== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 13 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 13 2006 ==

Planner hints are a subject of another lively discussion on -hackers.

People are engaging in a lively discussion on -hackers about packages
for PL languages.

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane committed:

- A back-patch of HEAD's configure fixes to select the appropriate
compiler switches for Intel's icc and AIX's xlc.

- A joint Simon Riggs/Tom Lane patch which makes recovery from WAL be
restartable, by executing a checkpoint-like operation every so
often.

- A patch based on Ralph Engeschall's which creates hooks for
dynamically initializing preloaded libraries. You can do this by
calling functions _PG_init() and _PG_fini() if the library defines
such symbols. This way, you no longer need to specify an
initialization function in preload_libraries. Instead, PostgreSQL
can assume that the library used the _PG_init() convention. This
removes one source of pilot error in use of preloaded libraries.

- His fix UNION, EXCEPT and INTERSECT which shows the output typmod
(i.e. the 255 in varchar(255)) when inputs being merged have the
same data type and typmod. Per several gripes over the years about
UNION's dropping precision info.

- A Jonah Harris/Tom Lane patch which adds INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE ...
RETURNING capability, PL/PgSQL support will follow. The patch also
converts execMain's SELECT INTO support into a DestReceiver,
eliminating some ugly special cases.

- A change to SPI_cursor_open to allow INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE RETURNING.

- A patch which fixes a cord dump in duration logging for a
V3-protocol Execute message when what's being executed is a COMMIT
or ROLLBACK. Per report from Sergey Koposov. This includes
back-patches to 8.1 and 8.0.

- A patch which causes psql to report both the returned data and the
command status tag for INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE RETURNING.

- A change to the regression test for RETURNING which makes output
deterministic.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- a fix to contrib/ltree's gist_betwee() per report by Mario Weilguni
where modifying a value in a shared buffer could result in index
corruption.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- a patch which lets you log protocol-level prepare/bind/execute

- a fix to statement_timeout so that it properly treats microseconds
as microseconds, rather than as 100 microseconds, as it did before.
This actually fixes all setitimer calls on Win32, but
statement_timeout is the most visible fix.

- Yoshiyuki Asaba's patch which sets the server-size socket buffer on
Win32 to 32k for performance.

- David Fetter's patch which increases the size of the psql line
counter so it can handle files with more than 2^32 lines.

- Add Neil Conway and Gavin Sherry's presentation from the PostgreSQL
Tenth Anniversary Conference to FAQ_DEV.

- Zdenek Kotala's refactor of set_config_option() which makes its
behavior more consistent.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Alvaro Herrera's patch which fixes ECPG regression tests for VPATH
builds.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

Tom Lane rejected Dhanaraj M's patch which changes FETCH and MOVE to
use int8 on grounds of excessive invasiveness and lack of utility.

Zdenek Kotala's patch which allows commenting of variables in
postgresql.conf to restore them to defaults. It broke the buildfarm.

Pavel Stehule's patch which allows you to convert from perl to
postgresql array in OUT parameters. Another part of the patch allows
hash form output from procedures with one OUT argument. It broke the
buildfarm.

== Pending Patches ==

Sven Suursoho sent in a patch adding to PL/Python's capabilities,
including:

- Return SETOF as Python's sequence types (tuple, list) or using
iterator or generator

- Return composite types as sequence (tuple, list), mapping (dict) or
class (actually any object providing method __getattr__)

- Allow named procedure arguments

Korry Douglas sent in another version of his PL instrumentation plugin
patch, this one using "rendezvous variables" per Tom Lane's
suggestion.

Satoshi Nagayasu sent in a patch which adds pgstatindex functions to
the pgstattuple contrib module.
== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Active Query Builder 1.6 is out.
http://activequerybuilder.com/

Watch for the upcoming NPGSQL 1.0RC3, now with lots of fixes.
http://pgfoundry.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=835

PostgreSQL 8.1.4 packages for Solaris are out.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/solarispackages/

DBLink-TDS 0.64 is out. It supports PostgreSQL 8.1.4 and freetds 0.63.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/dblink-tds/

The PL/Scheme project has kicked off on pgfoundry.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/plscheme/

Slony-I 1.2 RC3 is out. Please test.
http://slony.info/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for August ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-08/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Everything this week was global.

== 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.