== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 06 2012 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 06 2012 ==

PostgreSQL conference China 2012 will be on June 14-17, 2012 in Beijing.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Pgconfchina2012

PostgreSQL Magazine #01 is out now.
http://pgmag.org/01/

PostgreSQL Turkey User Group is organizing 2nd Turkish PostgreSQL
Conference in Istanbul, on May 12, 2012.  Magnus Hagander will be
giving the keynote.  Please register for free:
http://pgday.PostgreSQL.org.tr/2012/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

ODB 2.0.0, an ORM for C++, supports PostgreSQL.
http://www.codesynthesis.com/pipermail/odb-announcements/2012/000013.html

== PostgreSQL Jobs for May ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2012-05/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PGCon 2012 will be held 17-18 May 2012, in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa.  It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 15-16 May 2012.
http://www.pgcon.org/2012/

PGDay France will be in Lyon on June 7, 2012.
http://www.pgday.fr

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012 will be in Prague, Czech Republic
on October 23-26.  The call for sponsors is open.
http://2012.pgconf.eu/

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

PostgreSQL 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.  Spanish language
to pwn@arpug.com.ar.

== Reviews ==

== Applied Patches ==

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Add comments suggesting usage of git_changelog to generate release
  notes.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f33fe47a9169eec692b80c17ea47bd2f9c261aaf

- Mark git_changelog examples with the proper executable names.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7490c48f1e2c51dce77d33f7fd464e72713679a5

- Remove BSD/OS (BSDi) port.  There are no known users upgrading to
  Postgres 9.2, and perhaps no existing users either.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ebcaa5fcde8411786e3765414465174e6d31c8e6

- Fix psql doc typo.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/768c3affd44d1dcb4e43e2e006c642524714c2a4

- Revert typo fix 768c3affd44d1dcb4e43e2e006c642524714c2a4;  I was
  wrong.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0a3a674b98ebb47e2f4b539a0e284744a7871987

- Document that it is the pgsql version we are matching for psqlrc
  version-specific files, not the server version.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/65b110703b798cdbfa568aa3583caba0ed51b33a

Robert Haas pushed:

- Remove duplicate word in comment.  Noted by Peter Geoghegan.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0d2235a25bc71848c18f551f992b3eed8cec2399

- Tweak psql to print row counts when \x auto chooses non-expanded
  output.  Noah Misch
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9b7a84f2a45322b21b86eb180a869d1ed2937b85

- More duplicate word removal.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e01e66f808fbd161b2714eab34bb9e9d0db0db53

- Further corrections from the department of redundancy department.
  Thom Brown
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1b4998fd44bad9f8ab90e741cadd6519f6c94a44

- Avoid repeated CLOG access from heap_hot_search_buffer.  At the time
  we check whether the tuple is dead to all running transactions,
  we've already verified that it isn't visible to our scan, setting
  hint bits if appropriate.  So there's no need to recheck CLOG for
  the all-dead test we do just a moment later.  So, add
  HeapTupleIsSurelyDead() to test the appropriate condition under the
  assumption that all relevant hit bits are already set.  Review by
  Tom Lane.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/003811042139790a5a479c8264271a3248eda36f

- Add missing parenthesis in comment.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8e0c5195dff70ffc9c132716d0cf7f3eff45e302

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Mark ReThrowError() with attribute noreturn.  All related functions
  were already so marked.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/26471a51fc833e2ce58a2f16f891256d57dd28c6

- Improve markup of cmdsynopsis elements.  Add more markup in
  particular so that the command options appear consistently in
  monospace in the HTML output.  On the vacuumdb reference page,
  remove listing all the possible options in the synopsis.  They have
  become too many now; we have the detailed options list for that.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4266509c577b089627930af39f1dcd2d06b493e9

- Fix display of <command> elements on man pages.  We had changed this
  from the default bold to monospace for all output formats, but for
  man pages, this creates visual inconsistencies, so revert to the
  default for man pages.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/61c84b47619c11e74089cb3160813a4b3c98e6d7

- Remove dead ports.  Remove the following ports: dgux, nextstep,
  sunos4, svr4, ultrix4, and univel.  These are obsolete and not worth
  rescuing.  In most cases, there is circumstantial evidence that they
  wouldn't work anymore anyway.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f2f9439fbfba378cb64cd6e5a046e0184cd542c6

- Even more duplicate word removal, in the spirit of the season
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e9605a039b60350003daf8a5b3c0c10993994b60

- PL/Python: Fix crash in functions returning SETOF and using SPI.
  Allocate PLyResultObject.tupdesc in TopMemoryContext, because its
  lifetime is the lifetime of the Python object and it shouldn't be
  freed by some other memory context, such as one controlled by SPI.
  We trust that the Python object will clean up its own memory.
  Before, this would crash the included regression test case by trying
  to use memory that was already freed.  reported by Asif Naeem,
  analysis by Tom Lane
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/52aa334fcd5a9d230be7e8fb964d94c6c4e63dc7

