This page is a free-form list of various ideas for projects to work on at the Postgres Code Sprint. If you have an idea for a project, feel free to add it to the list below, and create a sub-page for the project if needed. If you'd like to comment on a project, go right ahead; if think you might be interested in working on the project at the sprint, add your name to the project's description.

Per Tom, a good rule of thumb might be to limit code sprint projects to ideas where community input isn't warranted (because the feature is straightforward), or ideas for which a proposal has already been sent to the community, and a consensus has been reached about how the feature ought to behave.

Another source of good project ideas is the PostgreSQL TODO list, linked below.

Neilc is interested in working on:

• Make the int8 type pass-by-value on 64-bit platforms

• Implement CORRESPONDING BY, per SQL:2003
• Consider using profile-guided optimization with recent versions of GCC
• Generalize the planner knobs
• Inline set-returning SQL functions
• Fix ordering of function table entries in docs
  

Neilc's project ideas for anyone who's interested:

• Implement UNIQUE predicate, per SQL:2003
• Implement CREATE TABLE LIKE composite_type
• Improve schema browsing in psql
• Add a psql option to have it submit SELECT queries via a cursor, to avoid excessive memory consumption when manipulating large result sets (<- I'll look a bit into this (too shy to touch the backend :) - if you're doing this too, let me know, Chris Mair)
  
• Finish INSERT ... RETURNING patch
• Implement INSERT with multiple VALUES, per SQL:2003
  
• Implement UNIQUE for hash indexes
• Finish patch for column-level triggers
  
• Enumerating each of the outstanding patches on Bruce's list, and applying or rejecting each of them

Gavin's suggestions:

• Improving contended LWLocks
• Preparing for 8.2
• Make use of posix_fadvise for heap/index relations

Larry Rosenman's suggestion:

• create unsigned integer type(s) (int2, int4 & int8).
  

Greg's suggestions and notes:

• Will probably work on: column-level triggers, CREATE OR REPLACE enhancements
• May work on: INSERT with multiple VALUES
• Finalize my pg_dump patch
  
• postgresql.conf analyzer
  
• Asynchronous DBD::Pg
• Improved logging of prepared statements
• Overhaul of logging to allow fine granularity per database/user/subsection/etc.
• More tid operators

alvherre's suggestions:

• Will probably work on: finishing the relminxid patch
• May work on: autovacuum maintenance-window feature
• May work on: COPY (query) TO feature
  
• Having BEGIN not start a transaction right away, but rather wait until the serial snapshot is set
• Deferred UNIQUE constraints
• Enhance pg_dump to support dumping multiple tables
  

Devrim will work on:

• Enable multiple versions of PostgreSQL RPMs to be installed to the same server. Currently we do not allow that.

Hannu Krosing :

• WAL progress reporting for up-to ms log-shipping
  
• pg_dump instrumentation for structured splitting of dump file
• add ctid to non-unique indexes when ordering + implement non-locking CREATE INDEX and REINDEX
• discuss "ARCHIVE TABLES" + index-only queries.
• haggle about getting CONCURRENT VACUUM into backend
• add throttling knobs to more "maintenance" commands in addition to vacuum. Depending on context, "maintenance" commands can be DELETE, CREATE INDEX, UPDATE, COPY, INSERT ... SELECT FROM ..., CREATE TABLE ... AS SELECT ...,
• tunability of new tuple placement (both insert and update)
• clustering by set of bitmap indexes
• TOAST tuples should be accessed by CTID
  
• CICS

Relevant links:

• PostgreSQL TODO List