Accepted Google Summer of Code projects 2013

This year's accepted Google Summer of Code projects have been published. Among them are 3 accepted proposals for PostgreSQL which not only will be fine addition to PostgreSQL's set of features, but also helps introduce new students to our community for hopefully long-term contributions.

The projects that will be worked on are:

Cube extension improvement (Stas Kelvich)

Indexes on the cube data type (in the "cube" extension) tend to be on the large size, meaning maintenance of and accessing these indexes is expensive. The improvements this project aims to implement are in reducing the cost of indexes on cube data by using r-tree structures. In addition to this, PostgreSQL's relatively new K-Nearest Neighbour framework would serve to allow the creation of ordering operators for retrieving sorted data directly from the index, and ordering operators for kNN with different spatial norms.

UPDATE ... RETURNING OLD (Karol Trzcionka)

PostgreSQL can perform UPDATE statements and return the new row by using the RETURNING clause and referencing the columns you want. This project would introduce NEW and OLD aliases to provide the ability to reference not just the new row but also the old. This would allow for a before/after comparison of data.

Efficient KNN search through high-dimensional indexing with iDistance (Mike Schuh)

This will introduce a new indexing algorithm that utilises a high-dimensional space leading to more efficient K-nearest neighbour searches. Such indexes are an advantage over b-tree and r-tree which degrade with a modest increase in dimensions, whereas the iDistance algorithm has been demonstrated to remain well-performing and efficient.

Of course our students won't be left to work in isolation; they will also receive guidance from established community members specifically assigned to mentor them. We welcome Stas, Karol and Mike to the community, and hope not only that they are successful in their projects, but that they continue to contribute beyond this year's Google Summer of Code. Also thanks to Alexander Korotkov, David Fetter and Stephen Frost who will mentor this year's students. It's worth noting that Alexander was actually a GSoC student last year whose work on indexing on ranges made it into the upcoming 9.3 release.