== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 28 2013 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 28 2013 ==

The next meeting of the Indian PostgreSQL User Group will be in Pune
on November 16, 2013.  Info and RSVP:
http://www.meetup.com/India-PostgreSQL-UserGroup-Meetup/events/146224752/
                                            
Papers:
http://www.meetup.com/India-PostgreSQL-UserGroup-Meetup/messages/boards/thread/38935632/
                                            

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Ora2PG 12.0, a migration system for moving from Oracle to PostgreSQL, released.
http://ora2pg.darold.net/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for October ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2013-10/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

pgconf.EU 2013 will be held on Oct 29-Nov 1, 2013 at the Conrad Hotel
in downtown Dublin, Ireland.
http://2013.pgconf.eu/

PGConf.DE 2013 will be held November 8th, 2013, at the Rhineland
Industrial Museum in Oberhausen.  The CfP is open through September
15, 2013.
http://2013.pgconf.de/

The fourth edition of the Argentinian PostgreSQL Day will be held on
November 14 2013 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PGDay_Argentina_2013

PGDay Cuba will be November 28-29, 2013.
http://postgresql.uci.cu/?page_id=474

== 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.

== Applied Patches ==

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- doc: Improve setup for documentation building with FOP.  Add a
  makefile rule for building PDFs with FOP.  Two new build targets in
  doc/src/sgml are postgres-A4-fop.pdf and postgres-US-fop.pdf.  Run
  .fo output through xmllint for reformatting, so that errors are
  easier to find.  (The default output has hardly any line breaks, so
  you might be looking for an error in column 20000.) Set some XSLT
  parameters to optimize for building with FOP.  Remove some redundant
  or somewhat useless chapterinfo/author information, because it
  renders strangely with the FO stylesheet.  Reviewed-by: Álvaro
  Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a5963efa8f2b46700c0591281c57aeea3d429c34

- Make use of psprintf() in recent changes
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/586a8fc75bf266214d635cdcf527176b80f808ea

- Tweak "line" test to avoid negative zeros on some platforms
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a0a546f0d94ec6cbb3cd6b1c82f58d801046615f

Tom Lane pushed:

- Fix blatantly broken record_image_cmp() logic for pass-by-value
  fields.  Doesn't anybody here pay attention to compiler warnings?
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/28858811472f316f73eba0e564837088fc8c6ccd

- Get rid of use of asprintf() in favor of a more portable
  implementation.  asprintf(), aside from not being particularly
  portable, has a fundamentally badly-designed API; the psprintf()
  function that was added in passing in the previous patch has a much
  better API choice.  Moreover, the NetBSD implementation that was
  borrowed for the previous patch doesn't work with non-C99-compliant
  vsnprintf, which is something we still have to cope with on some
  platforms; and it depends on va_copy which isn't all that portable
  either.  Get rid of that code in favor of an implementation similar
  to what we've used for many years in stringinfo.c.  Also, move it
  into libpgcommon since it's not really libpgport material.  I think
  this patch will be enough to turn the buildfarm green again, but
  there's still cosmetic work left to do, namely get rid of
  pg_asprintf() in favor of using psprintf().  That will come in a
  followon patch.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/09a89cb5fc29b47c26d151e82293fd3bef592b7b

- Replace pg_asprintf() with psprintf().  This eliminates an awkward
  coding pattern that's also unnecessarily inconsistent with backend
  coding.  psprintf() is now the thing to use everywhere.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2c66f9924c1162bfba27c77004ccf42fb6ea188d

- Suppress a couple of compiler warnings seen with older gcc versions.
  To wit, bgworker.c: In function `RegisterDynamicBackgroundWorker':
  bgworker.c:761: warning: `generation' might be used uninitialized in
  this function dsm_impl.c: In function `dsm_impl_op': dsm_impl.c:197:
  warning: control reaches end of non-void function Neither of these
  represent actual bugs, but we may as well tweak the code so that
  more compilers can tell that.  This won't change the generated code
  on compilers that do recognize that the cases are unreachable.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5f1ab4610102a73c124000788585c1af2a36284b

- Use improved vsnprintf calling logic in more places.  When we are
  using a C99-compliant vsnprintf implementation (which should be most
  places, these days) it is worth the trouble to make use of its
  report of how large the buffer needs to be to succeed.  This patch
  adjusts stringinfo.c and some miscellaneous usages in pg_dump to do
  that, relying on the logic recently added in libpgcommon's
  psprintf.c.  Since these places want to know the number of bytes
  written once we succeed, modify the API of pvsnprintf() to report
  that.  There remains near-duplicate logic in pqexpbuffer.c, but
  since that code is in libpq, psprintf.c's approach of
  exit()-on-error isn't appropriate for use there.  Also note that I
  didn't bother touching the multitude of places that call (v)snprintf
  without any attempt to provide a resizable buffer.
  Release-note-worthy incompatibility: the API of appendStringInfoVA()
  changed.  If there's any third-party code that's calling that
  directly, it will need tweaking along the same lines as in this
  patch.  David Rowley and Tom Lane
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3147acd63e0135aff9a6c4b01d861251925d97d9

