beta3 & the open items list

It would be nice to get beta3 out the door sooner rather than later,
but I sort of feel like we're not ready yet. In fact, we seem to be a
bit stalled. The open items list currently lists four items.

1. max_standby_delay. Tom has committed to getting this done, but has
been tied up with non-PostgreSQL related work for the last few weeks.

2. infinite repeat of warning message in standby. Heikki changed the
code so this isn't a tight loop any more, which is an improvement, but
we've discussed the fact that retrying forever may not be the best
behavior.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-06/msg00806.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-06/msg00838.php

I am not clear, however, on how difficult it is to implement the
proposed behavior, and I'm not sure Heikki's on board with the
proposed change.

3. supply alternate hstore operator for equals-greater in preparation
for later user in function parameter assignment. There's some work
left to be done here but it's pretty minor. Mostly we're arguing
about whether to call the hstore slice operator +> or & or % or %> --
I've written three patches to rename it so far (to three different
alternative names), one of which I committed, and there's still
ongoing discussion as to whether to rename it again and/or remove it.
Aside from that, we need to deal with the singleton-hstore constructor
(text => text); I believe the consensus there is to remove the
operator in favor of the underlying hstore(text, text) function and
backpatch that function name into the back-branches to facilitate
writing hstore code that is portable across major PostgreSQL releases.

4. Streaming Replication needs to detect death of master. We need
some sort of keep-alive, here. Whether it's at the TCP level (as
advocated by Tom Lane and others) or at the protocol level (as
advocated by Greg Stark) is something that we have yet to decide; once
it's decided, someone will need to do it...

It would be nice if we could make a final push to get these issues
resolved and another beta out the door before the end of the month...

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company