== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 08 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 08 2006 ==

The University of California, Davis, is studying how open source
software is made through PostgreSQL, Apache and Python:
http://macbeth.cs.ucdavis.edu/hazard/

AnyWebDb wants PostgreSQL beta testers.
http://www.anywebdb.com/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Continuent uni/cluster replication software released.
http://www.continuent.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=212&Itemid=169

Red Hat Inc. announced their new application development stack, which
includes support for PostgreSQL.
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2006/appstack.html

CyberTech.at has released an OLAP Cube solution for PostgreSQL.
http://www.postgresql.at/

pgAdmin III v1.6 Beta 2 released. Please test.
http://www.pgadmin.org/download/

Navicat PostgreSQL 6.3.1 for OS/X and Navicat PostgreSQL 7.2.6 for
Windows released.
http://pgsql.navicat.com/

3CX VOIP Phone System for Windows released.
http://www.3cx.com/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for October ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-10/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

French PostgreSQL company Dalibo has just hired Stephane Schildknecht
(SAS), French PostgreSQL association president. Kudos to both.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

This Week in General Bits:
Renumbering with COPY, Functional Indexes, and Deferrable UNIQUE
Constraints with SET CONSTRAINTS.
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter,
Josh Berkus and Dave Page.

== Applied Patches ==

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Update multi-line editing wording in release notes.

- In release notes, mention that multi-line history saving does not
work on Win32.

- Add include needed for new getrusage() call to
pgsql/src/backend/tcop/postgres.c.

- Update comments for pgcvslog, -r BASE does not work with cvs log.

- In release notes, always use </link> rather than </>.

- Add main documentation link tags to the release notes.

- Add indenting to Solaris FAQ, for clarity.

- Andreas Seltenreich' update to the DB2X texinfo example code.

- Update Solaris strtol() bug comment.

- Update Solaris strtod() bug comment.

- Zdenek Kotala's patch which update the Solaris FAQ.

- Exclude pgindent from affecting the ecpg regression directory.

- Add URL about strlcpy() creation history to strlcpy.c.

- Add 'Fix SSL retry to avoid useless repeated connection attempts and
ensuing misleading error messages' to TODO.

- Add URL for strlcpy() to TODO

- David Wheeler's patch that mentioning in postgresql.conf that
autovacuum also needs stats_start_collector and stats_row_level to
be on as well.

- Guillaume Lelarge's patch which fixes a small typo in
information_schema.sgml.

- Move WIN32_ONLY_COMPILER define from c.h to win32.h because it was
being defined too late.

- Simon Riggs's updated recovery (PITR) documentation.

- Updated tsearch2 README for current version.

- Add URL for cached copy of paper as SGML comment.

- Changed TODO to reflect use of strlcopy rather than PostgreSQL's
StrNCpy() macro

- Kenneth Marshall's change which removes mention of the -fast option
from the Solaris FAQ.

- Add Magnus Hagander's note to release notes: "Drop privileges on
startup so servers can be started from an administrative account"

- Move "Exotic Features" to the bottom of TODO.

- David Fetter's patch correcting an error message for overflow of
NUMERIC types.

- Euler Taveira de Oliveira's patch which make some sentences
consistent with similar ones in the source.

- Andreas Seltenreich's patch which improves readline psql prompt
suggestion.

- Andreas Seltenreich's patch which adds experimental support for db2x
texinfo

- ITAGAKI Takahiro's patch which changes units of the some default
values in postgresql.conf, modifies initdb to write MB-unit values.
Anything over 8000kB is now rounded out to MB. Adds
GUC_UNIT_XBLOCKS for wal_buffers, which is like GUC_UNIT_BLOCKS,
but uses XLOG_BLCKSZ instead of BLCKSZ. Cleans up the tests of
GUC_UNIT_* flags in preparation to add more unit flags in fewer
bits.

- Clean up pgwin32_open() 'if' test, and avoid possible error.

- Martijn van Oosterhout's patch which fixes a yesno_prompt() memory
leak in /script tools, reported by Coverity.

- Update typedef list for 8.2 pgindent run.

- Magnus Hagander's patch which makes vcbuild actually build the
pgevent dll and changes the pgevent DLL file so it doens't specify
ordinal for the functions.

Tom Lane committed:

- Fix back-branch pg_regress scripts to try the "canonical" expected
file if we tried a variant file from resultmap and it didn't match.
This is already done in HEAD's C-code version, and is needed
because OpenBSD has recently migrated to a more standard handling
of float underflow --- see buildfarm results from emu.

- Update Darwin dlopen() support to avoid deprecation warnings with
latest Apple developer tools. We now use dlopen directly if
available, and fall back to the older code if not. Per Chris
Campbell.

