW* perspective.
What makes the analyst (and I know this isn't the communities problem)
say, "Holy crap batman, we need to be talking to more people about this
database". I think those would be Updateable views, Bitmap Indexes and
the SQL2003-standard statistical aggregates.
Sincerely,
Joshua D. Drake
and that's just back to the beginning of July, so it probably represents
about a quarter of the work that's gone into 8.2, but I got tired of
reading the logs at that point.
We have this discussion every single release cycle: "hey, if we wait X
amount more time then we can have cool features Y and Z". But there's
always another X, Y, and Z. More importantly, this view ignores the
very real disadvantages of not getting already-finished cool features
A through W out to our users sooner.
regards, tom lane
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