== Postgres Weekly News - November 18 2007 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== Postgres Weekly News - November 18 2007 ==

PGCon 2008 Call for Papers starts December 19.  Start your papers now.
http://www.pgcon.org/2008/papers.php

8.3 Beta 3 will be out soon.  Keep testing!

Continuent has donated two servers to PostgreSQLFr and two others for
the upcoming PostgreSQL Europe group.  Dalibo will be hosting all
four, just as it has hosted PostgreSQLFr since 2005.

The PostgreSQL Project needs regional contacts!  Share the fame and
excitement by helping us get the news about the 8.3 release to press
and communities in your area.  Particularly needed are contacts in
India, Africa, Southeast Asia, Mexico and the Pacific Islands.
Contact josh@postgresql.org to volunteer.

== Postgres Product News ==

Lightning Admin Version 1.3.4 build 44 released.
http://www.amsoftwaredesign.com/down_loads

pgloader 2.2.3 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgloader/

Slony-I 1.2.12 released.
http://slony.info/

== Postgres Jobs for November ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-11/threads.php

== Postgres Local ==

Josh Berkus will be speaking at FOSS.IN.  Help make the BoF great!
http://www.foss.in/

PgCon.BR will take place in Sao Paulo December 7-8.
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/index.en.html

== Postgres in the News ==

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

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

Postgres Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter

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

== Applied Patches ==

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/initdb/initdb.c, fix inconsistent message wording,
  and split off a couple of duplicated strings.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- Fix tsvectorout() and tsqueryout() to escape backslesh, add test of
  that.  Patch by Bruce Momjian.  Backpatch is needed, but it's
  impossible to apply it directly.

- Backpatch: Fix tsvector_out() and tsquery_out() to escape backslesh,
  add test of that.  Patch by Bruce Momjian.

Marc Fournier committed:

- Update files for beta3

- Remove pre-tag checks so that I can tag ...

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_ctl/pg_ctl.c, make synopses of -t option
  consistent.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_dumpall.c, make help synopsis
  consistent.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_ctl/pg_ctl.c, add to synopsis that timeout
  option also applies to stop mode.

- Message improvements in pgsql/src/backend/libpq/auth.c and
  pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/postmaster.c

- Update config.guess and config.sub.

- Translation updates.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c, when logging the
  recovery.conf parameters, show them quoted as they would
  appear in the configuration file.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Add note about deprecating krb5 authentication in favour of GSSAPI,
  per discussions (a long time ago). Documentation only, we keep full
  support in the code.

- Make cvs tagging trigger a replication of the repository just as a
  commit does.

- Clean out a bunch of files in CVSROOT that aren't used anymore (and
  haven't been used for years - in some cases possibly never).

Tom Lane committed:

- I find that an out-of-the-box installation of OSSP uuid 1.6.0
  installs itself as libuuid, not libossp-uuid which was the only case
  expected by our build support.  Install a configure test to
  determine which name to use (and to check that the library is
  present at all).

- Undo damage from yesterday's script "cleanup".

- In pgsql/contrib/adminpack, fix insufficient search-path paranoia in
  SQL function definitions.  Remove setting of search_path in
  install/uninstall scripts, since unlike other contrib modules this
  one does not want to let you change the installation schema.

- In pgsql/contrib/sslinfo, fix more script breakage.

- Fix a few contrib regression test scripts that hadn't gotten the
  word about best practice for including the module creation scripts:
  to wit that you should suppress NOTICE messages.  This avoids
  creating regression failures by adding or removing comment lines in
  the module scripts.

- Replace the now-incompatible-with-core contrib/tsearch2 module with
  a compatibility package.  This supports importing dumps from past
  versions using tsearch2, and provides the old names and API for most
  functions that were changed.  (rewrite(ARRAY[...]) is a glaring
  omission, though.) Pavel Stehule and Tom Lane

- Re-add contrib/tsearch2 to the set of buildable contrib modules.

- Update description of contrib/tsearch2.

- Ooops, missed one file to remove:
  pgsql/contrib/tsearch2/tsearch.sql.in

- Resurrect the code for the rewrite(ARRAY[...]) aggregate function,
  and put it into contrib/tsearch2 compatibility module.

- contrib/tsearch2 need not be special-cased any longer.

- Clean up some stray references to tsearch2.

- Add some quick documentation for tsearch2 compatibility module.

- Clean up some now-obsolete references to GBorg.

- Move contrib docs to an appendix (next door to External Projects).
  Change title to Additional Supplied Modules.  Improve discussion of
  how to build and install 'em.

- Update discussion of tsearch2 migration.  I'm not entirely sure
  about the division of material between here and the tsearch2 contrib
  page, but at least it's not obviously unfinished any more.

- Add an Accept parameter to "simple" dictionaries.  The default of
  true gives the old behavior; selecting false allows the dictionary
  to be used as a filter ahead of other dictionaries, because it will
  pass on rather than accept words that aren't in its stopword list.
  Jan Urbanski

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/bgwriter.c, fix incorrect
  calculation of elapsed_xlogs.  Itagaki Takahiro

- Add a rank/(rank+1) normalization option to ts_rank().  While the
  usefulness of this seems a bit marginal, if it's useful enough to be
  shown in the manual then we probably ought to support doing it
  without double evaluation of the ts_rank function.  Per my proposal
  earlier today.

- Adjust example to reduce confusion between a tsvector column and an
  index, per Simon Riggs.

