== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 29 2008 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 29 2008 ==

July's commit-fest is starting soon.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgsnap 0.4 released.
http://pgsnap.projects.postgresql.org/

PL/Proxy 2.0.6 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/plproxy/

pyreplica 1.0 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pyreplica/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for June ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-06/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

pgDay Portland is July 20, just before OSCON.
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/400

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

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:

- Fix Gen_fmgrtab.sh to not rely on hard-wired knowledge of the column
numbers in pg_proc. Also make it not emit duplicate extern
declarations, and make it a bit more bulletproof in some other small
ways. Likewise fix the equally hard-wired, and utterly
undocumented, knowledge in the MSVC build scripts. For testing
purposes and perhaps other uses in future, pull out that portion of
the MSVC scripts into a standalone perl script equivalent to
Gen_fmgrtab.sh, and make it generate actually identical output,
rather than just more-or-less-the-same output. Motivated by looking
at Pavel's variadic function patch. Whether or not that gets
accepted, we can be sure that pg_proc's column set will change again
in the future; it's time to not have to deal with this gotcha.

- Oops, make the MSVC build put fmgroids.h where it needs to be. Per
buildfarm results.

- Reduce the alignment requirement of type "name" from int to char,
and arrange to suppress zero-padding of "name" entries in indexes.
The alignment change is unlikely to save any space, but it is really
needed anyway to make the world safe for our widespread practice of
passing plain old C strings to functions that are declared as taking
Name. In the previous coding, the C compiler was entitled to assume
that a Name pointer was word-aligned; but we were failing to
guarantee that. I think the reason we'd not seen failures is that
usually the only thing that gets done with such a pointer is
strcmp(), which is hard to optimize in a way that exploits
word-alignment. Still, some enterprising compiler guy will probably
think of a way eventually, or we might change our code in a way that
exposes more-obvious optimization opportunities. The padding change
is accomplished in one-liner fashion by declaring the "name" index
opclasses to use storage type "cstring" in pg_opclass.h. Normally
btree and hash don't allow a nondefault storage type, because they
don't have any provisions for converting the input datum to another
type. However, because name and cstring are effectively the same
thing except for padding, no conversion is needed --- we only need
index_form_tuple() to treat the datum as being cstring not name, and
this is sufficient. This seems to make for about a one-third
reduction in the typical sizes of system catalog indexes that
involve "name" columns, of which we have many. These two changes
are only weakly related, but the alignment change makes me feel
safer that the padding change won't introduce problems, so I'm
committing them together.

- Modify the recently-added probe for -Wl,--as-needed some more,
because RHEL-4 vintage Linux is even more broken than we realized: a
link to libreadline will succeed, and fail only at runtime. It
seems that an AC_TRY_RUN test is the only reliable way to check
whether this is really safe. Per report from Tatsuo Ishii.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/plpgsql.sgml, clarify plpgsql documentation by
not treating IF THEN ELSE IF ... as a truly distinct version of IF.
Per suggestion from Marko Kreen.

- Improve planner's estimation of the size of an append relation:
rather than taking the maximum of any child rel's width, we should
weight the widths proportionally to the number of rows expected from
each child. In hindsight this is obviously correct because row
width is really a proxy for the total physical size of the relation.
Per discussion with Scott Carey (bug #4264).

- Consider a clause to be outerjoin_delayed if it references the
nullable side of any lower outer join, even if it also references
the non-nullable side and so could not get pushed below the outer
join anyway. We need this in case the clause is an OR clause: if it
doesn't get marked outerjoin_delayed, create_or_index_quals() could
pull an indexable restriction for the nullable side out of it,
leading to wrong results as demonstrated by today's bug report from
toruvinn. (See added regression test case for an example.) In
principle this has been wrong for quite a while. In practice I
don't think any branch before 8.3 can really show the failure,
because create_or_index_quals() will only pull out indexable
conditions, and before 8.3 those were always strict. So though we
might have improperly generated null-extended rows in the outer
join, they'd get discarded from the result anyway. The gating
factor that makes the failure visible is that 8.3 considers "col IS
NULL" to be indexable. Hence I'm not going to risk back-patching
further than 8.3.

- If pnstrdup is going to be promoted to a generally available
function, it ought to conform to the rest of palloc.h in using Size
for sizes.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/gin/ginbulk.c, remove unnecessary
coziness of GIN code with datum copying. Now that space is tracked
via GetMemoryChunkSpace, there's really no advantage to duplicating
datumCopy's innards here. This is one bit of my toast indirection
patch that should go in anyway.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Merge duplicate upper/lower/initcap() routines in oracle_compat.c
and formatting.c to use common code; remove duplicate functions and
support routines that are no longer needed.

- Add TODO: "Consider whether duplicate keys should be sorted by
block/offset."

- Add libpq comment about how to determine the format used for passing
binary values. Add comments to libpq C function for parameter
passing.

- Add to TODO: "Implement a module capability for loading
/contrib-style extensions."

- Add to TODO: "Allow custom variables to appear in pg_settings()."

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/backup.sgml, backup wording improvement.
Joshua D. Drake.

- Add URL for Merge TODO.

- Add to TODO: "Allow COPY to report errors sooner."

- Mark TODO as done: "Prevent pg_dump/pg_restore from being affected
by statement_timeout."

- Remove use of postmaster.opts.default by pg_ctl.

- Use SYSTEMQUOTE as concatentation to strings, rather than %s printf
patterns, for clarity.

- Fix 'pg_ctl restart' to preserve command-line arguments.

- Add to TODO: "Improve LDAP authentication configuration options."

- Update FAQ URLs as suggested by Curtis Gallant.

- Simplify 'pg_ctl restart' detection of first argument in
postmaster.opts.

- More FAQ URL updates from Curtis Gallant.

- Add TODO about security: "Improve server security options."

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_ctl/pg_ctl.c, fix pg_ctl bug where detection of
binary location from postmaster.opts wasn't working.

- Add MERGE TODO URL.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/syntax.sgml, use SGML table to show backslash
string escapes, rather than have them appear in a paragraph. Andy
Anderson.

- Fix 'pg_ctl reload' to properly preserve postmaster commend-line
arguments on restart. Patch to releases 8.0 - 8.3.X.

- Add to TODO: "Fix system views like pg_stat_all_tables to use
set-returning functions, rather than views of per-column functions."

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, mention actual function names in
documentation of how to pass binary values to libpq.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Synced parser for ecpg.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/formatting.c, fix bug "select
lower('asd') = 'asd'" returns false with multibyte encoding and
non-C locale. Fix is just to use correct source's length for
char2wchar call.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/win32.mak, fix standalone libpq build
on win32. Hiroshi Saito.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

Raneyt AT cecs.pdx.edu's patch implementing XML output for EXPLAIN.
No documentation.

== Pending Patches ==

Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of his "relation forks"
patch and another that rewrites the FSM.

David Wheeler sent in two revisions of a patch to add a
case-insensitive text types to PostgreSQL.

Thomas Lee sent in two revisions of a patch to add a new GUC called
track_activity_query_size per discussion
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-06/msg00814.php

ITAGI Takahiro sent in two revisions of a patch to fix the
archive/restore docs for Windows.

ITAGI Takahiro sent in a patch to create an executore hook for logging
SQL statements.