1 TODO list for PostgreSQL
2 ========================
3 #A dash (-) marks changes that will appear in the upcoming 8.0 release.#
5 Bracketed items "[]" have more detail.
7 Current maintainer: Bruce Momjian (pgman@candle.pha.pa.us)
8 Last updated: Tue Aug 10 13:30:30 EDT 2004
10 The most recent version of this document can be viewed at the PostgreSQL web site, http://www.PostgreSQL.org.
12 Remove items before beta?
17 * Point-in-time data recovery using backup and write-ahead log,
18 * Create native Win32 port, http://momjian.postgresql.org/main/writings/pgsql/project/win32.html
24 * -Incremental backups
25 * Remove behavior of postmaster -o after making postmaster/postgres
27 * -Allow configuration files to be specified in a different directory
28 * Allow limits on per-db/user connections
29 * Add group object ownership, so groups can rename/drop/grant on objects,
30 so we can implement roles
31 * -Add the concept of dataspaces/tablespaces (Gavin)
32 * -Allow logging of only data definition(DDL), or DDL and modification statements
33 * -Allow log lines to include session-level information, like database and user
34 * Allow server log information to be output as INSERT statements
36 This would allow server log information to be easily loaded into
37 a database for analysis.
39 * Prevent default re-use of sysids for dropped users and groups
41 Currently, if a user is removed while he still owns objects, a new
42 user given might be given their user id and inherit the
43 previous users objects.
45 * Prevent dropping user that still owns objects, or auto-drop the objects
46 * Allow pooled connections to list all prepared queries
48 This would allow an application inheriting a pooled connection to know
49 the queries prepared in the current session.
51 * Allow major upgrades without dump/reload, perhaps using pg_upgrade
52 * Have SHOW ALL and pg_settings show descriptions for server-side variables
53 * -Allow external interfaces to extend the GUC variable set
54 * Allow GRANT/REVOKE permissions to be given to all schema objects with one
56 * Remove unreferenced table files created by transactions that were
57 in-progress when the server terminated abruptly
58 * Allow reporting of which objects are in which tablespaces
60 This item is difficult because a tablespace can contain objects from
61 multiple databases. There is a server-side function that returns the
62 databases which use a specific tablespace, so this requires a tool
63 that will call that function and connect to each database to find the
64 objects in each database for that tablespace.
66 * Allow database recovery where tablespaces can't be created
68 When a pg_dump is restored, all tablespaces will attempt to be created
69 in their original locations. If this fails, the user must be able to
70 adjust the restore process.
72 * Add "include file" functionality in postgresql.conf
73 * Add session start time and last statement time to pg_stat_activity
74 * Allow server logs to be remotely read using SQL commands
75 * Allow server configuration parameters to be remotely modified
76 * Allow administrators to safely terminate individual sessions
78 Right now, SIGTERM will terminate a session, but it is treated as
79 though the postmaster has paniced and shared memory might not be
80 cleaned up properly. A new signal is needed for safe termination.
82 * Un-comment all variables in postgresql.conf
84 By not showing commented-out variables, we discourage people from
85 thinking that re-commenting a variable returns it to its default.
87 * Allow point-in-time recovery to archive partially filled write-ahead
90 Currently only full WAL files are archived. This means that the most
91 recent transactions aren't available for recovery in case of a disk
94 * Create dump tool for write-ahead logs for use in determining
95 transaction id for point-in-time recovery
96 * Improve replication solutions
99 The proper solution to this will probably the use of a master/slave
100 replication solution like Sloney and a connection pooling tool like
105 You can use any of the master/slave replication servers to use a
106 standby server for data warehousing. To allow read/write queries to
107 multiple servers, you need multi-master replication like pgcluster.
109 o Allow replication over unreliable or non-persistent links
115 * Remove Money type, add money formatting for decimal type
116 * -Change factorial to return a numeric (Gavin)
117 * Change NUMERIC to enforce the maximum precision, and increase it
118 * Add function to return compressed length of TOAST data values
119 * Allow INET subnet tests with non-constants to be indexed
120 * Add transaction_timestamp(), statement_timestamp(), clock_timestamp() functionality
122 Current CURRENT_TIMESTAMP returns the start time of the current
123 transaction, and gettimeofday() returns the wallclock time. This will
124 make time reporting more consistent and will allow reporting of
125 the statement start time.
