My wish list for Postgres 9.5

http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2014/08/15/my-postgres-wishlist-for-9.5/

by craigkerstiens • 12 years ago

41 48 12 years ago

astrodust• 12 years ago

MySQL's non-standard ON DUPLICATE KEY feature is extremely useful, so any "upsert"-like feature would be a great thing to have.

j_s• 12 years ago

Hope you saw the discussion of 'UPSERTisms in Postgres' a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7620050

giulianob• 12 years ago

More functions to modify JSON columns in place without needing to retrieve it.

rch2• 12 years ago

Does this thinking lead to feature parity with Redis EVAL?

ddorian43• 12 years ago

It will lead to feature parity with Mongodb.

buckbova3• 12 years ago

The OP mentions gui, but what is the best gui/code editor/ide for postgres for linux?

I found this list. I'll go through them.

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Community_Guide_to_PostgreS...

conradfr• 12 years ago

As a developer the database tool in Jetbrains' IDE covers the vast majority of my needs, in addition to the golden autocompletion in the code.

rch2• 12 years ago

I've found pgAdmin to be sufficient for clicking through things here and there, but my sense is that DBA types are expecting more from the GUI than I am. Any insight into what those things might be would probably be helpful.

smilliken• 12 years ago

I've gone through that list before, but never find anything compelling enough to pull me away from psql (the built-in CLI client).

I highly recommend learning psql first. It doesn't have every feature you might want, but it gets the basics right and is easy to integrate with your editor and other tools. As far as I can tell, it's what most professionals use.

yangyang4• 12 years ago

I fully agree with this. I used pgAdmin for a while but have recently switched to psql and it's much more useful.

In particular, learn the \ commands. It's extremely useful to be able to quickly look at the structure of a table, dump the source to a function and so on, from a command prompt rather than navigating trees with the mouse in pgAdmin.

It uses readline where available so you get history, completion etc.

booty• 12 years ago

All I really want from a database IDE is awesome autocomplete for identifiers and keywords. (I consider SQL Server Management Studio's autocomplete to be great - if I could get that for Postgres, I'd be thrilled)

You can get part of the way there by Sublime Text to run queries and browse results. In Sublime, it's easy - you can create a custom "build tool" with (essentially) just one line of config... you're basically just piping the current file's contents to command-line PSQL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPd4m3PLVqU

Then I use the SublimeAllAutocomplete package. It works just like "regular" Sublime autocomplete except it gives you autocomplete suggestions from all open files, not just the current one - so if you have your DB schema dump in another window it will use that: https://github.com/alienhard/SublimeAllAutocomplete

Obviously, that doesn't really give you the smartest autocomplete ever but it's pretty productive for me. Tons of room for improvement though.

asnyder5• 12 years ago

Has auto-complete and everything: http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/manager

megaman821• 12 years ago

It is not free (or even that cheap) but Navicat is really good. It was worth it for me as much as I interact with databases.

untog• 12 years ago

Seconded. And the 'Essentials' version is only $9.99.

dataminded• 12 years ago

Aqua Data Studio is the best database IDE I have ever used.

A_COMPUTER• 12 years ago

I use ToRA http://torasql.com/ and/or Oracle SQLDeveloper. Both of them are Oracle DB tools that work fine with Postgres with the right drivers. pgadmin is intolerable.

jfb3• 12 years ago

A better language than SQL in front of Postgres' careful and mature data storage engine?

collyw• 12 years ago

SQL syntax isn't great, but it is very powerful and good for what it does.

What would you expect from a language improvement point of view? Its a declarative language so you can't expect a load of object oriented features. I found that once I learned to think in sets, the language doesn't bother me. There is a certain simplicity to it, that is fairly elegant.

jfb3• 12 years ago

I would like a language more like Tutorial D; strictly set based (none of SQL's bags); without SQL's terrible, awful, no-good very bad 4GL syntax (I'd like something terser and more mathematical). It would be closed over composition, for instance, and would map more directly onto the relational calculus.

br1• 12 years ago

- Joins that know about the foreign keys already declared in the table definitions.

- Structured rows to kill all grouping special cases and the distinction between where and having.

- Hierarchical rows so that join(Planet, Person) doesn't repeat Planet columns in each returned row.

Linq already gets you 1 and 2. See http://www.linqpad.net/WhyLINQBeatsSQL.aspx Xml gets you 3.

yangyang4• 12 years ago

QUEL? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages

:-)

jfb3• 12 years ago

Heh. Back to the future, indeed.

asnyder5• 12 years ago

You can use most any language you want for Postgres functions. SQL, plpgsql, Python, etc, etc.

yangyang4• 12 years ago

SQL is always the query language, though. You still have to use it with pl/Python, pl/sh etc.

doxcf434• 12 years ago

Automatic failover that doesn't require a 3rd party HA tool would be great.

