== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 24 2008 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 24 2008 ==

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Archiveopteryx 2.1.1 and 3.0.0 will be out soon.
http://aox.org/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for August ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-08/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PGCon Brasil 2008 registration is open.
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/inscricoes.en.html

Stefan Kaltenbrunner is giving a talk about monitoring strategies for
postgresql.org at the Nagios conference 2008 September 11-12 in
Nuremberg, Germany.
http://www.netways.de/nagios_konferenz/y2008/programm/v/postgresql_monitoring/

The Prato Linux User Group will be having PostgreSQL talks in
September. The schedule in Italian is:
http://www.prato.linux.it/serate_a_tema_2008

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

PgDay.fr will be October 4 in Toulouse. The Call for Papers is open:
http://www.postgresqlfr.org/?q=node/1686
Registration:
http://www.pgday.fr/doku.php/inscription

The Open Source Day in Magdeburg, Germany will be on October 11 2008.
http://www.open-source-tag.de/
Send in your interesting talks for the PostgreSQL track!
The call for papers is open until August 31 2008.
http://www.open-source-tag.de/cfp/index.html (in german)

PostgreSQL Conference West 2008 will be October 10-12 at Portland
State University in Portland, Oregon.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/
Talk submission at:
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/west08/talk_submission/

Sponsor the European PGDay!
http://www.pgday.org/en/sponsors/campaign

The Call for Papers for European PGDay has begun.
http://www.pgday.org/en/call4papers

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

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

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 ==

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/clean.bat, properly remove
src\include\utils\probes.h when running clean.bat.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-misc.c, make libpq on windows not
try to send chunks larger than 64Kb. Per Microsoft knowledge base
article Q201213, early versions of Windows fail when we do this.
Later versions of Windows appear to have a higher limit than 64Kb,
but do still fail on large sends, so we unconditionally limit it for
all versions. Patch from Tom Lane.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Add to TODO: "Fix all set-returning system functions so they support
a wildcard target list."

- Mark TODO as done: "Allow an existing index to be marked as a
table's primary key."

- Not actually done: "Allow an existing index to be marked as a
table's primary key."

- New TODO list URL wiki location listed; contents truncated.

- TODO now in wiki, html version removed.

- Remove tools and documention for generating TODO.html.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/pg_dump.sgml, mention that pg_dump does
not dump ALTER DATABASE ... SET commands; backpatch to 8.3.X. Also
fix markup that had just one bullet.

- Improve wording of error message when a postgresql.conf setting is
ignored because it can only be set at server start.

- Minor patch on pgbench: 1. -i option should run vacuum analyze only
on pgbench tables, not *all* tables in database. 2. pre-run cleanup
step was DELETE FROM HISTORY then VACUUM HISTORY. This is just a
slow version of TRUNCATE HISTORY.

- Make "log_temp_files" super-user set only, like other logging
options. Simon Riggs.

- Update link to developer's FAQ from main FAQ.

- Add missing descriptions for aggregates, functions and conversions.
Bernd Helmle.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- Fix some issues that prevent this file to be processed by scripts.
While at it, mark a couple of TODO items completed in 8.4: "Prevent
long-lived temporary tables from causing frozen-xid advancement
starvation," and "Improve performance of shared invalidation queue
for multiple CPUs." Also remove a couple of obsolete assignments.

- In pgsql/doc/TODO, update URL.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In ecpg, fixed incorrect argument handling in SET command if
argument is a variable.

Tom Lane committed:

- Cause the output from debug_print_parse, debug_print_rewritten, and
debug_print_plan to appear at LOG message level, not DEBUG1 as
historically. Make debug_pretty_print default to on. Also, cause
plans generated via EXPLAIN to be subject to debug_print_plan. This
is all to make debug_print_plan a reasonably comfortable substitute
for the former behavior of EXPLAIN VERBOSE.

- Remove -Winline from the default set of CFLAGS for gcc. It's gotten
much too noisy to be useful as of gcc 4.3, and we were never really
doing anything about inlining warnings anyway.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/plan/subselect.c, fix obsolete
comment. It's no longer the case that Param nodes don't carry
typmod.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/plan/subselect.c, marginal
improvement in sublink planning: allow unknownEqFalse optimization
to be used for SubLinks that are underneath a top-level OR clause.
Just as at the very top level of WHERE, it's not necessary to be
accurate about whether the sublink returns FALSE or NULL, because
either result has the same impact on whether the WHERE will succeed.

- Arrange to convert EXISTS subqueries that are equivalent to hashable
IN subqueries into the same thing you'd have gotten from IN (except
always with unknownEqFalse = true, so as to get the proper semantics
for an EXISTS). I believe this fixes the last case within CVS HEAD
in which an EXISTS could give worse performance than an equivalent
IN subquery. The tricky part of this is that if the upper query
probes the EXISTS for only a few rows, the hashing implementation
can actually be worse than the default, and therefore we need to
make a cost-based decision about which way to use. But at the time
when the planner generates plans for subqueries, it doesn't really
know how many times the subquery will be executed. The least
invasive solution seems to be to generate both plans and postpone
the choice until execution. Therefore, in a query that has been
optimized this way, EXPLAIN will show two subplans for the EXISTS,
of which only one will actually get executed. There is a lot more
that could be done based on this infrastructure: in particular it's
interesting to consider switching to the hash plan if we start out
using the non-hashed plan but find a lot more upper rows going by
than we expected. I have therefore left some minor inefficiencies
in place, such as initializing both subplans even though we will
currently only use one.

Michael Meskes committed:

- In ecpg, synced parser.

- Fixed incorrect argument handling in SET command if argument is a
variable.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Autoconf 2.62 will require cache variables to contain "_cv_". Fix
our few noncomplying cases to be future-proof.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- Fix possible duplicate tuples while GiST scan. Now page is
processed at once and ItemPointers are collected in memory. Remove
tuple's killing by killtuple() if tuple was moved to another page,
it could produce unaceptable overhead. Backpatch up to 8.1 because
the bug was introduced by GiST's concurrency support.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch to let people include flags for
custom GUC variables at runtime.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to let people change the
stats_temp_directory with a SIGHUP.

D'Arcy J.M. Cain sent in two revisions of a patch to add a new border
setting to psql.