127 * Have sequence dependency track use of DEFAULT sequences,
129 * Disallow changing default expression of a SERIAL column (?)
130 * Allow infinite dates just like infinite timestamps
131 * -Allow pg_dump to dump sequences using NO_MAXVALUE and NO_MINVALUE
132 * -Prevent whole-row references from leaking memory, e.g. SELECT COUNT(tab.*)
133 * Have initdb set DateStyle based on locale?
134 * Add pg_get_acldef(), pg_get_typedefault(), and pg_get_attrdef()
135 * Allow to_char to print localized month names
136 * Allow functions to have a search path specified at creation time
137 * -Make LENGTH() of CHAR() not count trailing spaces
138 * Allow substring/replace() to get/set bit values
139 * Add GUC variable to allow output of interval values in ISO8601 format
140 * -Support composite types as table columns
141 * Fix data types where equality comparison isn't intuitive, e.g. box
145 o Allow nulls in arrays
146 o Allow MIN()/MAX() on arrays
147 o Delay resolution of array expression type so assignment coercion
148 can be performed on empty array expressions
149 o Modify array literal representation to handle array index lower bound
154 o Improve vacuum of large objects, like /contrib/vacuumlo (?)
155 o Add security checking for large objects
157 Currently large objects entries do not have owners. Permissions can
158 only be set at the pg_largeobject table level.
160 o Auto-delete large objects when referencing row is deleted
162 o Allow read/write into TOAST values like large objects
164 This requires the TOAST column to be stored EXTERNAL.
167 Multi-Language Support
168 ======================
170 * Add NCHAR (as distinguished from ordinary varchar),
171 * Allow locale to be set at database creation
173 Currently locale can only be set during initdb.
175 * Allow encoding on a per-column basis
177 Right now only one encoding is allowed per database.
179 * Optimize locale to have minimal performance impact when not used
180 * Support multiple simultaneous character sets, per SQL92
181 * Improve Unicode combined character handling (?)
182 * Add octet_length_server() and octet_length_client()
183 * Make octet_length_client() the same as octet_length()?
184 * -Prevent mismatch of frontend/backend encodings from converting bytea
185 data from being interpreted as encoded strings
186 * -Fix upper()/lower() to work for multibyte encodings
192 * Automatically create rules on views so they are updateable, per SQL92 [view]
193 * Add the functionality for WITH CHECK OPTION clause of CREATE VIEW
194 * Allow NOTIFY in rules involving conditionals
195 * Have views on temporary tables exist in the temporary namespace
196 * Allow temporary views on non-temporary tables
197 * Allow RULE recompilation
203 * -Order duplicate index entries on creation by ctid for faster heap lookups
204 * Allow inherited tables to inherit index, UNIQUE constraint, and primary
205 key, foreign key [inheritance]
206 * UNIQUE INDEX on base column not honored on inserts/updates from
207 inherited table: INSERT INTO inherit_table (unique_index_col) VALUES
208 (dup) should fail [inheritance]
210 The main difficulty with this item is the problem of creating an index
211 that can spam more than one table.
213 * Add UNIQUE capability to non-btree indexes
214 * Add rtree index support for line, lseg, path, point
215 * Use indexes for MIN() and MAX()
217 MIN/MAX queries can already be rewritten as SELECT col FROM tab ORDER
218 BY col {DESC} LIMIT 1. Completing this item involves making this
219 transformation automatically.
221 * Use index to restrict rows returned by multi-key index when used with
222 non-consecutive keys to reduce heap accesses
224 For an index on col1,col2,col3, and a WHERE clause of col1 = 5 and
225 col3 = 9, spin though the index checking for col1 and col3 matches,
226 rather than just col1
228 * -Be smarter about insertion of already-ordered data into btree index
229 * Prevent index uniqueness checks when UPDATE does not modify the column
231 Uniqueness (index) checks are done when updating a column even if the
232 column is not modified by the UPDATE.
234 * Fetch heap pages matching index entries in sequential order [performance]
236 Rather than randomly accessing heap pages based on index entries, mark
237 heap pages needing access in a bitmap and do the lookups in sequential
238 order. Another method would be to sort heap ctids matching the index
239 before accessing the heap rows.
