TO DO and wish list

The following are a list of things to do to improve postgres95. They are roughly sorted on priority. Please send mail to Jolly Chen (jolly@cs.berkeley.edu) if you want to tackle one of these.

fixing the rules system so that it's robust and making INSTEAD rules work
column constraints (using rules), esp. primary keys
full set of text operations and functions (word searches, concat, upper/lower() etc.). Easy to do, but big demand for it from common users.
binary distributions for linux (maximum percentage of newbies)
better documentation. Write a real book on postgres, perhaps?
real page-level locking. Fix the current broken implementation
memory leaks (hunt and destroy with tools like Purify)
large objects: overwriting blocks has problems. There are other problems, too.
revisit and fix vacuum. currently can't vacuum large objects should shrink pg_time and pg_log
ODBC drivers. Not that difficult. Just some grunt work that will probably win thousands of PC users.
Windows NT port. (The Mariposa project at Berkeley has a person who's working on this)
allow updates of fields to be null
DROP AGGREGATE should take in basetype as an arg
implement HAVING clause
optimizing disjunctive queries. (lots of other quirky bugs in the optimizer, too)
implement IN qualifier
DELETE FROM ... FROM .... where ...
add other language types for built-in functions. Currently, we have C and internal SQL funcs. Expand to allow tcl, perl, java, etc. I don't think it's too hard to generalize the function manager switch to pass function sources to interpreter engines. Could be pretty cool.
better interface for adding to pg_group.
a friendlier initdb. Seems like we get weekly bug mails about how initdb just croaked with no helpful messages.
multi-representational types, a la Illustra. For example, have a text type that is stored in-tuple when less than 8K and in large objects, when greater than 8K.
fix large object mapping scheme so as not to stuff everything as files in a single directory.
the usual miscellaneous: code-cleanup, documentation, test cases, etc...

Last modified: Tue Apr 23 00:57:54 PDT 1996

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