== Postgres Weekly News - December 09 2007 ==

== Postgres Weekly News - December 09 2007 ==

8.3 beta 4 is out. Keep on testing!

FISL 9.0 will be happening April 17-19, 2008 at PUCRS in Porto Alegre,
Brazil. Lecture proposals are due by December 17. Sorry about the
late notice.
https://fisl.softwarelivre.org/9.0/papers/speaker/

To help with the Italian translation of the Postgres documentation,
please visit:
https://labs.psql.it/wiki/Traduzioni

Developer.com survey: help bring PostgreSQL numbers up!
http://solutions.internet.com/index.php/4431_default/d06d68c39e4b77545d082da8d2ea5d86

PgCon.br was a smash hit with over 200 attendees.
http://www.postgresql.org.br/encontronacionalpostgresql

Xing now has a PostgreSQL group:
https://www.xing.com/net/postgresql

== Postgres Product News ==

Full-page write improvement project is out.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pglesslog/

2ndQuadrant now has a PostgreSQL Performance course.
http://www.2ndquadrant.com/training.html

pgloader 2.2.5 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgloader/

PostGis 1.3.2 released.
http://www.postgis.org/

== Postgres Jobs for December ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-12/threads.php

== Postgres Local ==

PGCon 2008 Call for Papers starts December 19. Start your papers now.
http://www.pgcon.org/2008/papers.php

The BSD and PostgreSQL teams share a developer room at FOSDEM 2008 in
Brussels. If you want to give a talk or help managing the dev room,
contact fosdem(at)pgug(dot)eu(dot) For more information, see:
http://fosdem.org/2008/schedule/devroom/bsdpostgresql

PostgreSQL Conference East '08 talks are March 28 and 29.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

== Postgres in the News ==

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

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

Postgres Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter, Josh
Berkus, Devrim GUNDUZ and Enrico Pirozzi.

Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
Please send English language ones to david(at)fetter(dot)org, German language
to pwn(at)pgug(dot)de, Italian language to pwn(at)itpug(dot)org(dot)

== Applied Patches ==

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, change documentation, change
"distributed" checkpoints to "smoothed" checkpoints.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, update HOT description to make
index column changes clearer.

- Remove completed 8.3 TODO items.

- In release notes, mention "most" updates are improved with HOT.

- In the release notes, mention that the "Overview" items are listed
in the sections below in more detail.

- FAQ wording and markup fix. Euler Taveira de Oliveira.

- Update Brazilian FAQ. Euler Taveira de Oliveira

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- Change wording of logged message when cancelling an autovacuum task,
using american speling (unlike this commit message). Per complaint
from Mike C. on bug #3790 and subsequent discussion.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, change the "distributed
checkpoint" release note item to Greg Smith's proposed wording.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Remove unused, occasionally confusing graphics building support from
pgsql/doc/src/sgml/Makefile.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/postgresql.conf.sample, Realign the
running text in this file to 79 characters wide. Some other
copy-editing.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/protocol.sgml, add missing documentation for
SSPI packets.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Install.pm, don't try to install README.spi.
Hannes Eder.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/config.pl, default to integer timestamps
being off until 8.4, to correspond to the settings used for other
platforms.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-auth.c, on't send an empty SSPI
negotiation packet at the end of the negotiation. Fixes bug #3750

- Disable asserts by default on msvc build (to make it the same as in
unix)

Tom Lane committed:

- Update SGML contrib documentation to catch up with recent changes to
the former README files. Albert Cervera i Areny

- Add SGML documentation for contrib/spi and contrib/test_parser. The
spi documentation is pretty rudimentary, but it's a start.

- Remove obsoleted README files.

- Improve partitioning example, per Itagaki Takahiro.

- Remove contrib/spi/preprocessor, which has been uninteresting ever
since we supported standard FOREIGN KEY constraint syntax. It was
harmless enough just sitting there, but the prospect of having to
document it is surely more work than it's worth.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/plan/planagg.c, fix
build_minmax_path() to cope if an IS NULL clause turns up in the
indexable-clauses list for a btree index. Formerly it just Asserted
that all such clauses were opclauses, but that's no longer true in
8.3. Per bug #3796 from Matthias Schoeneich.

- Entity-ify a passel of & < > characters. Per gripe from Devrim.

- Correct misattribution of earthdistance module --- according to its
old README file, Bruno Wolff did the bulk of the work, but for some
reason only Hal Snyder was credited here.

- Make an editorial pass over the newly SGML-ified contrib
documentation. Fix lots of bad markup, bad English, bad
explanations. This commit covers only about half the contrib
modules, but I grow weary...

- Add missing table entry for lastval(), per Jeff Davis.

- In pgsql/contrib/tablefunc/tablefunc.c, clean up a couple of
problems in crosstab_hash's use of a hash table. The original
coding leaked memory (at least 8K per crosstab_hash call) because it
allowed the hash table to be allocated as a child of
TopMemoryContext and then never freed it. Fix that by putting the
hash table under per_query_ctx, instead. Also get rid of use of a
static variable to point to the hash table. Aside from being ugly,
that would actively do the wrong thing in the case of re-entrant
calls to crosstab_hash, which are at least theoretically possible
since it was expecting the static variable to stay valid across a
SPI_execute call.

- Fix mergejoin cost estimation so that we consider the statistical
ranges of the two join variables at both ends: not only trailing
rows that need not be scanned because there cannot be a match on the
other side, but initial rows that will be scanned without possibly
having a match. This allows a more realistic estimate of startup
cost to be made, per recent pgsql-performance discussion. In
passing, fix a couple of bugs that had crept into mergejoinscansel:
it was not quite up to speed for the task of estimating
descending-order scans, which is a new requirement in 8.3.

- Fix completely-bogus volatility markings on pg_trgm functions.

- Fix up the PQconnectionUsedPassword mess: create a separate
PQconnectionNeedsPassword function that tells the right thing for
whether to prompt for a password, and improve
PQconnectionUsedPassword so that it checks whether the password used
by the connection was actually supplied as a connection argument,
instead of coming from environment or a password file. Per bug
report from Mark Cave-Ayland and subsequent discussion.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/startup.c, fix bogus prompt for password in -u
case. Per gripe from Robert Treat.

- The E. J. Pratt verse used as a tsearch test case is unfortunately
still under copyright in the US and many other places. Substitute a
little something from a poet who's more safely dead. Per gripe from
Bjorn Munch.

- Fix attribution for Rime of the Ancient Mariner (obviously it's been
too long since freshman English :-()

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

xeb <AT> mail.ru's patch intended to convert binary integers
automatically in libpq on grounds of lack of design discussion and
incomplete type coverage.

== Pending Patches ==

Andrew Chernow sent in another version of his pgparam patch.

Yoshiyuki Asaba sent in a patch to fix pgbench's time reporting for
the -C option.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix PQconnectionUsedPassword.

Andrew Dunstan sent in a patch to fix the buildenv.pl/buildenv.bat
issue on Windows.