Google Summer of Code 2020 started

ThePostgreSQL Project participates in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020, with 3 projects. After the “Community Bonding” period finished last week , we are now in the active development phase - “Coding” as Google calls it. All three projects make good progress!

Performance Farm

The project defined a number of milestones, and evaluated the current database structure. Modifications are required on this front, and will be applied over the following days. Also the structure for sending data from the client to the project server is re-evaluated and modified. The student started with the database design modifications, and also with documenting the changes and terminology used.

PL/Java build system

Thanks to the ongoing work setting up the continuous integration, PL/Java's master branch - which will become the 1.6 release - is now getting regular CI builds against several PostgreSQL and Java versions on amd64 Ubuntu and Mac OS X, and the student has moved on to setting up the same for Windows. We had a goal to enable test options in the CI builds that were otherwise impractically strict, and identify ways to filter the output down to a manageable volume which is exposing real issues. Through a combination of fixes to some real PL/Java warnings, and a small state machine now keeping known non-PL/Java ones out of the log, the project now builds -Xcheck:jni clean. The first actual bug found through the students work got fixed before the bonding period ended - the bug had been there for fifteen years.

The later part of the work will involve more straight-up coding, to replace a Maven plugin now used in PL/Java's build that isn't quite suited to the need. The proposal outlined a few reasons for that and the preliminary work has already uncovered more reasons. It was already a goal of that work to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of diagnostics from that plugin, so already solving a similar problem for -Xcheck:jni was a good warmup.

WAL-G performance

First 2 weeks are going almost as we planned, the student started working on the first task during the phase of proposals. In the first week he updated his PR and we merged it. The first feature already works. This week he updated it with several improvements (mostly refactorings) and started working on test coverage of the first feature and also making some drafts on the second feature. Now we have discussion about design details of the second feature. I hope it will help to implement it according to the current plan.

Thank you to all mentors for the status update!