== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 04 2009 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 04 2009 ==

Happy New Year from the PostgreSQL Weekly News :)

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PyGreSQL 4.0 released.
http://www.PyGreSQL.org/

Devrim GUNDUZ has released another set of snapshot RPMs.  Go forth and
test :)
http://yum.pgsqlrpms.org/news-8.4devel-ready-for-testing.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

SYDPUG will be meeting February 3, 2009 at 6:30pm.  Watch this space
for details.
http://archives.postgresql.org/sydpug/

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum will be presenting a talk at Perl Workshop
2009 on February 25 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
http://www.perl-workshop.de/talks/151/view

PGCon 2009 will be held 21-22 May 2009, in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa.  It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 19-20 May
2009.
http://www.pgcon.org/2009/papers.php

PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in
Campinas, Sao Paulo state.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://planet.postgresql.org/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
and Devrim GUNDUZ.

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:

- First round of whitespace changes to ecpg.  Everything but
  connect-test1 should be fine.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/test/expected/connect-test1.c, finally
  the last test.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/select.sgml, fix thinko in documentation
  of default window frame behavior, per Hitoshi Harada.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/cache/relcache.c, fix oversight in ALTER
  TABLE ENABLE/DISABLE RULE patch: the new enabled field needs to be
  included in equalRuleLocks() comparisons, else updates will fail to
  propagate into relcache entries when they have positive reference
  count (ie someone is using the relcache entry).  Per report from
  Alex Hunsaker.

- Reduce the last group of parallel regression tests to 19 tests, per
  failure on buildfarm member bear.  Sync the test order in
  serial_schedule with that in parallel_schedule.

- Add some basic support for window frame clauses to the
  window-functions patch.  This includes the ability to force the
  frame to cover the whole partition, and the ability to make the
  frame end exactly on the current row rather than its last ORDER BY
  peer.  Supporting any more of the full SQL frame-clause syntax will
  require nontrivial hacking on the window aggregate code, so it'll
  have to wait for 8.5 or beyond.

- Add a WINDOW attribute to CREATE FUNCTION, and teach pg_dump about
  it, so that user-defined window functions are possible.  For the
  moment you'll have to write them in C, for lack of any interface to
  the WindowObject API in the available PLs, but it's better than no
  support at all.  There was some debate about the best syntax for
  this.  I ended up choosing the "it's an attribute" position --- the
  other approach will inevitably be more work, and the likely market
  for user-defined window functions is probably too small to justify
  it.

- Consistently use multi-line formatting for all ACL columns printed
  by psql's various display commands, not only for \z.  In passing,
  fix some infelicities in the newly added \d commands for SQL-MED
  catalogs.  Andreas Scherbaum and Tom Lane

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/describe.c, fix another problem in SQL-MED \d
  displays: should have a clean failure report if the command is
  attempted against an old server.

- Throw error if a <window definition> references a window that
  already has a frame clause, as appears to be required by the fine
  print in the SQL spec.  Per discussion with Pavel, not doing so
  risks user confusion.

- In pgsql/src/backend/tcop/postgres.c, fix an oversight in my patch
  of a couple weeks ago that ensured a snapshot is available during
  datatype input in Bind message processing.  I put the
  PopActiveSnapshot() or equivalent just before PortalDefineQuery,
  which is an unsafe spot for it (in 8.3 and later) because we are
  carrying a plancache refcount that hasn't yet been assigned to the
  portal.  Any error thrown there would result in leaking the
  refcount.  It's not exactly likely that PopActiveSnapshot would
  throw an elog, perhaps, but it could happen.  Reorder the code and
  add another comment warning not to do that.

- Fix a couple of missed copyright dates.

- Tweak guc.c to allow underscores in the names of custom variable
  classes, and change auto_explain's custom GUC variables to be named
  auto_explain.xxx not just explain.xxx.  Per discussion in connection
  with the pg_stat_statements patch, it seems like a good idea to have
  the convention that custom variable classes are named the same as
  their defining module.  Committing separately since this should
  happen regardless of what happens with pg_stat_statements itself.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc.c, write_nondefault_variables
  must take care to write custom_variable_classes first; otherwise
  backends reading the file might reject values of custom variables.
  Per experimentation with auto_explain.

