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 Sep25 21:33:44 EDT 2004

Last updated:Mon Sep27 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

This would allow an informational message to be added to the 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