- On Windows, we know the backend stack size limit because we have to
specify it explicitly in backend/Makefile. Arrange for this value
to be known by get_stack_depth_rlimit() too. Per suggestion from
Magnus Hagander.

- Fix ancient oversight in psql's \d pattern processing code: when
seeing two quote chars inside quote marks, should emit one quote
*and stay in inquotes mode*. Back-patched through 7.3.

- Fix thinko in comment in pgsql/src/port/pgstrcasecmp.c.

- When planning a query at Bind time, be careful to pass the correct
query_list into the Portal, ie, the one seen and possibly modified
by the planner. Per report from Sergey Koposov.

- On platforms that have getrlimit(RLIMIT_STACK), use it to ensure
that max_stack_depth is not set to an unsafe value. This commit
also provides configure-time checking for <sys/resource.h>, and
cleans up some perhaps-unportable code associated with use of that
include file and getrlimit().

- Adjust HINT for stack depth limit to mention checking the underlying
platform limit, rather than just blindly raising max_stack_depth.
Also, tweak the code to work properly if someone sets
max_stack_depth to more than 2Gb, which guc.c will allow on a
64-bit machine.

- Fix string_to_array() to correctly handle the case where there are
overlapping possible matches for the separator string, such as
string_to_array('123xx456xxx789', 'xx'). Also, revise the logic of
replace(), split_part(), and string_to_array() to avoid O(N^2) work
from redundant searches and conversions to pg_wchar format when
there are N matches to the separator string.

- Fix bcc32.mak to create and remove pg_config_os.h properly.
Apparently win32.mak got patched for this, but not bcc32.mak.

- Fix SysCacheGetAttr() to handle the case where the specified
syscache has not been initialized yet. This can happen because
there are code paths that call SysCacheGetAttr() on a tuple
originally fetched from a different syscache (hopefully on the same
catalog) than the one specified in the call. It doesn't seem
useful or robust to try to prevent that from happening, so just
improve the function to cope instead. Per bug 2678 from Jeff
Trout.

- Cleanup for pglz_compress code: remove dead code, const-ify API of
remaining functions, simplify pglz_compress's API to not require a
useless data copy when compression fails. Also add a check in
pglz_decompress that the expected amount of data was decompressed.

- Work around buggy strtod on (some versions of?) IRIX. Combination
of proposed patches from John Jorgensen and Steve Singer.

- Second try at fixing libedit configuration for Bob Friesenhahn.
Buildfarm results from 'gazelle' show that there are indeed libedit
versions for which history.h is a needed header, even though it's
apparently been dropped entirely in other versions.

- Adjust configure's handling of libedit to not look for a history.h
file. Per Bob Friesenhahn's report, this file is not supplied by
some versions of libedit, and even when it is supplied it seems to
be just a link to readline.h, so we don't need to include it
anyway. Also, ensure that we won't try to use a too-old version of
Bison. The previous coding would bleat but then use it anyway;
better to invoke the 'missing' script if any grammar files need to
be rebuilt.

- Fix initdb's logic for picking shared_buffers/max_fsm_pages, which
had gotten rather thoroughly whacked out by careless recent
changes: the intended ratio between the two was off by a lot, and
the minimum number of shared buffers tried had increased by a lot.
Problem exposed by failures on buildfarm members with smaller
SHMMAX values.

- In postgresql.conf.sample, fix wal_buffers comment to agree with
presentation.

- Improve error messages from to_tsquery per yesterday's discussion:
provide the bad input, and be sure to mention that we are talking
about a tsearch query.

- Add qsort and qsort_arg to MSVC list of src/port files.

- Magnus Hagander's patch which rearranges MSVC errcode hack and fixes
incorrect _MSC_VER test.

- Switch over to using our own qsort() all the time, as has been
proposed repeatedly. Now that we don't have to worry about memory
leaks from glibc's qsort, we can safely put CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS
into the tuplesort comparators, as was requested a couple months
ago. Also, get rid of non-reentrancy and an extra level of
function call in tuplesort.c by providing a variant qsort_arg() API
that passes an extra void * argument through to the comparison
routine.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Revert changes made by pgindent, make show.pgc set all variables
before displaying them.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Updated keyword table for 8.2

- Added missing entry (CASCADED) in keywords table.

- Updated config.guess and config.sub

- The -X option in pg_dump was supposed to be a workaround for the
lack of portable long options, but we have had portable long
options for a long time now, so this is obsolete. People have
added options which *only* work with -X but not as regular long
option, so I'm putting a stop to this: -X is deprecated; it still
works, but it has been removed from the documentation, and please
don't add more of them.

- Message style improvements

Neil Conway committed:

- Fix a typo in release notes.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch which adds a version check for bison
when running the vc++ build.