postgres/doc/TODO

TODO list for PostgreSQL
========================
Last updated:		Fri Dec 18 02:30:47 EST 1998

Current maintainer:	Bruce Momjian (maillist@candle.pha.pa.us)

The most recent version of this document can be viewed at
the PostgreSQL WWW site, http://www.postgreSQL.org.

THE CHANGES FOR 6.4.1 APPEAR AT THE END OF THIS DOCUMENT

A dash(-) marks changes to be in the next release.

Developers who have claimed items are:
-------------------------------------
	* Billy is Billy G. Allie <Bill.Allie@mug.org>
	* Brook is Brook Milligan <brook@trillium.NMSU.Edu>
	* Bruce is Bruce Momjian<maillist@candle.pha.pa.us>
	* Bryan is Bryan Henderson<bryanh@giraffe.netgate.net>
	* D'Arcy is D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net>
	* Dan is Dan McGuirk <mcguirk@indirect.com>
	* Darren is Darren King <darrenk@insightdist.com>
	* David is David Hartwig <daveh@insightdist.com>
	* Edmund is Edmund Mergl <E.Mergl@bawue.de>
	* Goran is Goran Thyni <goran@bildbasen.se>
	* Henry is Henry B. Hotz <hotz@jpl.nasa.gov>
	* Jan is Jan Wieck <wieck@sapserv.debis.de>
	* Jun is Jun Kuwamura <juk@rccm.co.jp>
	* Maarten is Maarten Boekhold <maartenb@dutepp0.et.tudelft.nl>
 	* Marc is Marc Fournier <scrappy@hub.org>
 	* Martin is Martin S. Utesch <utesch@aut.tu-freiberg.de>
	* Massimo Dal Zotto <dz@cs.unitn.it>
	* Michael is Michael Meskes <meskes@debian.org>
	* Oleg is Oleg Bartunov <oleg@sai.msu.su>
	* Paul is Paul M. Aoki <aoki@CS.Berkeley.EDU>
	* Peter is Peter T Mount <peter@retep.org.uk>
	* Phil is Phil Thompson <phil@river-bank.demon.co.uk>
	* Ryan is Ryan Kirkpatrick <rkirkpat@nag.cs.colorado.edu>
	* Soo-Ho Ok <shok@detc.dongeui-tc.ac.kr>
	* Stefan Simkovics <ssimkovi@rainbow.studorg.tuwien.ac.at>
	* Sven is Sven Verdoolaege <skimo@breughel.ufsia.ac.be>
	* Tatsuo is Tatsuo Ishii <t-ishii@sra.co.jp>
	* Tom is Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	* Thomas is Thomas Lockhart <tgl@mythos.jpl.nasa.gov>
	* TomH is Tom I Helbekkmo <tih@Hamartun.Priv.NO>
	* Vadim is "Vadim B. Mikheev" <vadim@sable.krasnoyarsk.su>

RELIABILITY
-----------
* Overhaul mdmgr/smgr to fix double unlinking and double opens, cleanup
* Overhaul bufmgr/lockmgr/transaction manager
* Remove EXTEND?
* Can lo_export()/lo_import() read/write anywhere, causing a security problem?
* Tables that start with xinv confused to be large objects
* Two and three dimensional arrays display improperly, missing {}
* GROUP BY in INSERT INTO table SELECT * FROM table2 fails
* Prevent auto-table reference, like SELECT table.col WHERE col = 3 (?)
* SELECT a[1] FROM test fails, it needs test.a[1]
* UPDATE table SET table.value = 3 fails
* User who can create databases can modify pg_database table
* optimizer memory exhaustion with many OR's
* elog() does not free all its memory(Jan)
* views on subselects fail
* disallow inherited columns with the same name as new columns
* recover or force failure when disk space is exhausted
* allow UPDATE using aggregate to affect all rows, not just one
* computations in views fail:
	create view test as select usesysid * usesysid from pg_shadow;
* views containing aggregates sometimes fail(Jan)
* ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN does not honor DEFAULT, add CONSTRAINT
* fix memory leak in aborted transactions
* array index references without table name cause problems
* aggregates on array indexes crash backend
* subqueries containing HAVING return incorrect results
* DEFAULT handles single quotes in value by requiring too many quotes
* make CURSOR valid even after you hit end of cursor
* views with spaces in view name fail when referenced
* plpgsql does not handle quoted mixed-case identifiers
* do not allow bpchar column creation without length

