PostgreSQL Developer Meeting Brussels

The PostgreSQL Developer Meeting went well with attendees from UK, Czechia, US, Russia and Germany. The meeting is in Brussels, near the FOSDEM conference.

Andreas Seltenreich was the new face at the meeting. Andreas’ sqlsmith tool has found many PostgreSQL bugs, so we discussed extending that for the latest features in PostgreSQL 11.

We discussed all of the patches in the queue and moved a few forwards quickly. With more than 200 patches in the queue there is much work still to do and the last Commitfest hasn’t even started yet.

Bruce was able to commit a patch to improve the usability of psql with commands exit and quit. Finally the usability annoyance of people not remembering “\q” command ends in 2018!

I’ve taken on shepherding the new WAIT FOR command which should allow us to get causal consistency into PG11. That’s a subject for another blog, so more on that later.

We also looked at 64-bit TransactionIds, CommitSequenceNumber (CSNs) and Storage APIs. The meeting agreed unanimously to a big push to get Storage APIs into PG12, requiring people to publish their new storage plugins. Alexander’s patch for 64-bit TransactionIds will be split into two: part 1) TransactionId will become 64-bit in code, yet continue to be stored on disk as 32-bit value, an earlier suggestion by Heikki. part 2) develop a storage plugin that allows full 64-bit TransactionId to be stored on disk, which will then give us a migration path between current and future heap formats. No agreement to commit, but a clear path forwards for development, so we can look to commit early in the PG12 release cycle.

We discussed my MERGE patch and required next steps.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/SQL_MERGE_Patch_Status

Various other discussions, ending with the usual group photo