== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 24 2006 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 24 2006 ==

PostgreSQL 8.2 beta1 is out.  Testers, start your engines :)

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Talend Beta2, a new open source ETL tool, is available.
http://www.talend.com/downloads-talend.htm

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-09/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Everything this week was global.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
and Dave Page.

== Applied Patches ==

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- David Fuhry's documentation improvements on GIN.

- Add comments about STORAGE option for GIN

- Fix table's caption

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Add URL to the TODO list in the section on allowing DEFERRABLE and
  end-of-statement UNIQUE constraints.

- Move 8.2 release documentation into SGML.

- Updates to the release notes from Jim Nasby.

- Properly mention in the release notes that fillfactor controls both
  heap and indexes.

- Reorder 8.2 release note items more logically.

- Add Laurenz Albe's shared linking information to AIX FAQ.

- Dashed items in the TODO are now for 8.3.

- Remove completed TODO items.

- Add URL to TODO for domain casting.

- Update release notes to use scaron instead of numeric code for
  entity.

- First try at a major features list for 8.2.

- Update major release note items.

- Update release notes to be current as of CVS today.

Tom Lane committed:

- Add built-in userlock manipulation functions to replace the former
  contrib functionality.  Along the way, remove the USER_LOCKS
  configuration symbol, since it no longer makes any sense to try to
  compile that out.  No user documentation yet ... mmoncure has
  promised to write some.  Thanks to Abhijit Menon-Sen for creating a
  first draft to work from.

- Documentation for VALUES lists.  Gavin Sherry and Tom Lane.

- Fix problems with column name list of CREATE TABLE AS being applied
  to the input query's target list too soon, causing it to affect
  processing of ORDER BY in the input query.

- Albe Laurenz's updated patch for dynamic linking on AIX.

- Improve usage of effective_cache_size parameter by assuming that all
  the tables in the query compete for cache space, not just the one we
  are currently costing an indexscan for.

- Merlin Moncure's documentation for new in-core advisory lock
  functions.

- Fix bogus markup.

- Fix free space map to correctly track the total amount of FSM space
  needed even when a single relation requires more than max_fsm_pages
  pages.  Also, make VACUUM emit a warning in this case, since it
  likely means that VACUUM FULL or other drastic corrective measure
  is needed.  Per reports from Jeff Frost and others of unexpected
  changes in the claimed max_fsm_pages need.

- Joachim Wieland's patch which updates timezone documentation to
  reflect current reality: instead of giving tables of known timezone
  names, refer the user to the system views.

- Fix pg_locks view to call advisory locks advisory locks, while
  preserving backward compatibility for anyone using the old userlock
  code that's now on pgfoundry --- locks from that code still show as
  'userlock'.

- Fix bugs in plpgsql and ecpg caused by assuming that isspace() would
  only return true for exactly the characters treated as whitespace
  by their flex scanners.  Per report from Victor Snezhko and
  subsequent investigation.  Also fix a passel of unsafe usages of
  <ctype.h> functions, that is, ye olde char-vs-unsigned-char issue.

- Change a temporary buffer from static char[128] to char[256].

- Magnus Hagander's patch which fixes incorrect mapping of fopen mode
  'a' in recently-added code to make fopen work safely on Windows.

- Cause pg_regress to invoke the temporary postmaster as 'postgres'
  not 'postmaster', so as not to depend on the existence of the
  postmaster symlink.  Also, implement postmaster-still-alive and
  postmaster-kill operations for Windows, per Magnus.

- Magnus Hagander's patch which suppresses useless warning on pre-XP
  versions of Windows.

Neil Conway committed:

- Euler Taveira de Oliveira's patch which makes the order of the
  CASCADE and RESTRICT keywords in the DROP OWNED syntax summary
  consistent with the other SQL reference pages.

- Simon Riggs's patch with some additions and typo fixes for the
  backup documentation.

- A round of copy-editing for the release notes: fix some typos and
  grammatical errors, improve the description of some new features.

- Greg Stark's improvements to the partitioning documentation.

- Simon Riggs's document on how to use psql's --single-transaction
  option to rollback restoring an SQL dump if an error occurs and some
  improvements and copy-edits to the surrounding text.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Updated several parts in particular variable handling.  This work
  was part of Google's Summer of Code.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Add units to the default postgresql.conf.  For the most part, this
  should match what SHOW displays as default value, to make the user
  experience uniform.

- Rearrange yes/no prompting code so that the prompts always show the
  (possibly (un)translated) letters that are actually expected as
  input.  Also reject invalid responses instead of silenty taking them
  as "no."

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Simon Riggs submitted a patch which adds an 'incremental backup'
capability to PostgreSQL via PITR.

Gevik Babakhani submitted an updated patch for the uuid datatype.

Mark Cave-Ayland sent in a first patch for WITH RECURSIVE.