TODO list for PostgreSQL
========================
-#A dash (-) marks changes that will appear in the upcoming 8.0 release.#
+#A dash (-) marks changes that will appear in the upcoming 8.1 release.#
Bracketed items "[]" have more detail.
Current maintainer: Bruce Momjian (pgman@candle.pha.pa.us)
-Last updated: Sat Sep 25 21:33:44 EDT 2004
+Last updated: Mon Sep 27 10:15:31 EDT 2004
The most recent version of this document can be viewed at the PostgreSQL web
site, http://www.PostgreSQL.org.
-Remove items before beta?
-
-Urgent
-======
-
-* -Point-in-time data recovery using backup and write-ahead log
-* -Create native Win32 port
Administration
==============
-* -Incremental backups
* Remove behavior of postmaster -o after making postmaster/postgres
flags unique
-* -Allow configuration files to be specified in a different directory
* Allow limits on per-db/user connections
* Add group object ownership, so groups can rename/drop/grant on objects,
so we can implement roles
-* -Add the concept of dataspaces/tablespaces (Gavin)
-* -Allow logging of only data definition(DDL), or DDL and modification statements
-* -Allow log lines to include session-level information, like database and user
* Allow server log information to be output as INSERT statements
This would allow server log information to be easily loaded into
* Allow major upgrades without dump/reload, perhaps using pg_upgrade
* Have SHOW ALL and pg_settings show descriptions for server-side variables
-* -Allow external interfaces to extend the GUC variable set
* Allow GRANT/REVOKE permissions to be given to all schema objects with one
command
* Remove unreferenced table files created by transactions that were
==========
* Remove Money type, add money formatting for decimal type
-* -Change factorial to return a numeric (Gavin)
* Change NUMERIC to enforce the maximum precision, and increase it
* Add function to return compressed length of TOAST data values
* Allow INET subnet tests with non-constants to be indexed
seqname.nextval (?)
* Disallow changing default expression of a SERIAL column (?)
* Allow infinite dates just like infinite timestamps
-* -Allow pg_dump to dump sequences using NO_MAXVALUE and NO_MINVALUE
-* -Prevent whole-row references from leaking memory, e.g. SELECT COUNT(tab.*)
* Have initdb set DateStyle based on locale?
* Add pg_get_acldef(), pg_get_typedefault(), and pg_get_attrdef()
* Allow to_char to print localized month names
* Allow functions to have a search path specified at creation time
-* -Make LENGTH() of CHAR() not count trailing spaces
* Allow substring/replace() to get/set bit values
* Add GUC variable to allow output of interval values in ISO8601 format
-* -Support composite types as table columns
* Fix data types where equality comparison isn't intuitive, e.g. box
* Merge hardwired timezone names with the TZ database; allow either kind
everywhere a TZ name is currently taken
* Improve Unicode combined character handling (?)
* Add octet_length_server() and octet_length_client()
* Make octet_length_client() the same as octet_length()?
-* -Prevent mismatch of frontend/backend encodings from converting bytea
- data from being interpreted as encoded strings
-* -Fix upper()/lower() to work for multibyte encodings
Views / Rules
Indexes
=======
-* -Order duplicate index entries on creation by ctid for faster heap lookups
* Allow inherited tables to inherit index, UNIQUE constraint, and primary
key, foreign key [inheritance]
* UNIQUE INDEX on base column not honored on inserts/updates from
col3 = 9, spin though the index checking for col1 and col3 matches,
rather than just col1
-* -Be smarter about insertion of already-ordered data into btree index
* Prevent index uniqueness checks when UPDATE does not modify the column
Uniqueness (index) checks are done when updating a column even if the
One solution is to create a partial index on an IS NULL expression.
-* -Allow SELECT * FROM tab WHERE int2col = 4 to use int2col index, int8,
- float4, numeric/decimal too
* Add concurrency to GIST
* Pack hash index buckets onto disk pages more efficiently
* Change LIMIT/OFFSET to use int8
* CREATE TABLE AS can not determine column lengths from expressions [atttypmod]
* Allow UPDATE to handle complex aggregates [update] (?)
-* -Allow command blocks to ignore certain types of errors
* Allow backslash handling in quoted strings to be disabled for portability
The use of C-style backslashes (.e.g. \n, \r) in quoted strings is not
* Allow REINDEX to rebuild all database indexes, remove /contrib/reindex
* Add ROLLUP, CUBE, GROUPING SETS options to GROUP BY
* Add a schema option to createlang
-* -Allow savepoints / nested transactions (Alvaro)
-* -Use nested transactions to prevent syntax errors from aborting a transaction
* Allow UPDATE tab SET ROW (col, ...) = (...) for updating multiple columns
* Allow SET CONSTRAINTS to be qualified by schema/table name
-* -Prevent COMMENT ON DATABASE from using a database name
-* -Add NO WAIT LOCKs
* Allow TRUNCATE ... CASCADE/RESTRICT
* Allow PREPARE of cursors
* Allow PREPARE to automatically determine parameter types based on the SQL
Currently LISTEN/NOTIFY information is stored in pg_listener. Storing
such information in memory would improve performance.
-* -COMMENT ON [ CAST | CONVERSION | OPERATOR CLASS | LARGE OBJECT | LANGUAGE ]
- (Christopher)
* Dump large object comments in custom dump format
* Add optional textual message to NOTIFY
message, perhaps indicating the row modified or other custom
information.
-* -Allow more ISOLATION LEVELS to be accepted
* Allow CREATE TABLE foo (f1 INT CHECK (f1 > 0) CHECK (f1 < 10)) to work
by searching for non-conflicting constraint names, and prefix with
table name?