241 * Use bitmaps to combine existing indexes [performance]
243 Bitmap indexes allow single indexed columns to be combined to
244 dynamically create a composite index to match a specific query. Each
245 index is a bitmap, and the bitmaps are AND'ed or OR'ed to be combined.
247 * Allow use of indexes to search for NULLs
249 One solution is to create a partial index on an IS NULL expression.
251 * -Allow SELECT * FROM tab WHERE int2col = 4 to use int2col index, int8,
252 float4, numeric/decimal too
253 * Add concurrency to GIST
254 * Pack hash index buckets onto disk pages more efficiently
256 Currently no only one hash bucket can be stored on a page. Ideally
257 several hash buckets could be stored on a single page and greater
258 granularity used for the hash algorithm.
264 * Add BETWEEN ASYMMETRIC/SYMMETRIC
265 * Change LIMIT/OFFSET to use int8
266 * CREATE TABLE AS can not determine column lengths from expressions [atttypmod]
267 * Allow UPDATE to handle complex aggregates [update] (?)
268 * -Allow command blocks to ignore certain types of errors
269 * Allow backslash handling in quoted strings to be disabled for portability
271 The use of C-style backslashes (.e.g. \n, \r) in quoted strings is not
272 SQL-spec compliant, so allow such handling to be disabled.
274 * Allow an alias to be provided for the target table in UPDATE/DELETE
276 This is not SQL-spec but many DBMSs allow it.
278 * Allow additional tables to be specified in DELETE for joins
280 UPDATE already allows this (UPDATE...FROM) but we need similar
281 functionality in DELETE. It's been agreed that the keyword should
282 be USING, to avoid anything as confusing as DELETE FROM a FROM b.
284 * Add CORRESPONDING BY to UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT
285 * Allow REINDEX to rebuild all database indexes, remove /contrib/reindex
286 * Add ROLLUP, CUBE, GROUPING SETS options to GROUP BY
287 * Add a schema option to createlang
288 * -Allow savepoints / nested transactions [transactions] (Alvaro)
289 * -Use nested transactions to prevent syntax errors from aborting a transaction
290 * Allow UPDATE tab SET ROW (col, ...) = (...) for updating multiple columns
291 * Allow SET CONSTRAINTS to be qualified by schema/table name
292 * -Prevent COMMENT ON DATABASE from using a database name
294 * Allow TRUNCATE ... CASCADE/RESTRICT
295 * Allow PREPARE of cursors
296 * Allow PREPARE to automatically determine parameter types based on the SQL
298 * Allow LISTEN/NOTIFY to store info in memory rather than tables?
300 Currently LISTEN/NOTIFY information is stored in pg_listener. Storing
301 such information in memory would improve performance.
303 * -COMMENT ON [ CAST | CONVERSION | OPERATOR CLASS | LARGE OBJECT | LANGUAGE ]
305 * Dump large object comments in custom dump format
306 * Add optional textual message to NOTIFY
308 This would allow an informational message to be added to the notify
309 message, perhaps indicating the row modified or other custom
312 * -Allow more ISOLATION LEVELS to be accepted
313 * Allow CREATE TABLE foo (f1 INT CHECK (f1 > 0) CHECK (f1 < 10)) to work
314 by searching for non-conflicting constraint names, and prefix with
316 * Use more reliable method for CREATE DATABASE to get a consistent copy
319 Currently the system uses the operating system COPY command to create
322 * Add C code to copy directories for use in creating new databases
323 * -Have psql \dn show only visible temp schemas using current_schemas()
324 * -Have psql '\i ~/<tab><tab>' actually load files it displays from home dir
325 * Ignore temporary tables from other sessions when processing
327 * -Add GUC setting to make created tables default to WITHOUT OIDS
328 * Have pg_ctl look at PGHOST in case it is a socket directory?
329 * Allow column-level GRANT/REVOKE privileges
330 * Add a session mode to warn about non-standard SQL usage in queries
331 * Add MERGE command that does UPDATE/DELETE, or on failure, INSERT (rules, triggers?)
