Monday, December 28, 2009

PostgreSQL innovation: Exclusion constraints

It seems like the next generation of PostgreSQL will have a new, rather innovative feature: Exclusion constraints. The feature is explained in a video from a presentation at a recent San Francisco PostgreSQL Users' Group; the presentation couples the new feature with the time period data type.

In a perfect World where databases implement the full ISO SQL standard (including non-core features), exclusion constraints could be nicely expressed as SQL assertions, but the perfect World hasn't happened yet. And I think that I know the reason for this: SQL assertions seem like a strong cocktail of NP-hard problems - they are probably very hard to implement in an efficient way.

In our less than perfect World, it's nice that PostgreSQL will soon offer a way to specify exclusion constraints other than the UNIQUE constraint.

The presenter, Jeff Davis, has an interesting blog, by the way. An on the subject of video, Vimeo has a little collection of PostgreSQL video clips that looks interesting.