== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 30 2012 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 30 2012 ==

Bug fix releases 9.2.1, 9.1.6, 9.0.10, 8.4.14, and 8.3.21 are out now.
Upgrade ASAP!
http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1416/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

openBarter 0.4.2, a postgres extension implementing primitives of a
barter market place model, released.
http://olivierch.github.com/openBarter/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2012-09/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

There will be a PGDay October 3, 2012 at UNICAMP, Campinas, São Paulo state
http://www.postgresql.org.br/node/16948

PostgreSQL Session will be held on October 4th, 2012, in Paris,
France.  More information at:
http://www.postgresql-sessions.org/en/4/

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012 will be in Prague, Czech Republic
on October 23-26.
http://2012.pgconf.eu/

There will be a PGDay November 9, 2012 at USP, São Paulo
http://www.postgresql.org.br/node/16949

PostgreSQL Day Argentina 2012 will be held on November 13th in Bernal,
Buenos Aires, at the National University of Quilmes.  It will cover
topics for PostgreSQL users, developers and contributors, as well as
decision and policy makers.  For more information about the
conference, please see the website at
http://www.pgday.com.ar/quilmes2012?lang=en

This year Ecuador's PGDay will be held at Quito city on November 17th,
2012.  The Call for Papers is open until October 10.  Send proposals
to Jaime Casanova jaime <AT> 2ndquadrant <DOT> com.
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PGDay_Ecuador_2012

The sixth edition of the Italian PostgreSQL Day (PGDay.IT 2012) will
be held on November 23, 2012 in Prato, Tuscany.  The International
Call for Papers is now open. Talks and presentations in English are
accepted.  Information in English for papers submission is available
at:
http://2012.pgday.it/call-for-papers/international-call-for-papers/



== 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
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to pwn@arpug.com.ar.

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane pushed:

- Prevent emitting "ALTER VIEW foo SET ()".  Small oversight in commit
  0f524ea0cf388a149f362e48a33c01662eeddc04 ...  per report from
  Grazvydas Valeika.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ce9eee39d18822902cd8cb05a4e16fc0683b49d6

- Fix examples of how to use "su" while starting the server.  The
  syntax "su -c 'command' username" is not accepted by all versions of
  su, for example not OpenBSD's.  More portable is "su username -c
  'command'".  So change runtime.sgml to recommend that syntax.  Also,
  add a -D switch to the OpenBSD example script, for consistency with
  other examples.  Per Denis Lapshin and Gábor Hidvégi.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7d8cbeb0c3f48c6c204b742b6891a9e5e5031d15

- Add new EVENT keyword to unreserved_keyword production.  Once again,
  somebody who ought to know better forgot this.  We really need some
  automated cross-check on the keyword-list productions, I think.  Per
  report from Brian Weaver.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/fc68ac86b1c8b19ec6a2064c8a24e1c124f77f7f

- Make plpgsql's unreserved keywords more unreserved.  There were
  assorted places where unreserved keywords were not treated the same
  as T_WORD (that is, a random unrecognized identifier).  Fix them.
  It might not always be possible to allow this, but it is in all
  these places, so I don't see any downside.  Per gripe from Jim
  Wilson.  Arguably this is a bug fix, but given the lack of other
  complaints and the ease of working around it (just quote the word),
  I won't risk back-patching.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bac95fd4740e3ac13baf5c2ad38b9c9dc26f9c9d

- Run check_keywords.pl anytime gram.c is rebuilt.  This script is a
  bit slow, but still it only takes a fraction of the time the bison
  run does, so the overhead doesn't seem intolerable.  And we
  definitely need some mechanical aid here, because people keep
  missing the need to add new keywords to the appropriate keyword-list
  production.  While at it, I moved check_keywords.pl from src/tools
  into src/backend/parser where it's actually used, and did some very
  minor cleanup on the script.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/55c1687a97c3c2b6cbf7c1b45830b49f03641908

- Fix btmarkpos/btrestrpos to handle array keys.  This fixes another
  error in commit 9e8da0f75731aaa7605cf4656c21ea09e84d2eb1.  I
  neglected to make the mark/restore functionality save and restore
  the current set of array key values, which led to strange behavior
  if an IndexScan with ScalarArrayOpExpr quals was used as the inner
  side of a mergejoin.  Per bug #7570 from Melese Tesfaye.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/70bc5833195daf64a200ac7b4a8c9aff65cf966f