- Create a "shmem_startup_hook" to be called at the end of shared
  memory initialization, to give loadable modules a reasonable place
  to perform creation of any shared memory areas they need.  This is
  the logical conclusion of our previous creation of
  RequestAddinShmemSpace() and RequestAddinLWLocks().  We don't need
  an explicit shmem_shutdown_hook, because the existing on_shmem_exit
  and on_proc_exit mechanisms serve that need.  Also, adjust
  SubPostmasterMain so that libraries that got loaded into the
  postmaster will be loaded into all child processes, not only regular
  backends.  This improves consistency with the non-EXEC_BACKEND
  behavior, and might be necessary for functionality for some types of
  add-ons.

- Allow loadable modules to create PGC_POSTMASTER GUC variables, but
  only when loaded via shared_preload_libraries.  Needed for support
  of pg_stat_statements, or pretty much anything else that wants a GUC
  to control size of a shared memory allocation.

- Add a pg_encoding_mbcliplen() function that is just like
  pg_mbcliplen() except the caller can specify the encoding to work
  in; this will be needed for pg_stat_statements.  In passing, do some
  marginal efficiency hacking and clean up some comments.  Also,
  prevent the single-byte-encoding code path from fetching one byte
  past the stated length of the string (this last is a bug that might
  need to be back-patched at some point).

- Add contrib/pg_stat_statements for server-wide tracking of statement
  execution statistics.  Takahiro Itagaki.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- In pgsql/src/include/access/nbtree.h, the flag to mark dead tuples
  is nowadays called LP_DEAD, not LP_DELETE.  Simon Riggs.

- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/storage.c, fix embarrassing bug in
  recent smgr refactoring patch: WAL records should be written for
  *non*-temp tables only.  Report and test case by Mark Kirkwood and
  Simon Riggs.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/contrib/uuid-ossp/uuid-ossp.c, add comma so this copyright
  notice is picked up in 2010.

- In pgsql/src/tools/copyright, make comma optional for copyright text
  change.

- In pgsql/src/tools/copyright, mention src/interfaces/libpq/libpq.rc.in
  needs to be updated for copyright too.

- In pgsql/src/tools/copyright, be smarter --- accept missing comma,
  and force comma if missing.

Joe Conway committed:

- In pgsql/contrib/dblink/dblink.c, fix bug per Oleksiy Shchukin - 2nd
  argument for dblink_get_result(text,bool) is PG_GETARG_BOOL(2),
  should be PG_GETARG_BOOL(1).  Apply simple fix to back branches
  only.  More extensive change to be applied to head per Tom's
  suggestion.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/include/miscadmin.h, export IsUnderPostmaster on win32.
  ITAGAKI Takahiro

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Jeff Davis sent in an updated of the patch which does B-Tree emulation
for GIN.

Nikhil Sontakke sent in two revisions of a patch which fixes a casting
bug in PL/PgSQL.

KaiGai Kohei sent in two more revisions of his SE-PostgreSQL patches.

Andrew Dunstan sent in another revision of his parallel restore patch.

Alvaro Herrera sent in two more revisions of his reloptions
improvement patch.

Bryce Cutt sent in another revision of the performance improvement for
multi-batch hash joins on skewed data sets.

Kevin Grittner sent in a patch explicating the SERIALIZABLE isolation
level.

Stephen Frost sent in two more revisions of his patch to allow
column-level permissions.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to add a parameter called
include_realm to pg_hba.conf for Kerberos.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to fix lazy_truncate_heap.

Joe Conway sent in two revisions of a patch to integrate SQL/MED
connections with dblink.

Alvaro Herrera sent in two more revisions of his generic reloptions
patch.

Robert Haas sent in another revision of the posix_fadvise patch.

Magnus Hagander sent in another revision of his libpq SSL patch.

Alex Hunsaker sent in a patch based on the reloptions patch to control
three knobs on lz_compression on a per-table basis.