== Postgres Weekly News - January 20 2008 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== Postgres Weekly News - January 20 2008 ==

PostgreSQL has won Developer.com's Product of the Year 2008.
http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/10925_3721761_1

IT-PUG has signed an open letter to the Italian Ministry
http://www.gabrielebartolini.it/blog/index.php?/archives/40-IT-PUG-signs-a-letter-to-the-Italian-Ministry.html

== Postgres Product News ==

DBD::Pg 2.0.0_5 (RC5) released.
http://search.cpan.org/~dbdpg/DBD-Pg/Pg.pm

PGCluster-1.5.0rc17 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgcluster/

pg_proboscis 0.9.3 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/python/

IT-PUG has created a documentation search plugin for Firefox.
http://www.itpug.org/index.en.html

Visual SQL Builder Pre-Alpha 0.3 released, and needs contributors and testers.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vsqlbuilder

== Postgres Jobs for January ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-01/threads.php

== Postgres Local ==

NYPUG's first meeting will be at the Skylight Diner
http://skylightdinernyc.com/ January 22 7:30pm
RSVP to josh <AT> postgresql.org.

The European PostgreSQL User Group will elect a new board of
directors.  If you want to suggest a candidate or for the voting rules
look at:
http://www.pgug.eu/election.txt

What's new in PostgreSQL 8.3 - Breakfast with Bruce Momjian
24th January 2008 - London.  Email below to get in.
info.emea <AT> enterprisedb.com

Prague PostgreSQL Developers' Day 2008 will be on February 13th.
http://www.dbsvet.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2008011101

PGCon 2008 will be May 20-23 in Ottawa - now accepting proposals.
http://www.pgcon.org/2008/papers.php

The BSD and PostgreSQL teams share a developer room at FOSDEM 2008 in
Brussels February 23-34, 2008.  If you want to give a talk or help
managing the dev room, contact fosdem@pgug.eu.  For more information,
see:
https://www.bsdwiki.de/FOSDEM_2008

PostgreSQL Conference East '08 talks are March 29 and 30 at the
University of Maryland, College Park.  The Call for Papers is open.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

FISL 9.0 will be happening April 17-19, 2008 at PUCRS in Porto Alegre,
Brazil.
https://fisl.softwarelivre.org/9.0/

== 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
and Robert Treat.

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 ==

Michael Meskes committed:

- In ecpg, set valid return values even in case of an error to prevent
  segfaults.

- In ecpg, re-enabled variables in fetch/move command.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/autovacuum.c, mark autovacuum
  entries in pg_stat_activity so that they can be easily distinguished
  from user-invoked commands.  Per suggestion from Tom Lane.

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/autovacuum.c, backpatch my fix of
  rev 1.48 to avoid a division-by-zero error in the cost-limit vacuum
  code.  Per trouble report from Joshua Drake.

Tom Lane committed:

- Fix an ancient oversight in libpq's handling of V3-protocol COPY OUT
  mode: we need to be able to swallow NOTICE messages, and potentially
  also ParameterStatus messages (although the latter would be a bit
  weird), without exiting COPY OUT state.  Fix it, and adjust the
  protocol documentation to emphasize the need for this.  Per off-list
  report from Alexander Galler.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc.c, avoid cluttering the
  postmaster log with bogus complaints during transaction abort, per
  my note from a couple days ago.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_backup_archiver.c, prevent pg_dump from
  dumping the comment (if any) on the 'public' schema.  This is to
  avoid uselessly requiring superuser permissions to restore the dump
  without errors.  Pretty grotty, but no better alternative seems
  available, at least not in the near term.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/errcodes.sgml, somebody forgot to add the "NOT
  AN XML DOCUMENT" ERRCODE everywhere it should go ...

- In pgsql/src/backend/tsearch/wparser.c, tweak new error message to
  conform to style guidelines.

- Revise memory management for libxml calls.  Instead of keeping
  libxml's data in whichever context happens to be current during a
  call of an xml.c function, use a dedicated context that will not go
  away until we explicitly delete it (which we do at transaction end
  or subtransaction abort).  This makes recovery after an error much
  simpler --- we don't have to individually delete the data structures
  created by libxml.  Also, we need to initialize and cleanup libxml
  only once per transaction (if there's no error) instead of once per
  function call, so it should be a bit faster.  We'll need to keep an
  eye out for intra-transaction memory leaks, though.  Alvaro and Tom.

- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/cluster.c, prevent CLUSTER from
  decreasing a relation's relfrozenxid.  Bug introduced in rewrite to
  make CLUSTER MVCC-safe.

- Be less wishy-washy in the documentation and comments about whether
  a ParameterStatus message can be sent during COPY OUT: it's
  definitely possible, since COPY from a SELECT subquery can trigger
  any user-defined function.

- In pgsql/contrib/start-scripts/osx/PostgreSQL, remove inappropriate
  cd commands, per David Wheeler.  Also make the PATH responsive to
  the installation prefix, which was the apparent intent of the
  previous edit, but not well executed.

- Fix ALTER INDEX RENAME so that if the index belongs to a unique or
  primary key constraint, the constraint is renamed as well.  This
  avoids inconsistent situations that could confuse pg_dump (not to
  mention humans).  We might at some point provide ALTER TABLE RENAME
  CONSTRAINT as a more general solution, but there seems no reason not
  to allow doing it this way too.  Per bug #3854 and related
  discussions.

- Fix pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/plan/subselect.c to avoid assuming
  that a SubLink's testexpr references each subquery output column
  exactly once left-to-right.  Although this is the case in the
  original parser output, it might not be so after rewriting and
  constant-folding, as illustrated by bug #3882 from Jan Mate.
  Instead scan the subquery's target list to obtain needed per-column
  information; this is duplicative of what the parser did, but only a
  couple dozen lines need be copied, and we can clean up a couple of
  notational uglinesses.  Bug was introduced in 8.2 as part of
  revision of SubLink representation.

- Insert into getCopyDataMessage() the same logic that already existed
  in the main code path for enlarging libpq's input buffer in one
  swoop when needing to read a long data message.  Without this, the
  code will double the buffer size, read more data, notice it still
  hasn't got the whole message, and repeat till it finally has a large
  enough buffer.  Which wastes a lot of data-moving effort and also
  memory (since malloc probably can't do anything very useful with the
  freed-up smaller buffers).  Not sure why this wasn't there already;
  certainly the COPY data path is a place where we're quite likely to
  see long data messages.  I'm not backpatching though, since this is
  just a marginal performance issue rather than a real bug.

- In pgsql/src/test/regress/pg_regress.c, make pg_regress clean out
  the testtablespace directory only on Windows.  On other platforms
  it's better to let the Makefile handle it, but we want the
  regression tests to be invokable without make on Windows.  A batch
  file would be a better solution, but no time for that before 8.3.
  Per my discovery that this breaks testing under SELinux, and
  subsequent discussion.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Add to TODO: "Add the ability to automatically create materialized
  views.  Right now materialized views require the user to create
  triggers on the main table to keep the summary table current.  SQL
  syntax should be able to manager the triggers and summary table
  automatically.  A more sophisticated implementation would
  automatically retrieve from the summary table when the main table is
  referenced, if possible."

- In FAQ, most recent Postgres version is 8.2.6, per report from
  Robert Treat.

- Improve usage message for pgindent.

- Update Japanese FAQ.  Jun Kuwamura.

- Stamp release for 8.3RC2;  configure will be stamped by packager.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/tsearch/wparser.c, add check of headline method
  presence.  Per report by Yoshiyuki Asaba.

- In pgsql/src/backend/tsearch/spell.c, fix core dump with
  buffer-overrun from too-long infinitive.  Add checking of using
  fixed length arrays to prevent array's overrun.  Per report by
  Hannes Dorbath and comments by Tom Lane.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- Document the fact that COPY always uses the client encoding.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/pgcrypto.sgml, typo fix per Erik Rijkers.

- Marko Kreen's updates to pgsql/doc/src/sgml/pgcrypto.sgml which
  touch on SHA1, SHA224, SHA256, SHA384 and SHA512 encryption and
  change references to RFC 2440 to RFC 4880.

Marc Fournier committed:

- must commit after autoconf ... and yes, I used the right autoconf

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Tom Lane sent in a revision of Alvaro Herrera's XML memory allocation
patch.