== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 05 2006 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 05 2006 ==

Ron Peterson created a set of PostgreSQL functions which implement the
extended set of digest and hashing functions from Nikos
Mavroyanopoulos and Sascha Schumann's Mhash library.
http://mhash.sourceforge.net/
http://www.yellowbank.com/code/PostgreSQL/y_mhash/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Commandprompt now supports Slony-I.
http://www.commandprompt.com/

pgAdmin III 1.6 Release Candidate 1 is out
http://www.pgadmin.org/download/

pg_migrator, which does some kinds of in-place upgrades between
PostgreSQL versions, is out.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pg-migrator/

ZybaCafe 4.0alpha internet cafe management software released.
http://zybacafe.silentcoder.co.za

== PostgreSQL Jobs for November ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-11/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The PostgreSQL 8.2beta2 manual is now available in French.
Please write to Guillaume Lelarge (gleu) guillaume@lelarge.info with
any corrections.
http://docs.postgresqlfr.org/pgsql-8.2.0-fr/

== 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 ==

Tom Lane committed:

- In the cluster docs, Add note about space usage of 'manual' approach
  to clustering, per suggestion from Sergey Koposov.  Also some other
  minor editing.

- Correct documentation error: in 8.1 and 8.2, %p in archive and
  restore command strings inserts relative not absolute path of file
  to process.  This is a side-effect of 2005-07-04 change that makes
  the server use relative paths in general.  Noted by Bernd Helmle.

- In 7.4-8.1, fix "failed to re-find parent key" btree VACUUM failure
  by tweaking _bt_pagedel to recover from the failure: just search the
  whole parent level if searching to the right fails.  This does
  nothing for the underlying problem that index keys became
  out-of-order in the grandparent level.  However, we believe that
  there is no other consequence worse than slightly inefficient
  searching, so this narrow patch seems like the safest solution for
  the back branches.

- In 8.2-to-be, fix "failed to re-find parent key" btree VACUUM
  failure by revising page deletion code to avoid the case where an
  upper-level btree page remains "half dead" for a significant period
  of time, and to block insertions into a key range that is in process
  of being re-assigned to the right sibling of the deleted page's
  parent.  This prevents the scenario reported by Ed L.  wherein index
  keys could become out-of-order in the grandparent index level.

- pg_restore failed on tar-format archives if they contained large
  objects (blobs) with comments, per bug #2727 from Konstantin
  Pelepelin.  Mea culpa for not having tested this case.  Back-patch
  to 8.1; prior branches don't dump blob comments at all.

- Update zic database to tzdata2006n.

- In psql docs, fix the misstatement about the results of using -1
  with BEGIN.

Neil Conway committed:

- Simon Riggs's patch which adds text to the VACUUM, REINDEX, DROP
  TABLESPACE and CREATE TABLESPACE reference pages documenting that
  these commands cannot be used within a transaction block.  Also make
  some minor improvements to the psql reference page.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In configure, code the unknown options check without using m4
  diversions.  Otherwise this code relies on the checking macro
  actually being called at the end, or the automatic undiversion will
  produce garbage.  These sort of implicit side-effects undermine the
  modularity of the macros and happen to break the ODBC driver which
  makes use of them.  Also put the warnings at the very end of
  configure, so there is an even better chance of seeing them.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- Add description of new features to tsearch2 docs.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Marc Munro submitted a patch against xfunc.sgml which adds a new
subsection 33.9.12, Shared Memory and LWLocks in C-Language Functions,
describing how shared memory and lwlocks may be requested by C add-in
functions.

Tom Lane submitted a patch designed to remove a memory leak from
PL/PgSQL in the case of SPI subtransactions.

Neil Conway sent in a patch to fix a small error in LDAP auth.

Tom Lane sent in a patch for the tuple freezing issues being discussed
on -hackers including work by Heikki and Simon.