332 * Add ON COMMIT capability to CREATE TABLE AS SELECT
333 * Add NOVICE output level for helpful messages like automatic sequence/index creation
334 * Add COMMENT ON for all cluster global objects (users, groups,
335 databases and tablespaces)
338 o -ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN does not honor DEFAULT and non-CHECK CONSTRAINT
339 o -ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN column DEFAULT should fill existing
340 rows with DEFAULT value
341 o -ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN column SERIAL doesn't create sequence because
343 o Have ALTER TABLE RENAME rename SERIAL sequence names
344 o -Allow ALTER TABLE to modify column lengths and change to binary
346 o -Add ALTER DATABASE ... OWNER TO newowner
347 o Add ALTER DOMAIN TYPE
348 o Allow ALTER TABLE ... ALTER CONSTRAINT ... RENAME
349 o Allow ALTER TABLE to change constraint deferrability and actions
350 o Disallow dropping of an inherited constraint
351 o Allow objects to be moved to different schemas
352 o Allow ALTER TABLESPACE to move to different directories
353 o Allow databases, schemas, and indexes to be moved to different
355 o Allow moving system tables to other tablespaces, where possible
357 Currently non-global system tables must be in the default database
358 schema. Global system tables can never be moved.
360 o -Add ALTER DOMAIN, AGGREGATE, CONVERSION ... OWNER TO
361 o -Add ALTER SEQUENCE ... OWNER TO
364 o Automatically maintain clustering on a table
366 This would require some background daemon to restore clustering
367 during periods of low usage. It might also require tables to be only
368 paritally filled for easier reorganization.
370 o -Add ALTER TABLE table SET WITHOUT CLUSTER (Christopher)
371 o Add default clustering to system tables
373 To do this, determine the ideal cluster index for each system
374 table and set the cluster setting during initdb.
377 o -Allow dump/load of CSV format
378 o Allow COPY to report error lines and continue
380 This requires the use of a savepoint before each COPY line is
381 processed, with ROLLBACK on COPY failure.
383 o Allow COPY to understand \x as a hex byte
384 o Have COPY return the number of rows loaded/unloaded (?)
387 o Allow UPDATE/DELETE WHERE CURRENT OF cursor
389 This requires using the row ctid to map cursor rows back to the
390 original heap row. This become more complicated if WITH HOLD cursors
391 are to be supported because WITH HOLD cursors have a copy of the row
392 and no FOR UPDATE lock.
394 o Prevent DROP TABLE from dropping a row referenced by its own open
397 o Allow pooled connections to list all open WITH HOLD cursors
399 Because WITH HOLD cursors exist outside transactions, this allows
400 them to be listed so they can be closed.
403 o Allow INSERT/UPDATE of the system-generated oid value for a row
404 o Allow INSERT INTO tab (col1, ..) VALUES (val1, ..), (val2, ..)
405 o Allow INSERT/UPDATE ... RETURNING new.col or old.col
407 This is useful for returning the auto-generated key for an INSERT.
408 One complication is how to handle rules that run as part of
412 o Add SET PERFORMANCE_TIPS option to suggest INDEX, VACUUM, VACUUM
414 o Add SET PATH for schemas (?)
416 This is basically the same as SET search_path.
418 o Prevent conflicting SET options from being set
420 This requires a checking function to be called after the server
421 configuration file is read.
423 * SERVER-SIDE LANGUAGES
424 o Allow PL/PgSQL's RAISE function to take expressions (?)
426 Currently only constants are supported.
428 o Change PL/PgSQL to use palloc() instead of malloc()
429 o -Allow Java server-side programming
430 o Handle references to temporary tables that are created, destroyed,
431 then recreated during a session, and EXECUTE is not used
433 This requires the cached PL/PgSQL byte code to be invalidated when
434 an object referenced in the function is changed.
436 o Fix PL/pgSQL RENAME to work on variables other than OLD/NEW
437 o Improve PL/PgSQL exception handling using savepoints
438 o -Allow PL/pgSQL parameters to be specified by name and type during definition
439 o Allow function parameters to be passed by name,
440 get_employee_salary(emp_id => 12345, tax_year => 2001)
441 o Add Oracle-style packages
442 o Add table function support to pltcl, plperl, plpython (?)