- Ignore SIGSYS during initdb.  This prevents the recently-added probe
  for shm_open() from crashing on platforms that are impolite enough
  to deliver a signal rather than returning ENOSYS for an
  unimplemented kernel call.  At least on the one known example (HPUX
  10.20), ignoring SIGSYS does result in the desired behavior of
  getting an ENOSYS error return instead.  Per discussion, we might
  later wish to do this in the backend as well, but for now it seems
  sufficient to do it in initdb.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5e1e47c7c00d01d1b2fd3a4354f48be427a30f67

- Suppress -0 in the C field of lines computed by
  line_construct_pts().  It's not entirely clear why some PPC machines
  are generating -0 here, since the underlying computation should be
  exactly 0 - 0.  Perhaps there's some wider-than-nominal-precision
  calculations happening?  Anyway, the best way to avoid
  platform-dependent results seems to be to explicitly reset -0 to
  regular zero.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/43fe90f66a0b200f6c32507428349afb45f661ca

- Revert "Tweak "line" test to avoid negative zeros on some platforms"
  This reverts commit a0a546f0d94ec6cbb3cd6b1c82f58d801046615f.  It
  seems better to tweak the code to suppress -0 results during
  line_construct_pts(), which I'll do in the next commit.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1f7a47912af2206698d14650f2149fa951b8ce07

- Improve pqexpbuffer.c to use modern vsnprintf implementations
  efficiently.  When using a C99-compliant vsnprintf, we can use its
  report of the required buffer size to avoid making multiple loops
  through the formatting logic.  This is similar to the changes
  recently made in stringinfo.c, but we can't use psprintf.c here
  because in libpq we don't want to exit() on error.  (The behavior
  pqexpbuffer.c has historically used is to mark the PQExpBuffer as
  "broken", ie empty, if it runs into any fatal problem.) To avoid
  duplicating code more than necessary, I refactored printfPQExpBuffer
  and appendPQExpBuffer to share a subroutine that's very similar to
  psprintf.c's pvsnprintf in spirit.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9f9d9b51f068a19ad243fd8fe500c9970999db9b

- Use unaligned output in selected regression queries to reduce diff
  noise.  The rules regression test prints all known views and rules,
  which is a set that changes regularly.  Previously, a change in one
  rule would frequently lead to whitespace changes across the entire
  output of this query, which is painful to verify and causes
  undesirable conflicts between unrelated patch sets.  Use \a mode to
  improve matters.  Also use \t mode to suppress the total-rows count,
  which was also a source of unnecessary patch conflicts.  Likewise
  modify the output mode for the list of indexed tables generated in
  sanity_check.sql.  There might be other places where we should use
  this idea, but these are the ones that have caused the most
  problems.  Andres Freund
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9c339eb4f853e44c462f53587f69e4a11e89c09b

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Adjust cube.out expected output for new test queries.  Previous
  commit modified the test case, but I didn't update cube.out expected
  output file in previous commit because it was not needed by the
  platforms I have easy access to. Buildfarm animal 'dugong', running
  "Debian 4.0 icc 10.1.011 ia64", has now gone red because of that, so
  update it now.  Also adjust cube_3.out. According to git history, it
  was added to support 64-bit MinGW. There is no such animal in the
  buildfarm, so I'm doing this blindly, but it was added quite
  recently so maybe someone still cares.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/36f4c7843cf3d201279855ed9a6ebc1deb3c9463

- Extend cube on-disk format to pack points more tightly.  If the
  lower left and upper right corners of a cube are the same, set a
  flag in the cube header, and only store one copy of the coordinates.
  That cuts the on-disk size into half for the common case that the
  cube datatype is used to represent points rather than boxes.  The
  new format is backwards-compatible with the old one, so pg_upgrade
  still works. However, to get the space savings, the data needs to be
  rewritten. A simple VACUUM FULL or REINDEX is not enough, as the old
  Datums will just be moved to the new heap/index as is. A pg_dump and
  reload, or something similar like casting to text and back, will do
  the trick.  This patch deliberately doesn't update all the
  alternative expected output files, as I don't have access to
  machines that produce those outputs.  I'm not sure if they are still
  relevant, but if they are, the buildfarm will tell us and produce
  the diff required to fix it. If none of the buildfarm animals need
  them, they should be removed altogether.  Patch by Stas Kelvich.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/08612f45a0e236bd01db3fc96cc1fa7bfabc927c

