== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 10 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 10 2006 ==

Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane have been hard at work making the docs
easier for people to modify and translate.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PostgreSQL 8.2.0 RPMs are now available.
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/v8.2.0/linux/

pgPool is now in Fedora Core Extras.

PL/Scheme 0.9 released.
http://plscheme.projects.postgresql.org/

Navicat PostgreSQL 7.2.9 for Windows released.
http://pgsql.navicat.com/

PostgreSQL Maestro 6.12 released.
http://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/postgresql/maestro/

SQL Edge 2.3 released.
http://www.baybreezesoft.com

== PostgreSQL Jobs for December ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-12/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PostgreSQL 8.2 Release Party in the San Francisco Bay Area. Details
here: http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/5268465/

Gavin Sherry is running a PostgreSQL miniconf at Linux.Conf.Au in
Sydney on Tuesday the 16th of January 2007.
http://lca2007.linux.org.au/Miniconfs/PostgreSQL If you would like to
attending, email gavin AT alcove . com . au

== 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
and Dave Page.

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane committed:

- Fix LIMIT/OFFSET for null limit values. This worked before 8.2 but
was broken by the change to make limit values int8 instead of int4.
(Specifically, you can do DatumGetInt32 safely on a null value, but
not DatumGetInt64.) Per bug #2803 from Greg Johnson.

- Refactor ExecGetJunkAttribute to avoid searching for junk attributes
by name on each and every row processed. Profiling suggests this
may buy a percent or two for simple UPDATE scenarios, which isn't
huge, but when it's so easy to get ...

- Fix planning of SubLinks to ensure that Vars generated from
transformation of a sublink's test expression have the correct
vartypmod, rather than defaulting to -1. There's at least one place
where this is important because we're expecting these Vars to be
exactly equal() to those appearing in the subplan itself. This is a
pretty klugy solution --- it would likely be cleaner to change Param
nodes to include a typmod field --- but we can't do that in the
already-released 8.2 branch. Per bug report from Hubert Fongarnand.

- Repair incorrect placement of WHERE clauses when there are multiple,
rearrangeable outer joins and the WHERE clause is non-strict and
mentions only nullable-side relations. New bug in 8.2, caused by
new logic to allow rearranging outer joins. Per bug #2807 from Ross
Cohen; thanks to Jeff Davis for producing a usable test case. Avoid
double free of _SPI_current->tuptable. AtEOSubXact_SPI() now tries
to release it in a subtransaction abort, but this neglects
possibility that someone outside SPI already did. Fix is for spi.c
to forget about a tuptable as soon as it's handed it back to the
caller. Per bug #2817 from Michael Andreen.

- Remove the logId/logSeg fields from pg_control, because they are not
needed in normal operation, and we can avoid rewriting pg_control at
every log segment switch if we don't insist that these values be
valid. Reducing the number of pg_control updates is a good idea for
both performance and reliability. It does make pg_resetxlog's life
a bit harder, but that seems a good tradeoff; and anyway the change
to pg_resetxlog amounts to automating something people formerly
needed to do by hand, namely look at the existing pg_xlog files to
make sure the new WAL start point was past them.

- In passing, change the wording of xlog.c's "database system was
interrupted" messages: describe the pg_control timestamp as "last
known up at" rather than implying it is the exact time of service
interruption. With this change the timestamp will generally be the
time of the last checkpoint, which could be many minutes before the
failure; and we've already seen indications that people tend to
misinterpret the old wording. initdb forced due to change in
pg_control layout. Simon Riggs and Tom Lane

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Patch of Win32 Encoding problem for server messages using
FormatMessage() (This should have been in 8.2.0, patched to 8.2.X
and HEAD):

- I think this problem to be complex....
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-11/msg00042.php

- FormatMessage of windows cannot consider the encoding of the
database. However, I should try the solution now. It is necessary
to clear the problem.

- Multi character-code exists together in message and log. It doesn't
consider the data base encoding that the user intended....

- The user in multi-byte country can try this.
http://inet.winpg.jp/~saito/pg_bug/MessageCheck.c

- That is, it is likely to become it in this manner. (Japanese)
http://inet.winpg.jp/~saito/pg_bug/FormatMessage998.png

- Hiroshi Saito's patch which fixes pg_dump linking on Win32 with MSVS
win32.mak: The module link is insufficient.:-(

- Simon Riggs's update of port FAQs, HEAD patch only.

- Fix documentation example of using psql \x with a SELECT command,
per Simon Riggs. Backpatch to 8.2.X.

- Make URL to docs use /current/.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- Fix core dump of ispell for case of non-successfull initialization.
Previous versions aren't affected.

- Fix synonym dictionary init: string should be malloc'ed, not
palloc'ed. Bug introduced recently while fixing lowerstr().

Neil Conway committed:

- Fix typos in comments and error messages in HStore. Patch from Filip
Rembialkowski, with some additional fixes by myself.

- Add a txn_start column to pg_stat_activity. This makes it easier to
identify long-running transactions. Since we already need to record
the transaction-start time (e.g. for now()), we don't need any
additional system calls to report this information. Catversion
bumped, initdb required.

- Various improvements to the GUC description strings. Punctuate and
capitalize the strings like sentences. Remove unnecessarily specific
descriptions of the units used by GUC variables, since we now allow
any reasonable unit to be specified.

- Fix the build for when SHOW_MEMORY_STATS is defined. The reference
> to the nonexistent ShowStats variable is simply removed, per Gavin
> Sherry.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Generalize Texinfo rules. Prevent them from overriding the
PostScript build rules.

- Drop indentation of verbatim environments in print output. This
increased the build time by what seemed like infinity.

- Add some information about increasing JadeTeX parameters.

- Reorganize XSLT stylesheet support. Put common things into a
separate file (instead of repeating), add XSL-FO stylesheet and
appropriate make rules.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Gavin Sherry posted a patch implementing optional password complexity
checking and a delay following a failed login to slow down brute force
password attacks.