For the 13th year, the PostgreSQL Project is participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC). This project is a great opportunity to let students learn about Open Source projects, and help them deliver new features. It is also a chance to engage the students beyond just one summer, and grow them into active contributors.
In GSoC, students first learn about the Open Source organization, and either pick a summer project from the list provided by the org, or submit their own idea for review. After a “community bonding” period, the students have time to implement their idea, under supervision of mentors from the Open Source organization. There is also an incentive: first, Google pays the students for their work on improving Open Source projects. And second, having a completed GSoC project in a CV is well recognized.
In 2019 the PostgreSQL Project got 5 slots for 5 student projects allocated. The mentors will help students work on these ideas:
- ARTful Buffer Manager (evaluate and implement an adaptive radix tree as an alternative to the current PostgreSQL buffer manager)
- de-TOAST’ing using an iterator (Use an iterator to decompress TOASTed values, which allows to extract only required parts of the compressed entry, and thus save CPU cycles)
- Develop Performance Farm Database and Website (implement a website and a database for the performance farm)
- pgAdmin 4 Query Tool Automatic Mode Detection (update the pgAdmin 4 UI to enable/disable editing results based on the query)
- WAL-G Safety Features (add safety features to WAL-G)
The next steps are “community bonding” until end of May, and then the students have until mid of August to work on their projects.