Qantourisc• 12 years ago

You'd still have to deal with the complexity, but somewhere else ...

saosebastiao2• 12 years ago

I was really excited about the Citus column-store FDW...but it took me about an hour of using it before I realized it wasn't going to solve any of my problems any time soon. Queries with data larger than memory were slower than native tables. Compression didn't come anywhere close to the 2-4x improvement that was claimed. It doesn't support insert, update, or delete commands, let alone the insert from select that I was hoping to use. In order to convert a native table into a cstore table, you have to output to a file and then import using COPY, or hack it with a pipe to a COPY command.

After a while, I realized that some of this was just the maturity of the extension, but a huge amount was the limitations of FDWs as a platform. And not only that, it seems that every other 3rd party FDW extension is either abandoned or ignored.

Postgres is quite possibly the highest quality piece of software I use. I rate it higher than the Linux Kernel. But Postgres' historical approaches to extensibility have left a lot to be desired. Reading over this comment, I realize I probably sound like an entitled jackass, but I'll post it anyway. I really do wish I could contribute to Postgres, but learning C well enough to contribute is way out of reach for me at the moment. But I guess all I can say is that my (admittedly vague) wishlist for Postgres 9.5 is to enhance any and all features to support extensibility, including FDWs and Extensions.

buckbova3• 12 years ago

I really do wish I could contribute to Postgres, but learning C well enough to contribute is way out of reach for me at the moment.

I'm sure they accept money in lieu of C skills.

http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/

saosebastiao2• 12 years ago

Good call...now I feel like even more of a jackass for not considering that :)

ozgune• 12 years ago

(Ozgun from Citus Data here)

We're actively working on improving the cstore_fdw extension and your feedback is valuable to us. We're keeping a list of open issues on GitHub, and prioritize them for upcoming releases based on your comments.

If you have any requests, please give us your feedback here: https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw/issues

For performance and compression related questions, we'd also love to hear more from you and help if we can in any way: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cstore-users

As PostgreSQL covers a huge feature set, we know that it will take time on our end to get there. Some of that will involve new foreign table features from PostgreSQL core, such as foreign indexes and foreign table inheritance. I just wanted to let you know that we are working hard in that journey to get there.

asnyder5• 12 years ago

I don't think an "official" GUI is necessary. Rather it would simply hurt the community of paid/free tools that have built up around it.

My favorite PostgreSQL GUI is: http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/manager, it's excellent overall.

terhechte• 12 years ago

Excuse me, but I think this only runs on Windows. Many developers use Mac OS X or Linux. A wonderful cross platform solution would certainly be great. I'm using PGAdmin on a weekly basis, and while it offers more features than any other free solution, it fails at usability, native integration and also lacks support for the more advanced features of PostgreSQL.

asnyder5• 12 years ago

It supports most of the advanced features of PostgreSQL, including functions, triggers, composite types, JSON, and most anything one can throw at it. Not to mention it obviously has a great SQL Editor with auto-complete for when you want to do drafts by hand, as I usually do.

As far as it being windows only, I thought that was no longer an issue thanks to great tools like Parallels and VMWare Fusion. Can't you just open the app in that while still living in your OS?

I honestly don't see much of an issue.

nasalgoat• 12 years ago

I'd sure like to have replication to one database while still allowing writes on another.

As it stands now, if you're replicating from a master, you can't do anything else. This is something that MySQL could do over a decade ago.

jpitz2• 12 years ago

My long-standing feature request is for index-organized-tables : http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/ac116f9a0907151917o6d87...

buckbova3• 12 years ago

Same as this todo item?

Automatically maintain clustering on a table

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Todo#CLUSTER

jpitz2• 12 years ago

In my view, periodic re-clustering isn't the same thing, though it may be good enough for most use cases. I'd label it "transactionally maintain clustering on a table"

Lennie• 12 years ago

On my list, adding even better support for fast full text search: https://wiki.postgresql.org/images/2/25/Full-text_search_in_...

Many of the changes already went into 9.4 but for PostgreSQL to be a 'killer' of external tools would be ridiculously awesome.

gerry_shaw• 12 years ago

It might be simple or maybe it's OCD but I sure wish there was a way to reorder table columns in the table schema without having rebuild the columns.

pbz• 12 years ago

I came across this limitation within minutes of playing with pg. I couldn't believe that such a powerful tool would be missing something so basic.

swasheck• 12 years ago

parallelism is a big omission from pg for me. for all of the language features (and they're awesome), the thing that is the most glaring omission is parallelism. i understand it's been and on-again off-again project that seems difficult to implement. i still love pg, though so it's not a deal-breaker for me.

My wish list for Postgres 9.5

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