443 o Allow PL/pgSQL to name columns by ordinal position, e.g. rec.(3)
444 o Allow PL/pgSQL EXECUTE query_var INTO record_var;
445 o Add capability to create and call PROCEDURES
446 o Allow PL/pgSQL to handle %TYPE arrays, e.g. tab.col%TYPE[]
452 * Add XML output to pg_dump and COPY
454 We already allow XML to be stored in the database, and XPath queries
455 can be used on that data using /contrib/xml2. It also supports XSLT
458 * -Allow psql \du to show users, and add \dg for groups
459 * Add a libpq function to support Parse/DescribeStatement capability
460 * Prevent libpq's PQfnumber() from lowercasing the column name (?)
461 * -Allow pg_dump to dump CREATE CONVERSION (Christopher)
462 * -Make pg_restore continue after errors, so it acts more like pg_dump scripts
463 * Have psql show current values for a sequence
464 * Allow pg_dumpall to use non-text output formats
465 * Have pg_dump use multi-statement transactions for INSERT dumps
466 * Move psql backslash database information into the backend, use mnemonic
469 This would allow non-psql clients to pull the same information out of
470 the database as psql.
472 * Allow pg_dump to use multiple -t and -n switches
474 This should be done by allowing a '-t schema.table' syntax.
476 * Fix oid2name and dbsize for tablespaces
477 * Consistently display privilege information for all objects in psql
482 Document differences between ecpg and the SQL standard and
483 information about the Informix-compatibility module.
485 o -Implement SET DESCRIPTOR
486 o Solve cardinality > 1 for input descriptors / variables (?)
487 o Improve error handling (?)
488 o Add a semantic check level, e.g. check if a table really exists
489 o fix handling of DB attributes that are arrays
490 o Use backend PREPARE/EXECUTE facility for ecpg where possible
492 o Fix nested C comments
493 o sqlwarn[6] should be 'W' if the PRECISION or SCALE value specified
494 o Make SET CONNECTION thread-aware, non-standard?
495 o Allow multidimensional arrays
498 Referential Integrity
499 =====================
501 * Add MATCH PARTIAL referential integrity
502 * Add deferred trigger queue file
504 Right now all deferred trigger information is stored in backend
505 memory. This could exhaust memory for very large trigger queues.
506 This item involves dumping large queues into files.
508 * Implement dirty reads or shared row locks and use them in RI triggers (?)
509 * Enforce referential integrity for system tables
510 * Change foreign key constraint for array -> element to mean element
512 * Allow DEFERRABLE UNIQUE constraints (?)
513 * Allow triggers to be disabled [trigger]
515 Currently the only way to disable triggers is to modify the system
518 * With disabled triggers, allow pg_dump to use ALTER TABLE ADD FOREIGN KEY
520 If the dump is known to be valid, allow foreign keys to be added
521 without revalidating the data.
523 * Allow statement-level triggers to access modified rows
524 * Support triggers on columns
525 * Have AFTER triggers execute after the appropriate SQL statement in a
526 function, not at the end of the function
527 * -Print table names with constraint names in error messages, or make constraint
528 names unique within a schema
529 * -Issue NOTICE if foreign key data requires costly test to match primary key
530 * Remove CREATE CONSTRAINT TRIGGER
532 This was used in older releases to dump referential integrity
535 * Allow AFTER triggers on system tables
537 System tables are modified in many places in the backend without going
538 through the executor and therefore not causing triggers to fire. To
539 complete this item, the functions that modify system tables will have
546 * Flush cached query plans when the dependent objects change
547 * -Use dependency information to dump data in proper order
548 * -Have pg_dump -c clear the database using dependency information
549 * Track dependencies in function bodies and recompile/invalidate
555 * Add SQL99 WITH clause to SELECT
556 * Add SQL99 WITH RECURSIVE to SELECT
557 * Add pre-parsing phase that converts non-ANSI syntax to supported
560 This could allow SQL written for other databases to run without
563 * Allow plug-in modules to emulate features from other databases
564 * SQL*Net listener that makes PostgreSQL appear as an Oracle database
566 * Allow queries across databases or servers with transaction
569 Right now contrib/dblink can be used to issue such queries except it
570 does not have locking or transaction semantics. Two-phase commit is
571 needed to enable transaction semantics.
