PostgreSQL versions for 1.4

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

Hi all;

PostgreSQL 8.2 has reached it's official end of life, meaning that now 8.4 should, I think, be the minimum version we should be targetting for any and all new development (including add-ons).  There are a number of cases where performance is currently limited by us trying to support PostgreSQL 8.3, and the biggest example here is the rendering of the menu.

9.2 is on its way soon, and has a few features we will probably find extremely useful as we get there.  In particular the native JSON support might be useful as a replacement for native Pg representation of nested types.  I don't see that we can even think about requiring 9.2 for 1.4, however, since it will be in beta most of the time we are developing.  However, I would like to consider looking at this for 1.5 despite the fact that it is a big jump.

The reason here is that parsing/formatting complex data types for PostgreSQL is a pain, and currently DBD::Pg is not able to pick this up.  We could probably standardize on XML at present, but JSON might be better long-run.

What do people think?  Obviously any discussion right now needs to be pretty tentative.

Best Wishes,

Chris Travers