- Fix tar files emitted by pg_dump and pg_basebackup to be POSIX
  conformant.  Both programs got the "magic" string wrong, causing
  standard-conforming tar implementations to believe the output was
  just legacy tar format without any POSIX extensions.  This doesn't
  actually matter that much, especially since pg_dump failed to fill
  the POSIX fields anyway, but still there is little point in emitting
  tar format if we can't be compliant with the standard.  In addition,
  pg_dump failed to write the EOF marker correctly (there should be 2
  blocks of zeroes not just one), pg_basebackup put the numeric group
  ID in the wrong place, and both programs had a pretty brain-dead
  idea of how to compute the checksum.  Fix all that and improve the
  comments a bit.  pg_restore is modified to accept either the correct
  POSIX-compliant "magic" string or the previous value.  This part of
  the change will need to be back-patched to avoid an unnecessary
  compatibility break when a previous version tries to read tar-format
  output from 9.3 pg_dump.  Brian Weaver and Tom Lane
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/05b555d12bc2ad0d581f48a12b45174db41dc10d

- Fix bugs in "restore.sql" script emitted in pg_dump tar output.  The
  tar output module did some very ugly and ultimately incorrect
  hacking on COPY commands to try to get them to work in the context
  of restoring a deconstructed tar archive.  In particular, it would
  fail altogether for table names containing any upper-case
  characters, since it smashed the command string to lower-case before
  modifying it (and, just to add insult to injury, did that in a way
  that would fail in multibyte encodings).  I don't see any particular
  value in being flexible about the case of the command keywords,
  since the string will just have been created by dumpTableData, so
  let's get rid of the whole case-folding thing.  Also, it doesn't
  seem to meet the POLA for the script to restore data only in COPY
  mode, so add \i commands to make it have comparable behavior in
  --inserts mode.  Noted while looking at the tar-output code in
  connection with Brian Weaver's patch.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ff75219e9f58f0cee1578e6d4175fe36b6bab3e3

- Add infrastructure for compile-time assertions about variable types.
  Currently, the macros only work with fairly recent gcc versions, but
  there is room to expand them to other compilers that have comparable
  features.  Heavily revised and autoconfiscated version of a patch by
  Andres Freund.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ea473fb2dee7dfe61f8fbdfac9d9da87d84e564e

- Provide some static-assertion functionality on all compilers.  On
  reflection (especially after noticing how many buildfarm critters
  have __builtin_types_compatible_p but not _Static_assert), it seems
  like we ought to try a bit harder to make these macros do something
  everywhere.  The initial cut at it would have been no help to code
  that is compiled only on platforms without _Static_assert, for
  instance; and in any case not all our contributors do their initial
  coding on the latest gcc version.  Some googling about static
  assertions turns up quite a bit of prior art for making it work in
  compilers that lack _Static_assert.  The method that seems closest
  to our needs involves defining a struct with a bit-field that has
  negative width if the assertion condition fails.  There seems no
  reliable way to get the error message string to be output, but
  throwing a compile error with a confusing message is better than
  missing the problem altogether.  In the same spirit, if we don't
  have __builtin_types_compatible_p we can at least insist that the
  variable have the same width as the type.  This won't catch errors
  such as "wrong pointer type", but it's far better than nothing.  In
  addition to changing the macro definitions, adjust a
  compile-time-constant Assert in contrib/hstore to use
  StaticAssertStmt, so we can get some buildfarm coverage on whether
  that macro behaves sanely or not.  There's surely more places that
  could be converted, but this is the first one I came across.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0d0aa5d29175c539db1981be27dbbf059be6f3b1

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Add support for include_dir in config file.  This allows easily
  splitting configuration into many files, deployed in a directory.
  Magnus Hagander, Greg Smith, Selena Deckelmann, reviewed by Noah
  Misch.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2a0c81a12c7e6c5ac1557b0f1f4a581f23fd4ca7

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- pg_upgrade test: Disable fsync in initdb and postgres calls.  This
  mirrors the behavior of pg_regress and makes the test run much
  faster.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/10bfe81deeb8dc2af2204dbeebf3dda62f1ae263

- Produce textual error messages for LDAP issues instead of numeric
  codes.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/edc9109c42299ea8d7d897647967cf65d638617c

- PL/Python: Convert oid to long/int.  oid is a numeric type, so
  transform it to the appropriate Python numeric type like the other
  ones.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/db0af74af28663e060e8c5d6f8dd0927bb572f25