573 * Add two-phase commit
575 This will involve adding a way to respond to commit failure by either
576 taking the server into offline/readonly mode or notifying the
587 * Improve commit_delay handling to reduce fsync()
588 * Determine optimal fdatasync/fsync, O_SYNC/O_DSYNC options
589 * Allow multiple blocks to be written to WAL with one write()
590 * Add an option to sync() before fsync()'ing checkpoint files
595 * Add free-behind capability for large sequential scans [fadvise]
596 * Consider use of open/fcntl(O_DIRECT) to minimize OS caching
597 * Cache last known per-tuple offsets to speed long tuple access
599 While column offsets are already cached, the cache can not be used if
600 the tuple has NULLs or TOAST columns because these values change the
601 typical column offsets. Caching of such offsets could be accomplished
602 by remembering the previous offsets and use them again if the row has
607 We could use a fixed row count and a +/- count to follow MVCC
608 visibility rules, or a single cached value could be used and
609 invalidated if anyone modifies the table. [count]
615 * Improve speed with indexes
617 For large table adjustements during vacuum, it is faster to reindex
618 rather than update the index.
620 * Reduce lock time by moving tuples with read lock, then write
621 lock and truncate table
623 Moved tuples are invisible to other backends so they don't require a
624 write lock. However, the read lock promotion to write lock could lead
625 to deadlock situations.
627 * -Provide automatic running of vacuum in the background in backend
628 rather than in /contrib (Matthew)
629 * Allow free space map to be auto-sized or warn when it is too small
631 The free space map is in shared memory so resizing is difficult.
633 * Maintain a map of recently-expired rows
635 This allows vacuum to reclaim free space without requiring
642 * Make locking of shared data structures more fine-grained
644 This requires that more locks be acquired but this would reduce lock
645 contention, improving concurrency.
647 * Add code to detect an SMP machine and handle spinlocks accordingly
648 from distributted.net, http://www1.distributed.net/source,
649 in client/common/cpucheck.cpp
651 On SMP machines, it is possible that locks might be released shortly,
652 while on non-SMP machines, the backend should sleep so the process
653 holding the lock can complete and release it.
655 * Improve SMP performance on i386 machines
657 i386-based SMP machines can generate excessive context switching
658 caused by lock failure in high concurrency situations. This may be
659 caused by CPU cache line invalidation inefficiencies.
661 * Research use of sched_yield() for spinlock acquisition failure
667 * Experiment with multi-threaded backend [thread]
669 This would prevent the overhead associated with process creation. Most
670 operating systems have trivial process creation time compared to
671 database startup overhead, but a few operating systems (WIn32,
672 Solaris) might benefit from threading.
674 * Add connection pooling [pool]
676 It is unclear if this should be done inside the backend code or done
677 by something external like pgpool. The passing of file descriptors to
678 existing backends is one of the difficulties with a backend approach.
684 * Eliminate need to write full pages to WAL before page modification [wal]
686 Currently, to protect against partial disk page writes, we write the
687 full page images to WAL before they are modified so we can correct any
688 partial page writes during recovery.
690 * Reduce WAL traffic so only modified values are written rather than
692 * Turn off after-change writes if fsync is disabled
694 If fsync is off, there is no purpose in writing full pages to WAL
696 * Add WAL index reliability improvement to non-btree indexes
697 * Allow the pg_xlog directory location to be specified during initdb
698 with a symlink back to the /data location
700 * Allow WAL information to recover corrupted pg_controldata
701 * Find a way to reduce rotational delay when repeatedly writing
704 Currently fsync of WAL requires the disk platter to perform a full
705 rotation to fsync again. One idea is to write the WAL to different
706 offsets that might reduce the rotational delay.
712 * Add missing optimizer selectivities for date, r-tree, etc
713 * Allow ORDER BY ... LIMIT 1 to select high/low value without sort or
714 index using a sequential scan for highest/lowest values
716 If only one value is needed, there is no need to sort the entire
717 table. Instead a sequential scan could get the matching value.