- Prevent re-use of a deleted relation's relfilenode until after the
  next checkpoint.  This guards against an unlikely data-loss scenario
  in which we re-use the relfilenode, then crash, then replay the
  deletion and recreation of the file.  Even then we'd be OK if all
  insertions into the new relation had been WAL-logged ... but that's
  not guaranteed given all the no-WAL-logging optimizations that have
  recently been added.  Patch by Heikki Linnakangas, per a discussion
  last month.

- Update timezone data files to release 2007i of the zic database.

- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/smgr/md.c, use ftruncate() not
  truncate() in mdunlink.  Seems Windows doesn't support the latter.

- Add snb_ru_init(internal) to list of stub functions in tsearch2
  compatibility module.  Needed to support loading of 8.1-era tsearch2
  configuration data.

- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/smgr/md.c, fix stupid typo in
  recently-added code :-(

- Add a couple of notes pointing out that GIN index build time is very
  sensitive to maintenance_work_mem (something I just learned the hard
  way).

- Re-do configure with autoconf 2.59

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, fix markup that doesn't work in
  HISTORY generation.

- Repair still another bug in the btree page split WAL reduction
  patch: it failed for splits of non-leaf pages because in such pages
  the first data key on a page is suppressed, and so we can't just
  copy the first key from the right page to reconstitute the left
  page's high key.  Problem found by Koichi Suzuki, patch by Heikki.

- GIN index build's allocatedMemory counter needs to be long, not
  uint32.  Else, in a 64-bit machine with maintenance_work_mem set to
  above 4Gb, the counter overflows and we never recognize having
  reached the maintenance_work_mem limit.  I believe this explains
  out-of-memory failure recently reported by Sean Davis.  This is a
  bug, so backpatch to 8.2.

- Improve GIN index build's tracking of memory usage by using
  GetMemoryChunkSpace, not just the palloc request size.  This brings
  the allocatedMemory counter close enough to reality (as measured by
  MemoryContextStats printouts) that I think we can get rid of the
  arbitrary factor-of-2 adjustment that was put into the code
  initially.  Given the sensitivity of GIN build to work memory size,
  not using as much of work memory as we're allowed to seems a pretty
  bad idea.

- Remove no-longer-accurate claim that REINDEX won't invalidate cached
  plans.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/high-availability.sgml, change replication
  chart title to "No waiting for multiple servers".

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/high-availability.sgml, no master server
  overhead for middleware replication.

- Adjust script to be consistent (thanks Tom for the fix).

- Add CVS version labels to all install/uninstall scripts in contrib/.

- In pgsql/contrib/ltree/expected/ltree.out, adjust expected file for
  new CVS version label.

- In pgsql/config/install-sh, modify OS/X Darin test to actually work,
  (no $template)

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/high-availability.sgml, add link to Postgres-R
  glossary from our documentation (has helpful terms defined).

- In pgsql/config/install-sh, again properly fix Darwin strip.

- Update release notes to current CVS.

- In FAQ, remove reference to gborg, instead reference pgfoundry.

- In FAQ_DEV, refer to pgfoundry instead of gborg.

- FAQ markup cleanup.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, properly capitalize "Migrate To
  Version";  seems we always had that wrong.

- Capitalize "Migration to Version".

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, mention that GSSAPI is preferred
  over Kerberos authentication because GSSAPI is industry-standard.

- Document that /contrib/tsearch2 now contains a compatibility
  interface.

- Add more detail for non-TEXT cast release item.

- pgindent run for 8.3.

- Add blank lines to pgindent.

- Update pgindent with current typedefs.

- Update pgtools README to be clearer about typdefs.

- Update README to suggest 'gmake distclean'.  Add library typedefs.

- In pgsql/src/tools/pgindent/README, beef up README instructions,
  again.

- Re-run pgindent with updated list of typedefs.  (Updated README
  should avoid this problem in the future.)

- Fix pgindent to properly handle 'else' and single-line comments on
  the same line;  previous fix was only partial.  Re-run pgindent on
  files that need it.

- Modify LOOPBYTE/LOOPBIT macros to be more logical;  rather than have
  the for() body passed as a parameter, make the macros act as simple
  headers to code blocks.  This allows pgindent to be run on these
  files.

- Cleanup for new else/comment handling.

- Run pgindent on remaining files now that LOOPBYTE is a usable macro.

- Better guard token used by pgindent.

- Small comment spacing improvement.

- Add FAQ items about "Postgres" alias usage, remove old reference.

- Simplify wording in FAQ.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, add release note that "Postgres"
  is now documented as an acceptable alias.

- Fix a few mentions of "Postgres" that slipped into the release
  notes.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, simplify TEXT cast working;
  spelling fixes to release notes.

- Wordsmith improvements to first half of release notes, move TEXT
  cast item to #1 incompatibility slot.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

Greg Sabino Mullane's patch to change the default_statistics_target
setting from 10 to 100, pending testing.

Peter Eisentraut's patch to make psql -f complain if the -f is
actually a directory.  "Too far from the scene of the crime."

== Pending Patches ==

Simon Riggs sent in a patch which adds Postgres dialects for
Hibernate.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch which clarifies the name of the column
used in the text search index example so everybody is clear it is a
column name.

Zdenek Kotala sent in two more versions of his patch to remove
pg_dump's dependency on postgres.h.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in a patch to fix a misbehavior where loading
the output of pg_dump -n does not put the schema back in place.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix ANALYZE's over-counting dead rows.