Besides doing a bunch of things to finally make views useful, ALTER SYSTEM looks especially interesting to me—it seems like it could allow for Database-as-a-Service Postgres instances (e.g. RDS, Heroku Postgres) to be stood up with "conventional defaults", and then configured "online" by their consuming application as part of its migrations. No more deploy-time DBParameterGroup fiddling.
How many releases before JSON/JSONB support becomes stable? Looks like a lot of changes in this area.
It also looks like a lot of performance improvements have arrived. With the article the other day about how an intern found a 4x speed improvements for SELECT queries, it gives me hope that amazingly postgresql still has plenty of room to be sped up.
Just the SSL ECDH key exchange alone should dramatically improve the speed to fetch data. Also, pg_prewarm should reduce the time of the first queries to hit the database once a DB is restarted.
Looks like some NOSQL/Document databases can be replaced with postgresql quite nicely.
Whilst there are some improvements in the full text search, it seems things like SOLR are safe... for now.
It's nice to see more steps towards multi-master too.
I'm really hoping to see out of the box multi-master myself, not to mention I think that with the improved JSON/JSONB formats, that PLV8 will become more important in this space.
With multi-master (or a better failover strategy in general), I can potentially drop MongoDB in favor of PostgreSQL, what has kept me from it is the HA strategy has been missing from the open/free/libre version, and the commercial support is cost prohibitive imho.
Besides doing a bunch of things to finally make views useful, ALTER SYSTEM looks especially interesting to me—it seems like it could allow for Database-as-a-Service Postgres instances (e.g. RDS, Heroku Postgres) to be stood up with "conventional defaults", and then configured "online" by their consuming application as part of its migrations. No more deploy-time DBParameterGroup fiddling.