== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 15 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 15 2006 ==

PostgreSQL 8.1.5, 8.0.9, 7.4.14 and 7.3.16 will be out soon. Get
ready to upgrade!

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgpool-HA 1.0.0 released. pgpool-HA combines pgpool with heartbeat.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/

SQL Manager 3.7 for PostgreSQL released.
http://www.sqlmanager.net/en/products/postgresql/manager

PostGIS 1.1.5 released. Upgrade!
http://postgis.refractions.net/

DBI-Link 2.0beta1 released. Test!
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/dbi-link/

pgAdmin III v1.6 Beta 3 released.
http://www.pgadmin.org/download/

Glom 1.1.6 released.
http://www.glom.org

The Npgsql Development Team is proud to announce Npgsql 1.0 GA.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/npgsql/

PGCluster-1.3.1rc6 and PGCluster-1.5.0rc8 released. Test!
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgcluster/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for October ==

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

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PostgreSQL will have a booth in the .ORG village at Linuxworld UK.
http://www.linuxworldexpo.co.uk/, October 25-26. Contact
uk(at)postgresql(dot)org to volunteer or for more information.

== 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 Josh Berkus

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane committed:

- Adjust plperl to ensure that all strings and hash keys passed to
Perl are marked as UTF8 when the database encoding is UTF8. This
should avoid inconsistencies like that exhibited in bug #2683 from
Vitali Stupin.

- Code review for --no-data-for-failed-tables patch. Instead of
trashing one of the program's core data structures, make use of the
existing ability to selectively exclude TOC items by ID. Slightly
more code but much less likely to create future maintenance
problems.

- Code and docs review for ALTER TABLE INHERIT/NO INHERIT patch.

- Stamps for 8.1.5, 8.0.9, 7.4.14, 7.3.16.

- Sync 8.1 pg_config.h.in with expected autoheader output (looks like
someone did this manually last time ...)

- Update release notes for SQL functions vs triggers fix.

- Fix mishandling of after-trigger state when a SQL function returns
multiple rows --- if the surrounding query queued any trigger
events between the rows, the events would be fired at the wrong
time, leading to bizarre behavior. Per report from Merlin Moncure.

- Use Min() instead of min() in qsort, for consistency and to avoid
redefined-macro warnings on some platforms. Per gripe from Hiroshi
Saito.

- Remove somebody's ill-considered free() call, per report from
Chander Ganesan. No, I do not care whether Coverity considers this
a memory leak. It's entirely not worth the code space to do it
correctly.

- A bit of copy-editing on back-branch release notes.

- Repair incorrect check for coercion of unknown literal to ANYARRAY.
It's correct to allow unknown to be coerced to ANY or ANYELEMENT,
since it's a real-enough data type, but it most certainly isn't an
array datatype. This can cause a backend crash but AFAICT is not
exploitable as a security hole. Per report from Michael Fuhr.

- CREATE TABLE ... LIKE ... should mark the columns it creates with
attislocal = true, since they are not really inherited but merely
copied from the original table.

- Fix psql \d commands to behave properly when a pattern using regex |
is given. Formerly they'd emit '^foo|bar$' which is wrong because
the anchors are parsed as part of the alternatives; must emit
'^(foo|bar)$' to get expected behavior. Same as bug found
previously in similar_escape(). Already fixed in HEAD, this is
just back-porting the part of that patch that was a bug fix.

- Revise psql pattern-matching switches as per discussion. The rule
is now to process all inclusion switches then all exclusion
switches, so that the behavior is independent of switch ordering.
Use of -T does not cause non-table objects to be suppressed. And
the patterns are now interpreted the same way psql's \d commands do
it, rather than as pure regex commands; this allows for example -t
schema.tab to do what it should have been doing all along.
Re-enable the --blobs switch to do something useful, ie, add back
blobs into a dump they were otherwise suppressed from.

- Improve description of the pattern matching rules used by psql's \d
commands (and soon by pg_dump).

- Move processNamePattern into dumputils.c in preparation for using it
in pg_dump as well as psql. Since psql already uses dumputils.c,
while there's not any code sharing in the other direction, this
seems the easiest way. Also, fix misinterpretation of patterns
using regex | by adding parentheses (same bug found previously in
similar_escape()). This should be backpatched.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- FAQ updates --- This is a small cosmetic patch that adds pt_BR IRC
channel to the lists of IRC channels, fixes a typo in the OID's
question, and corrects the PGCluster's project name.

- Jun Kuwamura's updates to the Japanese FAQ.

- Hiroshi Saito's patch which fixes the test_fsync compile on
MinGW(win32)

- Added to TODO: Issue a notice if CREATE TABLE ... ON COMMIT { DELETE
ROWS | DROP } is issued outside a multi-statement transaction.

- Update pg_hba.conf comment about documentation section per Quinn
Weaver.

- Hiroshi Saito's MSVC/BCC Win32 compiler fixes.

- Restore HPUX FAQ entry that talked about working around regression
script problems, because in 8.1.X, the regression test is still a
script. Patch to 8.1.X only.

- Add release checklist item: "copy FAQs from HEAD to top-most
branches"

- Backpatch FAQs to 8.1.X.

- Update FAQ for latest release 8.1.5.

- Update libpq.rc for 7.3.16 and 7.4.14. Later releases use
libpq.rc.in, which was already updated.

- Stamp releases 7.3.16, 7.4.14, 8.0.9, and 8.1.5.

- Update release notes for releases 7.3.16, 7.4.14, 8.0.9, and 8.1.5.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Make unknown-option-warning code more portable. echo -n is not
portable, and neither "|" nor "\|" is in basic regular expressions.

- Cleanup pass on FAQ_Solaris.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- In contrib/hstore, rename the 'isexists' and 'isdefined' function to
'exist' and 'defined' respectively. The old names are still there
for backward compatibility, but are no longer in the docs.

Neil Conway committed:

- Make some incremental improvements and fixes to the documentation on
Continuous Archiving. Plenty of editorial work remains.

- Laurenz Albe's patch to the installation docs which adds some links
to the documentation on LDAP to the discussion of the "--with-ldap"
configure option.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- A patch which fixes the infinite sleep and failure to send on Win32.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Michael Glaesman submitted a documentation patch for CREATE CONSTRAINT
TRIGGER.

Stephen Frost submitted a patch which adds the array_accum()
aggregate as a built-in, taking advantage of some existing speed
optimizations built into the array-handling functions.

Hiroshi Saito submitted a patch which compares fsync times on write()
and non-write() descriptors.