719 * Precompile SQL functions to avoid overhead
720 * Add utility to compute accurate random_page_cost value
721 * Improve ability to display optimizer analysis using OPTIMIZER_DEBUG
722 * Allow sorting, temp files, temp tables to use multiple work directories
724 This allows the I/O load to be spread across multiple disk drives.
725 * Have EXPLAIN ANALYZE highlight poor optimizer estimates
726 * Use CHECK constraints to influence optimizer decisions
728 CHECK constraints contain information about the distribution of values
729 within the table. This is also useful for implementing subtables where
730 a tables content is distributed across several subtables.
736 * Do async I/O for faster random read-ahead of data
738 Async I/O allows multiple I/O requests to be sent to the disk with
739 results coming back asynchronously.
741 * Use mmap() rather than SYSV shared memory or to write WAL files (?) [mmap]
743 This would remove the requirement for SYSV SHM but would introduce
744 portability issues. Anonymous mmap is required to prevent I/O
747 * Add a script to ask system configuration questions and tune postgresql.conf
748 * -Use background process to write dirty shared buffers to disk
749 * Use a phantom command counter for nested subtransactions to reduce
756 * Add use of 'const' for variables in source tree
757 * Rename some /contrib modules from pg* to pg_*
758 * Move some things from /contrib into main tree
759 * Remove warnings created by -Wcast-align
760 * Move platform-specific ps status display info from ps_status.c to ports
761 * Improve access-permissions check on data directory in Cygwin (Tom)
762 * Add optional CRC checksum to heap and index pages
763 * -Change representation of whole-tuple parameters to functions
764 * Clarify use of 'application' and 'command' tags in SGML docs
765 * Better document ability to build only certain interfaces (Marc)
766 * Remove or relicense modules that are not under the BSD license, if possible
767 * Remove memory/file descriptor freeing before ereport(ERROR)
768 * Acquire lock on a relation before building a relcache entry for it
769 * Research interaction of setitimer() and sleep() used by statement_timeout
770 * -Add checks for fclose() failure (Tom)
771 * -Change CVS ID to PostgreSQL
772 * -Exit postmaster if postgresql.conf can not be opened
773 * Rename /scripts directory because they are all C programs now
774 * Promote debug_query_string into a server-side function current_query()
775 * Allow the identifier length to be increased via a configure option
776 * Allow binaries to be statically linked so they are more easily relocated
779 * Wire Protocol Changes
780 o Allow dynamic character set handling
781 o Add decoded type, length, precision
783 o Update clients to use data types, typmod, schema.table.column names of
784 result sets using new query protocol
787 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
790 Developers who have claimed items are:
791 --------------------------------------
792 * Alvaro is Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@dcc.uchile.cl>
793 * Andrew is Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
794 * Bruce is Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> of Software Research Assoc.
795 * Christopher is Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> of
796 Family Health Network
797 * Claudio is Claudio Natoli <claudio.natoli@memetrics.com>
798 * D'Arcy is D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net> of The Cain Gang Ltd.
799 * Fabien is Fabien Coelho <coelho@cri.ensmp.fr>
800 * Gavin is Gavin Sherry <swm@linuxworld.com.au> of Alcove Systems Engineering
801 * Greg is Greg Sabino Mullane <greg@turnstep.com>
802 * Hiroshi is Hiroshi Inoue <Inoue@tpf.co.jp>
803 * Jan is Jan Wieck <JanWieck@Yahoo.com> of Afilias, Inc.
804 * Joe is Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com>
805 * Karel is Karel Zak <zakkr@zf.jcu.cz>
807 * Magnus is Magnus Hagander <mha@sollentuna.net>
808 * Marc is Marc Fournier <scrappy@hub.org> of PostgreSQL, Inc.
809 * Matthew T. O'Connor <matthew@zeut.net>
810 * Michael is Michael Meskes <meskes@postgresql.org> of Credativ
811 * Neil is Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com>
812 * Oleg is Oleg Bartunov <oleg@sai.msu.su>
813 * Peter is Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
814 * Philip is Philip Warner <pjw@rhyme.com.au> of Albatross Consulting Pty. Ltd.
815 * Rod is Rod Taylor <pg@rbt.ca>
816 * Simon is Simon Riggs
817 * Stephan is Stephan Szabo <sszabo@megazone23.bigpanda.com>
818 * Tatsuo is Tatsuo Ishii <t-ishii@sra.co.jp> of Software Research Assoc.
820 * Tom is Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> of Red Hat