ENHANCEMENTS
------------
* Replace table-level locking with row or page-level locking(Vadim)
* Transaction log, so re-do log can be on a separate disk
* Allow transaction commits with rollback with no-fsync performance
* More access control over who can create tables and access the database
* Add full ANSI SQL capabilities
	* add OUTER joins, left and right (Thomas)
	* add INTERSECTS, SUBTRACTS(Stephan)
	* add temporary tables
	* add sql3 recursive unions
	* add the concept of dataspaces
	* add BIT, BIT VARYING
 	* NCHAR (as distinguished from ordinary varchar),
	* DOMAIN capability
* Allow compression of large fields or a compressed field type
* Fix the rules system(Jan,Soo-Ho)
* Large objects
	* Fix large object mapping scheme, own reltype(Peter)
	* Allow large text type to use large objects(Peter)
	* not to stuff everything as files in a single directory
	* Fix large object memory leaks
	* delete orphaned large objects
* Better interface for adding to pg_group
* Make MONEY/DECIMAL have a defined precision
* Fix tables >2G, or report error when 2G size reached
	(fix lseek()/off_t, mdextend()/RELSEG_SIZE)
* Add REGEX internationalization
* allow row re-use without vacuum, maybe?(Vadim)
* Populate backend status area and write program to dump status data
* Add ALTER TABLE DROP/ALTER COLUMN feature
* Add syslog functionality(Marc)
* Add STDDEV/VARIANCE() function for standard deviation computation/variance
* add UNIQUE capability to non-btree indexes
* make number of backends a config parameter, storage/sinvaladt.h:MaxBackendId
* certain indexes will not shrink, i.e. oid indexes with many inserts
* make NULL's come out at the beginning or end depending on the ORDER BY direction
* change the library/backend interface to use network byte order
* Restore unused oid's on backend exit if no one else has gotten oids
* have UPDATE/DELETE clean out indexes
* allow WHERE restriction on ctid
* allow pg_descriptions when creating types, tables, columns, and functions
* Fix compile and security of Kerberos/GSSAPI code
* Allow psql to print nulls as distinct from ""(?)
* Allow INSERT INTO ... SELECT ... FROM view to work
* Make VACUUM on database not lock pg_class
* Make VACUUM ANALYZE only use a readlock
* Allow cursors to be DECLAREd/OPENed/CLOSEed outside transactions
* Allow installation data block size and max tuple size configuration(Darren)
* Allow views on a UNION
* Allow DISTINCT on view
* Allow views of aggregate columns
* Allow variable block sizes(Darren)
* System tables are now more update-able from SQL(Jan)
* New pg_shadow file, pg_user is now a view of pg_shadow(Jan)
* Allow flag to control COPY input/output of NULLs
* Allow CLUSTER on all tables at once, and improve CLUSTER
* Add ELOG_TIMESTAMPS to elog()(?)
* Allow max tuple length to be changed(Darren)
* Have psql with no database name not connect to username as default(?)
* Allow subqueries in target list
* Granting permissions to another user looses permissions for the owner
* Allow queries across multiple databases
* Add replication of distributed databases
* Allow table destruction/alter to be rolled back
* Add pg_attribute.atttypmod/Resdom->restypmod to PGresult structure
* Generate error on CREATE OPERATOR of ~~, ~ and and ~*
* Allow constraint NULL just as we honor NOT NULL
* Add version number in startup banners for psql and postmaster
* Restructure storing of GRANT permission information to allow +-=
* allow psql \copy to allow delimiters
* allow international error message support and add error codes
* allow usernames with dashes(GRANT fails)
* add a function to return the last inserted oid, for use in psql scripts
* allow creation of functional indexes to use default types
* put sort files, large objects in their on directory
* CREATE VIEW myview (name) AS SELECT lname FROM wages fails
* do autocommit so always in a transaction block
* add SIMILAR TO to allow character classes, 'pg_[a-c]%'
* multi-verion concurrency control(Vadim)
* improve reporting of syntax errors by showing location of error in query
* allow chaining of pages to allow >8k tuples
* remove un-needed conversion functions where appropriate
* redesign the function call interface to handle NULLs better(Jan)
* permissions on indexes - prevent them?
* allow multiple generic operators in expressions without the use of parentheses
* document/trigger/rule so changes to pg_shadow create pg_pwd
* improve group handling
* generate postmaster pid file and remove flock/fcntl lock code
* improve PRIMARY KEY handling
* add ability to specifiy location of lock/socket files
* psql \d on index with char()/varchar() fields shows improper length
* disallow LOCK outside a transaction, change message to LOCK instead of DELETE
* Fix roundoff problems in "cash" datatype
* fix any sprintf() overruns
* add portable vsnprintf()
* auto-destroy sequence on SERIAL removal
* CREATE TABLE inside aborted transaction causes stray table file
* allow user to define char1 column

