== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 23 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 23 2006 ==

Linuxworld Expo San Francisco is happening August 14-18. Stop by the
PostgreSQL booth at the .org pavilion. If you want to participate,
drop a line to David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org>

OSCON is going on this week in Portland. Stop by the PostgreSQL booth
if you're there.

=== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane applied Greg Stark's patch which adds btree operators for
tids.

Tom Lane applied a patch expected to fix the long-running 'stats
collector dies under high load on Windows' bug.

Joachim Wieland simplified the regression tests by moving code to drop
regression users and groups from the regression script into the SQL
script.

Tom Lane put some additional work into Magnus Hagander's
pg_regress-in-C patch and committed the resulting work to CVS.

Peter Eisentraut committed an update to make it possible to override
pg_config's location for pgxs builds.

Peter also updated the build system to use GCC's built in dependency
tracking rather than the sed hackery previously used. He also changed
the file extensions to look more like Automake's, which lets Dtrace
use .d as a file extension.

Neil Conway applied Marko Kreen's crypto merge cleanup.

On saturday, Tom Lane went on a hacking spree and committed changes to:

- Modify the planner to allow for cache benefits to heap accesses of
bitmap scans.

- Fix --disable-spinlocks which had become broken.

- Add support to dynahash.c for partitioning shared hashtables
according to the low-order bits of the entry hash value.

- Split the buffer mapping table into multiple separately lockable
partitions, as per discussion.

... and finished off on Sunday with a patch to fix an oversight in the
sizing of the shared memory lookup hashtable that could theoretically
lead to 'out of shared memory' failure.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending patches ==

Greg Sabino Mullane submitted a patch that allows pg_dump to take
multiple regex-enabled -n (include namespace), -N (exclude namespace),
-t (include table) and -T (exclude table) parameters.

Joshua Reich submitted a patch to add a cube_from_arrays() function to
the cube contrib module, as well as giving the cube module a cleanup.

Jie Zhang of Greenplum submitted a patch implementing on-disk bitmap
indexes. People are actively improving it in preparation for feature
freeze.

Joe Conway posted a patch that allows multiple tuples in INSERT
statements with a VALUES clause, e.g.

INSERT INTO foo (a, b) VALUES (1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6);

The first version worked up to about 9000 tuples. The next version
allowed for DEFAULT values, and was able to do 300,000 tuples in 13
seconds using slightly over 1G of RAM at peak.

In other multiple-tuple news, Susan Ebrecht sent in a patch that lets
UPDATE use syntax that looks like:

UPDATE table
SET (col1, col2, ...) = (val1, val2, ...),
(colm, coln, ...) = (valm, valn, ...), ...;

Marc Munro posted a patch allowing libraries loaded at postmaster
start via the preload_libraries config directive to register private
shared memory contexts and LWLocks.

Robert Lor from Sun submitted a patch to add DTrace support to
PostgreSQL as discussed in his presentation at the recent conference
and the following code sprint.

Zdenek Kotala submitted a patch which marks change-on-restart-only
values in postgresql.conf. This could be handy for DBAs and people
just getting started.

Marko Kreen sent in a patch that provides 8-byte transaction IDs to
the user level.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Devrim Gunduz pushed some PostgreSQL-related RPMs to Fedora Extras for
review:
* Slony-I
* psycopg2
* pgpool
* dbi-link

PyPgExplorer 0.8 released.
http://homepage.mac.com/levanj/Python

Matthew Hagerty has released version 1.0 of his full-text-search
parser in PHP.
http://digitalstratum.com/oss/fts_parser

pgAdmin3 1.4.3 bug fix release is out.
http://www.pgadmin.org/

Fujitsu will run a PostgreSQL 'Coffee Morning' on Friday July 28th in
Sydney, Australia. Gavin Sherry will be talking about PostgreSQL and
high availability.
http://www.fastware.com.au/postgresql_coffee.html

Fujitsu will be running a three day PostgreSQL training course August 15-17
in Canberra, Australia.
http://www.fastware.com.au/postgresql_training_august.html

== PostgreSQL Jobs for July ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-07/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Linuxfest Ohio is looking for PostgreSQL speakers. If you can go,
please sign up. The deadline for talk proposals is July 31st.
http://ohiolinux.org/speak.html

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
Dave Page and Devrim Gunduz.