* Add C code to copy directories for use in creating new databases
* Ignore temporary tables from other sessions when processing
inheritance?
-* -Add GUC setting to make created tables default to WITHOUT OIDS
* Have pg_ctl look at PGHOST in case it is a socket directory?
* Allow column-level GRANT/REVOKE privileges
* Add a session mode to warn about non-standard SQL usage in queries
* ALTER
- o -ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN does not honor DEFAULT and non-CHECK CONSTRAINT
- o -ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN column DEFAULT should fill existing
- rows with DEFAULT value
- o -ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN column SERIAL doesn't create sequence because
- of the item above
o Have ALTER TABLE RENAME rename SERIAL sequence names
- o -Allow ALTER TABLE to modify column lengths and change to binary
- compatible types
- o -Add ALTER DATABASE ... OWNER TO newowner
o Add ALTER DOMAIN TYPE
o Allow ALTER TABLE ... ALTER CONSTRAINT ... RENAME
o Allow ALTER TABLE to change constraint deferrability and actions
Currently non-global system tables must be in the default database
schema. Global system tables can never be moved.
- o -Add ALTER DOMAIN, AGGREGATE, CONVERSION ... OWNER TO
- o -Add ALTER SEQUENCE ... OWNER TO
- o -Add ALTER INDEX that works just like ALTER TABLE already does
- on an index
* CLUSTER
o Automatically maintain clustering on a table
be to create a merged heap/index data file so an index lookup would
automatically access the heap data too.
- o -Add ALTER TABLE table SET WITHOUT CLUSTER (Christopher)
o Add default clustering to system tables
To do this, determine the ideal cluster index for each system
table and set the cluster setting during initdb.
* COPY
- o -Allow dump/load of CSV format
o Allow COPY to report error lines and continue
This requires the use of a savepoint before each COPY line is
Currently only constants are supported.
o Change PL/PgSQL to use palloc() instead of malloc()
- o -Allow Java server-side programming
o Handle references to temporary tables that are created, destroyed,
then recreated during a session, and EXECUTE is not used
o Fix PL/pgSQL RENAME to work on variables other than OLD/NEW
o Improve PL/PgSQL exception handling using savepoints
- o -Allow PL/pgSQL parameters to be specified by name and type during definition
o Allow function parameters to be passed by name,
get_employee_salary(emp_id => 12345, tax_year => 2001)
o Add Oracle-style packages
can be used on that data using /contrib/xml2. It also supports XSLT
transformations.
-* -Allow psql \du to show users, and add \dg for groups
-* -Have psql \dn show only visible temp schemas using current_schemas()
-* -Have psql '\i ~/<tab><tab>' actually load files it displays from home dir
* Add a libpq function to support Parse/DescribeStatement capability
* Prevent libpq's PQfnumber() from lowercasing the column name (?)
* Have psql show current values for a sequence
* pg_dump
o Have pg_dump use multi-statement transactions for INSERT dumps
- o -Allow pg_dump to dump CREATE CONVERSION (Christopher)
- o -Make pg_restore continue after errors, so it acts more like pg_dump
- scripts
o Allow pg_dump to use multiple -t and -n switches
This should be done by allowing a '-t schema.table' syntax.
Document differences between ecpg and the SQL standard and
information about the Informix-compatibility module.
- o -Implement SET DESCRIPTOR
o Solve cardinality > 1 for input descriptors / variables (?)
o Improve error handling (?)
o Add a semantic check level, e.g. check if a table really exists
* Allow statement-level triggers to access modified rows
* Support triggers on columns
-* -Have AFTER triggers execute after the appropriate SQL statement in a
- function, not at the end of the function
-* -Print table names with constraint names in error messages, or make constraint
- names unique within a schema
-* -Issue NOTICE if foreign key data requires costly test to match primary key
* Remove CREATE CONSTRAINT TRIGGER
This was used in older releases to dump referential integrity
===================
* Flush cached query plans when the dependent objects change
-* -Use dependency information to dump data in proper order
-* -Have pg_dump -c clear the database using dependency information
* Track dependencies in function bodies and recompile/invalidate
write lock. However, the read lock promotion to write lock could lead
to deadlock situations.
-* -Provide automatic running of vacuum in the background in backend
- rather than in /contrib (Matthew)
* Allow free space map to be auto-sized or warn when it is too small
The free space map is in shared memory so resizing is difficult.
overhead.
* Add a script to ask system configuration questions and tune postgresql.conf
-* -Use background process to write dirty shared buffers to disk
* Use a phantom command counter for nested subtransactions to reduce
tuple overhead
* Move platform-specific ps status display info from ps_status.c to ports
* Improve access-permissions check on data directory in Cygwin (Tom)
* Add optional CRC checksum to heap and index pages
-* -Change representation of whole-tuple parameters to functions
* Clarify use of 'application' and 'command' tags in SGML docs
* Better document ability to build only certain interfaces (Marc)
* Remove or relicense modules that are not under the BSD license, if possible
* Remove memory/file descriptor freeing before ereport(ERROR)
* Acquire lock on a relation before building a relcache entry for it
* Research interaction of setitimer() and sleep() used by statement_timeout
-* -Add checks for fclose() failure (Tom)
-* -Change CVS ID to PostgreSQL
-* -Exit postmaster if postgresql.conf can not be opened
* Rename /scripts directory because they are all C programs now
* Promote debug_query_string into a server-side function current_query()
* Allow the identifier length to be increased via a configure option
projects / postgresql / commitdiff