- PL/Python: Remove workaround for returning booleans in Python <2.3.
  Since Python 2.2 is no longer supported, we can now use
  Py_RETURN_TRUE and Py_RETURN_FALSE instead of the old workaround.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/be0dfbad3671ed2503a2a661e70b48c5b364e069

- Add _FORTIFY_SOURCE to default compiler options for linux template.
  Many distributors use this, so we might as well see the warnings as
  well.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/997fa75d6b1522658d4464396cb91264f642634a

- Disable _FORTIFY_SOURCE with ICC There are apparently some
  incompatibilities, per buildfarm.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/97ec9621572054be96b0447395f5fa2438a4d6cb

- psql: Mark table headers in \drds output for translation
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/26fd82ddf1273d5df20b892fc02c8ca756d2e2bc

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- Have pg_terminate/cancel_backend not ERROR on non-existent
  processes.  This worked fine for superusers, but not for ordinary
  users trying to cancel their own processes.  Tweak the order the
  checks are done in so that we correctly return SIGNAL_BACKEND_ERROR
  (which current callers know to ignore without erroring out) so that
  an ordinary user can loop through a resultset without fearing that a
  process might exit in the middle of said looping -- causing the
  remaining processes to go unsignalled.  Incidentally, the last
  in-core caller of IsBackendPid() is now gone.  However, the function
  is exported and must remain in place, because there are plenty of
  callers in external modules.  Author: Josh Kupershmidt Reviewed by
  Noah Misch
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ae90ffada4cb27c9194797c43d864a86ce88d72c

- Add alter_generic regression test.  This makes refactoring of parts
  of the ALTER command safe(r) because we ensure no change in
  functionality.  Author: KaiGai Kohei
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ff7e5b4841eeedfb9cefec6226f4dca5b8840276

- Add alternative expected output for alter_generic.  The original
  only expected file failed to consider machines without non-default
  collation support.  Per buildfarm.  Also, move the test to another
  parallel group; the one it was originally put in is already full
  according to comments in the schedule file.  Per note from Tom Lane.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/811ca1300bf8eb50ff1a84082619ba770126cdc9

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Remove checks for now long outdated compilers.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6e9876dc32495976af525fa29922648a02c8ef9b

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the patch to add a write
interface for FDWs and implement same in file_fdw.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another revision of the
lock_timeout/SIGALARM framework patch.

Bruce Momjian sent in two revisions of a patch to fix an
encoding-related bug in pg_upgrade.

Andres Freund sent in two revisions of a patch to fix a concurrency
issue in DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY.

Karl O. Pinc sent in two more revisions of the patch to document which
parts of the catalog have oid as their only uniqueness, and which have
other primary keys.

Amit Kapila and Heikki Linnakangas traded patches to improve update
performance by reducing the amount of WAL written for same.

Nozomi Anzai sent in another revision of the patch to enable 64-bit
large objects.

Satoshi Nagayasu sent in another revision of the patch to add new
statistics for dirty write buffers.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a set of patches to allow switching
timelines during replication.

Bruce Momjian sent in a patch to fix an infelicity in the --new-port
option of pg_upgrade.

Alvaro Herrera sent in two more revisions of the patch to enable
generic background workers.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in two revisions of a patch to fix some pg_dump
infelicities with respect to EXTENSIONs.

Karl O. Pinc sent in patch (psql_remove_include.patch) replaces the
#include of psqlscan.c at the bottom of mainloop.c with the %top{}
flex feature.

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of the patch to allow COPY to
get the number of rows processed.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of the patch to help scale
XLogInsert.

Karl O. Pinc sent in two patches: pg_temp-toindex.patch, which puts
pg_temp into the index of the docs.  (Line lengths are ugly so the
change can be easily reviewed.), and pg_temp-reformat.patch, which
reformats the doc source after the above patch.  (Fixes line length.)

Karl O. Pinc sent in two revisions of a patch to index search_path
where it's used to secure functions.

Karl O. Pinc sent in a patch which normalizes "search_path" as the
thing indexed and uses a secondary index term to distinguish the
configuration parameter from the run-time setting.

Karl O. Pinc sent in two revisions of a documentation patch to
describe the additive nature of the permission system.

Andres Freund sent in another revision of the patch to add and then
use embedded lists.

Jeff Janes sent in a patch to document that the size of shared_buffers
was increased from 32MB to 128MB.