Monday 7 December 2009

New PostgreSQL Committers

Just a few minutes ago I posted the announcement below, telling the world that we've added some new committers to the PostgreSQL project. The project is extremely conservative when it comes to the source code as we're completely paranoid about breaking anything, however some have argued that we're perhaps too careful in this regard, and that our conservatism may actually be a bottleneck to the project.

Whilst the actual act of committing a change certainly isn't a bottleneck (after all, how long does it take to type 'cvs commit -m "Cool new feature from Joe"'?), the real bottleneck is in the review process, part of which involves one of our committers taking ownership of each patch, and guiding it through the final stages of the process. As patches become more and more complex, that can take more and more time - for (an extreme) example, Heikki has been reviewing Simon's Hot Standby patch for over a year now, as they refine the design and get it to a state where its ready to be committed to the main source tree. Of course, once a patch is committed, that's not necessarily the end. The committers will also take care of any post-commit cleanup, or other problems that may become apparent with any change, such as portability issues which may be highlighted by the buildfarm.

By increasing the pool of committers, we hope to ease that problem, and speed up the final stages involved in getting changes into PostgreSQL - and as all the new committers are experts with the PostgreSQL source code and work consistently to very high standards we're absolutely certain that the project's high standards will be maintained.


On behalf of the core team, I'm pleased to announce that the PostgreSQL Project has expanded it's team of "committers", those people who are able to make direct changes to the PostgreSQL source code respository. As the project is extremely conservative about any changes made to the source code to minimise the risk of introducing any bugs, commit access is only given to contributors who have consistently shown they work to a very high standard and have shown commitment to the project.

The new committers are:

Robert Haas: Robert developed the commitfest.postgresql.org website which is used to manage the process by which features are added to PostgreSQL. He has twice acted as commitfest manager, and submitted numerous patches such as join removal, auto-generation of headers & bki files and the TRUNCATE privilege.

Simon Riggs: Simon is well know for working on large enterprise features for PostgreSQL, including Point In Time Recovery and partitioning. Simon is currently working on allowing PITR slave servers to be used for read-only queries.

Greg Stark: Greg has worked on low-level features in PostgreSQL, including asynchronous pre-fetching of data and packed variable length data types. Greg was also responsible for the CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY feature.

ITAGAKI Takahiro: ITAGAKI-san has worked on countless patches for PostgreSQL, both fixing bugs and writing new features, recently including WHEN clauses for triggers, a buffer usage feature for EXPLAIN and a new implementation of VACUUM FULL.

Congratulations!

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