PERFORMANCE
-----------
* Use indexes in ORDER BY for restrictive data sets, min(), max()
* Allow LIMIT ability on single-table queries that have no ORDER BY or 
	a matching index
* Pull requested data directly from indexes, bypassing heap data
* Prevent psort() usage when query already using index matching ORDER BY
* Optimizing disjunctive queries
* Fix bushy-plans
* Prevent fsync in SELECT-only queries
* Cache most recent query plan(s?)
* Shared catalog cache, reduce lseek()'s by caching table size in shared area
* Allow compression of log and meta data
* Add FILLFACTOR to index creation
* update pg_statistic table to remove operator column
* make index creation use psort code, because it is now faster(Vadim)
* remove fork()/exec() of backend and make it just fork()
* Add base table name to \d index
* Allow char() not to use variable-sized header to reduce disk size
* Do async I/O to do better read-ahead of data
* Fix optmizer problem with self-table joins
* Fix memory exhaustion when using many OR's
* Use spin locks only on multi-CPU systems, yield CPU instead
* Get faster regex() code from Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.utoronto.ca>
	when it is available
* use mmap() rather than SYSV shared memory(?)
* use index to restrict rows returned by multi-key index when used with
	non-consecutive keys or OR clauses, so fewer heap accesses
* use index with constants on functions

DOCUMENTATION
-------------
* Update usermanual source(many)
* added features used in grammer but not in docs, like :: and CAST
* Add 'man pgsql' to show all manual page names
* Add use of 'const' for varibles in source tree


=============================================================================

CHANGES IN THE 6.4.1 RELEASE
----------------------------
Add pg_dump -N flag to force double quotes around identifiers.  This is
	the default(Thomas)
Fix for NOT in where clause causing crash(Bruce)
EXPLAIN VERBOSE coredump fix(Vadim)
Fix shared-library problems on Linux
Fix test for table existance to allow mixed-case and whitespace in
	the table name(Thomas)
Fix a couple of pg_dump bugs
Configure matches template/.similar entries better(Tom)
Change builtin function names from SPI_* to spi_*
OR WHERE clause fix(Vadim)
Fixes for mixed-case table names(Billy)
contrib/linux/postgres.init.csh/sh fix(Thomas)
libpq memory overrun fix
SunOS fixes(Tom)
Change exp() behavior to generate error on underflow(Thomas)
pg_dump fixes for memory leak, inheritance constraints, layout change
update pgaccess to 0.93
Fix prototype for 64-bit platforms
Multi-byte fixes(Tatsuo)
New ecpg man page
Fix memory overruns(Tatsuo)
Fix for lo_import() crash(Bruce)
Better search for install program(Tom)
Timezone fixes(Tom)
HPUX fixes(Tom)
Use implicit type coersion for matching DEFAULT values(Thomas)
Add routines to help with single-byte (internal) character type(Thomas)
Compilation of libpq for Win32 fixes(Magnus)
Upgrade to PyGreSQL 2.2(D'Arcy)