- doc: Fix for too many brackets in command synopses on man pages.
  The default for the choice attribute of the <arg> element is "opt",
  which would normally put the argument inside brackets.  But the
  DSSSL stylesheets contain a hack that treats <arg> directly inside
  <group> specially, so that <group><arg>-x</arg><arg>-y</arg></group>
  comes out as [ -x | -y ] rather than [ [-x] | [-y] ], which it would
  technically be.  But when building man pages, this doesn't work, and
  so the command synopses on the man pages contain lots of extra
  brackets.  By putting choice="opt" or choice="plain" explicitly on
  every <arg> and <group> element, we avoid any toolchain dependencies
  like that, and it also makes it clearer in the source code what is
  meant.  In passing, make some small corrections in the documentation
  about which arguments are really optional or not.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1715ff112809bca5218ddb6eccfda2c20dc420b5

- PL/Python: Improve test coverage.  Add test cases for inline handler
  of plython2u (when using that language name), and for result object
  element assignment.  There is now at least one test case for every
  top-level functionality, except plpy.Fatal (annoying to use in
  regression tests) and result object slice retrieval and slice
  assignment (which are somewhat broken).
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e6c2e8cb87846161033e1f215876c4b95f631df0

Tom Lane pushed:

- Converge all SQL-level statistics timing values to float8
  milliseconds.  This patch adjusts the core statistics views to match
  the decision already taken for pg_stat_statements, that values
  representing elapsed time should be represented as float8 and
  measured in milliseconds.  By using float8, we are no longer tied to
  a specific maximum precision of timing data.  (Internally, it's
  still microseconds, but we could now change that without needing
  changes at the SQL level.) The columns affected are
  pg_stat_bgwriter.checkpoint_write_time,
  pg_stat_bgwriter.checkpoint_sync_time,
  pg_stat_database.blk_read_time, pg_stat_database.blk_write_time,
  pg_stat_user_functions.total_time, pg_stat_user_functions.self_time,
  pg_stat_xact_user_functions.total_time, and
  pg_stat_xact_user_functions.self_time.  The first four of these are
  new in 9.2, so there is no compatibility issue from changing them.
  The others require a release note comment that they are now double
  precision (and can show a fractional part) rather than bigint as
  before; also their underlying statistics functions now match the
  column definitions, instead of returning bigint microseconds.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/809e7e21af8cd24855f1802524a13bbaa823f929

- Kill some remaining references to SVR4 and univel.  Both terms still
  appear in a few places, but I thought it best to leave those alone
  in context.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/50c2d6a1a63f04fd8c4553fc696c2c9e235b1a25

- Overdue code review for transaction-level advisory locks patch.
  Commit 62c7bd31c8878dd45c9b9b2429ab7a12103f3590 had assorted
  problems, most visibly that it broke PREPARE TRANSACTION in the
  presence of session-level advisory locks (which should be ignored by
  PREPARE), as per a recent complaint from Stephen Rees.  More
  abstractly, the patch made the LockMethodData.transactional flag not
  merely useless but outright dangerous, because in point of fact that
  flag no longer tells you anything at all about whether a lock is
  held transactionally.  This fix therefore removes that flag
  altogether.  We now rely entirely on the convention already in use
  in lock.c that transactional lock holds must be owned by some
  ResourceOwner, while session holds are never so owned.  Setting the
  locallock struct's owner link to NULL thus denotes a session hold,
  and there is no redundant marker for that.  PREPARE TRANSACTION now
  works again when there are session-level advisory locks, and it is
  also able to transfer transactional advisory locks to the prepared
  transaction, but for implementation reasons it throws an error if we
  hold both types of lock on a single lockable object.  Perhaps it
  will be worth improving that someday.  Assorted other minor cleanup
  and documentation editing, as well.  Back-patch to 9.1, except that
  in the 9.1 branch I did not remove the LockMethodData.transactional
  flag for fear of causing an ABI break for any external code that
  might be examining those structs.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/71b9549d053b2f0a9e76e829c917385841f84bee

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Remove duplicate words in comments.  Found these with grep -r "for
  for ".
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f291ccd43e06fdd7c55102975a0b2f38bc140b90

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Remove link to ODBCng project from the docs.  This backatches
  Heikki's patch in 140a4fbf1a87891a79a2c61a08416828d39f286a to make
  sure the documentation on the website gets updated, since we're
  regularly receiving complains about this link.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6d362ec209f0174f36a78936c5269f8d5f2cd26e

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Ryan Kelly sent in another revision of the patch to allow breaking out
of hung connection attempts in libpq.

Noah Misch sent in a patch to prevent a theoretical torn page hazard
in ginRedoUpdateMetapage().

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to add new error fields to PL/pgsql.

Laurenz Albe sent in another revision of the patch to analyze foreign
tables which gets the FDW to show that a value was non-NULL but
removed due to excess width by returning a value of length
WIDTH_THRESHOLD+1.

Peter Geoghegan sent in two revisions of a patch to latch up the WAL
Writer, reducing wake-ups and thus saving electricity in a way that is
more-or-less analogous to his previous work on the BGWriter.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to reduce the number of "Unexpected EOF
on client connection" messages clogging people's logs.

Jan Urbanski sent in a patch to fix an issue with PL/PythonU where
result set slicing was broken in the Python3 case.