- Fix two bugs in setting the vm bit of empty pages.  Use a critical
  section when setting the all-visible flag on an empty page, and
  WAL-logging it. log_newpage_buffer() contains an assertion that it
  must be called inside a critical section, and it's the right thing
  to do when modifying a buffer anyway.  Also, the page should be
  marked dirty before calling log_newpage_buffer(), per the comment in
  log_newpage_buffer() and src/backend/access/transam/README.  Patch
  by Andres Freund, in response to my report. Backpatch to 9.2, like
  the patch that introduced these bugs (a6370fd9).
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/83eb54001cb69d6ee8f0813c4e280be876823068

- Fix typos in comments.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4d6d425ab8d9b00c097d8bb8ce85302ea62887a3

- Fix memory leak when an empty ident file is reloaded.  Hari Babu
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bb598456dcdad5080f6dee980bc5cc94d2e9f574

- Plug memory leak when reloading config file.  The absolute path to
  config file was not pfreed. There are probably more small leaks here
  and there in the config file reload code and assign hooks, and in
  practice no-one reloads the config files frequently enough for it to
  be a problem, but this one is trivial enough that might as well fix
  it.  Backpatch to 9.3 where the leak was introduced.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/138184adc5f7c60c184972e4d23f8cdb32aed77d

- Improve documentation of random() function.  Move random() and
  setseed() to a separate table, to have them grouped together. Also
  add a notice that random() is not cryptographically secure.
  Original patch by Honza Horak, although I didn't use his version.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/75fdcec14543b60cc0c67483d8cc47d5c7adf1a8

- Increase the number of different values used when seeding random().
  When a backend process is forked, we initialize the system's random
  number generator with srandom(). The seed used is derived from the
  backend's pid and the timestamp. However, we only used the
  microseconds part of the timestamp, and it was XORed with the pid,
  so the total range of different seed values chosen was 0-999999.
  That's quite limited.  Change the code to also use the seconds part
  of the timestamp in the seed, and shift the microseconds so that all
  32 bits of the seed are used.  Honza Horak
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/98c50656cac2e6b873419fd09569a9119c02148c

Robert Haas pushed:

- Simplify tab completion rules for views and foreign tables.  Since
  an increasing number of views and foreign tables are now able to be
  updated, complete with any table, view, or foreign table in the
  relevant contexts.  This avoids the need to use a complex query that
  may be both confusing to end-users and nonperformant to construct
  the list of possible completions.  Dean Rasheed, persuant to a
  complaint from Bernd Helme and a suggestion from Peter Eisentraut
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5c4dd2cd9a26cadb3e5234badf2a5eedf89423a2

Noah Misch pushed:

- Add large object functions catering to SQL callers.  With these, one
  need no longer manipulate large object descriptors and extract
  numeric constants from header files in order to read and write large
  object contents from SQL.  Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Rushabh
  Lathia.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c50b7c09d852b6dc292bf24c72a0ffcac6cb2cab

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Hari Babu sent in two more revisions of a patch to fix a race
condition where a large table will continue to bloat despite being
vacuumed.

Laurenz Albe sent in another revision of a patch to add a deprecation
message for LDAP as needed.

Alexander Korotkov sent in another revision of a patch to add some
more information to GIN indexes to make them more useful.

Andres Freund sent in two more flocks of patches which are
infrastructure for logical replication.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a patch to track the timestamp of transaction
commits.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to add some locks needed to ensure safe
operation of materialized views during refresh in case of crash during
DDL.

Dean Rasheed and Andres Freund traded patches to correct the locking
behavior of INSERT INTO VIEW when it's defined WITH CHECK OPTION.

Craig Ringer sent in a patch to testing row-level access control with
SECURITY DEFINER functions returning refcursors.

Nigel Heron sent in another revision of a patch to collect network
stats.

Abhijit Menon-Sen sent in another revision of a patch to use
MAP_HUGETLB where supported.

Thomas Munro sent in three revisions of a patch to implement CLUSTER
FREEZE.

Hari Babu sent in a patch to improve test coverage of schema commands,
and user and tablespace files.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI sent in a patch to fix a situation where UNION ALL
on partitioned tables doesn't use indexes.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to fix an issue where failure while
inserting a parent tuple into a B-tree could corrupt data.

Robert Haas sent in a patch to change dynamic shared memory to use
Size instead of uint64 for size.

Etsuro Fujita sent in two more revisions of a patch to fix the
documentation for ALTER FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER to reflect current
realities.

Hugo Mercier sent in a patch to detect nested function calls.

Rodolfo Campero sent in a patch to implement domains over arrays in
PL/Python.