== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 08 2007 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 08 2007 ==

Spec jAppserver results are in, and PostgreSQL looks good.
http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q3/

PgDay was a success, including a kick-off meeting for the European
PostgreSQL group.  Check http://www.planetpostgresql.org/ for lots of
details.

== PostgreSQL Jobs for July ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-07/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PDXPUG Day at OSCON is now soliciting for speakers.  Thanks to the
generosity of O'Reilly, we will have a full day of PostgreSQL sessions
the day before OSCON (Sunday, July 22nd).  Change your plane tickets
now and submit at talk!
http://developer.postgresql.org/index.php/OSCON07PGDay

== 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
Andreas (ads) Scherbaum.

Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
Please send English language ones to david@fetter.org, German to
pwn@pgug.de,

== Applied Patches ==

Joe Conway committed:

- Restrict non-superusers to password authenticated connections to
  prevent possible escalation of privilege. Provide new SECURITY
  DEFINER functions with old behavior, but initially REVOKE ALL from
  public for these functions. Per list discussion and design proposed
  by Tom Lane. A different approach will be used for back-branches,
  committed separately.

- Arrange for the authentication request type to be preserved in
  PGconn. Invent a new libpq connection-status function,
  PQconnectionUsedPassword() that returns true if the server demanded
  a password during authentication, false otherwise.  This may be
  useful to clients in general, but is immediately useful to help plug
  a privilege escalation path in dblink.  Per list discussion and
  design proposed by Tom Lane.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Per Magnus Hagander, remove from TODO: "Check
  WSACancelBlockingCall() for interrupts [win32intr]"

Jan Wieck committed:

- Changed new \usleep command into \sleep with an optional time unit
  argument to specify us, ms or s per suggestion by Peter Eisentraut.

- Added a new scripting meta command \usleep [milliseconds|:variable]
  which can be used in -f scripts to insert a thinking time between
  other commands.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Yoshiyuki Asaba's patch which moves parse.h into src/backend on
  msvc, which is where it is on Unix.  Fixes builds from tarballs
  where the file is pre-generated.

- Dave Page's patch which fixes the -w (wait) option to work in
  Windows service mode, per bug #3382, prevents the -w option being
  passed to the postmaster, and reads the postmaster options file when
  starting as a Windows service.

Tom Lane committed:

- Get rid of client-code dependencies on the exact text of the
  no-password error message, by using PQconnectionUsedPassword()
  instead.  Someday we might be able to localize that error message,
  but not until this coding technique has disappeared everywhere.

- Closer code review for PQconnectionUsedPassword() patch: in
  particular, not OK to include postgres_fe.h into libpq-fe.h, hence
  declare it as returning int not bool.

- Fix broken markup.

- Fix a couple of planner bugs introduced by the new ability to
  discard ORDER BY <constant> as redundant.  One is that this means
  query_planner() has to canonicalize pathkeys even when the query
  jointree is empty; the canonicalization was always a no-op in such
  cases before, but no more.  Also, we have to guard against thinking
  that a set-returning function is "constant" for this purpose.  Add a
  couple of regression tests for these evidently under-tested cases.
  Per report from Greg Stark and subsequent experimentation.

- Fix up hash functions for datetime datatypes so that they don't take
  unwarranted liberties with int8 vs float8 values for these types.
  Specifically, be sure to apply either hashint8 or hashfloat8
  depending on HAVE_INT64_TIMESTAMP.  Per my gripe of even date.

- Improve description of SPI_scroll_cursor_move's return values, per a
  gripe by Pavel Stehule awhile ago.

- Fix incorrect comment about the timing of AbsorbFsyncRequests()
  during checkpoint.  The comment claimed that we could do this
  anytime after setting the checkpoint REDO point, but actually
  BufferSync is relying on the assumption that buffers dumped by other
  backends will be fsync'd too.  So we really could not do it any
  sooner than we are doing it.

- Fix failure to restart Postgres when Linux kernel returns EIDRM for
  shmctl().  This is a Linux kernel bug that apparently exists in
  every extant kernel version: sometimes shmctl() will fail with EIDRM
  when EINVAL is correct.  We were assuming that EIDRM indicates a
  possible conflict with pre-existing backends, and refusing to start
  the postmaster when this happens.  Fortunately, there does not seem
  to be any case where Linux can legitimately return EIDRM (it doesn't
  track shmem segments in a way that would allow that), so we can get
  away with just assuming that EIDRM means EINVAL on this platform.
  Per reports from Michael Fuhr and Jon Lapham --- it's a bit
  surprising we have not seen more reports, actually.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

ITAGAKI Takahiro's patch intended to fix the pgstat_drop_relation bug
on the grounds that it introduces relation OIDs into a level of the
system that should only be dealing in relfilenodes.

== Pending Patches ==

Zdenek Kotala submitted a patch which renames createdb createlang
createuser dropdb droplang dropuser clusterdb vacuumdb and reindexdb
to pg_createdb pg_createlang pg_createuser pg_dropdb pg_droplang
pg_dropuser pg_clusterdb pg_vacuumdb and pg_reindexdb respectively.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch to track buffer allocation statistics
using new LRU method base code.