== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 25 2008 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 25 2008 ==

The May commitfest is finished. The remaining patches on the queue
are Heikki's map-forks patch, which was WIP not intended to be
committed now; and Merlin and Andrew's libpq hooks patch, which is
still in flux and not ready to commit now.

PgCon 2008 was a smashing success, eh. People hashed things out at
the developer meeting, complete with a Secret Cabal Meeting.
Participants came in from as far as Pune, India.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

DbWrench Database Design v1.4.7 released.
http://www.dbwrench.com/

MicroOLAP Database Designer for PostgreSQL ver.1.2.4-beta released.
http://microolap.com/products/database/postgresql-designer/download/

Npgsql 2 Beta4 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/npgsql/

The call for papers for OSS 2.0: Leveraging the Open Source Community
for Business is open. Submissions must be in by June 21, 2008.
http://conferenze.dei.polimi.it/oss20

pgtcl 1.7 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtcl/

Playr 0.1 released.
https://area51.myyearbook.com/trac.cgi/wiki/Playr

== PostgreSQL Jobs for May ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-05/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The Greek PUG will be putting up a booth at the third Greek FLOSS
conference on May 27-28 at NTUA, Athens.
http://www.postgresql.gr

LAPUG will be meeting May 30, 2008 at Cal Poly
Non-trivial updateable views, from Keith Larson
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/390

The Call for Papers for PgCon.BR is open. The deadline is May 31, so
get those proposals in.
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/chamadas.en.html

PGDay will be in Portland the day before OSCON.
http://pugs.postgresql.org/taxonomy/term/53

Utah Open Source Conference 2008's CfP is open through June 1.
This 2nd annual conference is August 28-30, 2008 in Salt Lake City, UT
http://2008.utosc.com/

PGCon Brazil 2008 will be on September 26-27 at Unicamp in Campinas.
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/index.en.html

PGDay.IT 2008 will be October 17 and 18 in Prato.
http://www.pgday.org/it/

== 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 Tom Lane.

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 ==

Tom Lane committed:

- Coercion sanity check in ri_HashCompareOp failed to allow for enums,
as per example from Rod Taylor. On reflection the correct test here
is for any polymorphic type, not specifically ANYARRAY as in the
original coding.

- Make to_char()'s localized month/day names depend on LC_TIME, not
LC_MESSAGES. Euler Taveira de Oliveira

- Adjust -Wl,--asneeded test to avoid using the switch if it breaks
libreadline. What we will do for compatibility :-(

- Adjust timestamp regression tests to prevent two low-probability
failure cases. Recent buildfarm experience shows that it is
sometimes possible to execute several SQL commands in less time than
the granularity of Windows' not-very-high-resolution gettimeofday(),
leading to a failure because the tests expect the value of now() to
change and it doesn't. Also, it was recognized some time ago that
the same area of the tests could fail if local midnight passes
between the insertion and the checking of the values for
'yesterday', 'tomorrow', etc. Clean all this up per ideas from
myself and Greg Stark. There remains a window for failure if the
transaction block is entered exactly at local midnight (so that
'now' and 'today' have the same value), but that seems
low-probability enough to live with. Since the point of this change
is mostly to eliminate buildfarm noise, back-patch to all versions
we are still actively testing.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- Remove arbitrary 10MB limit on two-phase state file size. It's not
that hard to go beoynd 10MB, as demonstrated by Gavin Sharry's
example of dropping a schema with ~25000 objects. The really bogus
thing about the limit was that it was enforced when a state file
file was read in, not when it was written, so you would end up with
a prepared transaction that you can't commit or abort, and the only
recourse was to shut down the server and remove the file by hand.
Raise the limit to MaxAllocSize, and enforce it also when a state
file is written. We could've removed the limit altogether, but
reading in a file larger than MaxAllocSize would fail anyway because
we read it into a palloc'd buffer. Backpatch down to 8.1, where 2PC
and this issue was introduced.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Mark TODO as done: "Use LC_TIME for localized weekday/month names."

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/formatting.c, simplify code now that
to_(upper|lower|initcap) do not modify the passed string.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Synced parser. Made ecpg parser use backend provided keyword list.
Changed whenever test so exit value is 0.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/Makefile, ecpg_keywords.o also
depends on preproc.h

- Link in keywords file instead of copying it. Use #define/#ifdef
instead of sed to fix include files, this should work on Windows
too.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Use CRITICAL_SECTION instead of Mutexes for thread-locking in libpq
on Windows, for better performance. Per suggestion from Andrew
Chernow, but not his patch since the underlying code was changed to
deal with return values.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/print.c, fix function headers not matching
prototype in header file, per compiler warnings on msvc.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Mkvcbuild.pm, add include directory required
after the latest changes to the ecpg build. Per red Windows
buildfarm members.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Guillaume Lelarge sent in a patch to make psql backward-compatible to
7.4. Bryce Nesbitt followed up with one of his own.

Andrew Chernow sent in another revision of the libpq object hooks
patch.

Greg Sabino Mullane sent in a documentation patch by Kevin L. McBride
explaining LOCK_DEBUG options in detail.

Gregory Stark sent in three revisions of a patch which makes \d+ show
storage options for columns, per discussion with Oleg Bartunov.

Jaime Casanova sent in two versions of a patch to extent GRANT's scope
on sequences.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of his FSM rewrite patch.

Dickson Guedes sent in a patch in collaboration with Euler Taveira de
Oliveira which makes \d and \d+ on sequences produce more useful
output.