== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 21 2008 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 21 2008 ==

Watch for update releases 8.3.4, 8.2.10, 8.1.14, and 8.0.18 this week.

PostgreSQL User Group Germany is doing a talk and workshop at Open
Source day 2008 October 11 in Magdeburg, Germany.
http://www.open-source-tag.de/

Ohio LinuxFest 2008, held October 11 in Columbus, will once again have
a PostgreSQL booth this year. Contact melanie AT dunslane DOT net to
volunteer.

Viktor Vislobokov has started a Russian translation of the PostgreSQL
manual.
http://postgresql.ru.net/manual/index.html

New Survey: What kind of application do you run on PostgreSQL?
http://www.postgresql.org/community

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Archiveopteryx 3.0.1.
http://www.archiveopteryx.org/3.0.1

OpenERP now supports PostgreSQL 8.3.
http://openerp.com/downloads.html

pgTAP 0.10 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/frs/?group_id=1000389

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-09/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PGCon Brazil 2008 will be on September 26-27 at Unicamp in Campinas.
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/index.en.html
Registration:
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/inscricoes.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 Highload++ conference will be October 6-8 in Moscow, Russia.
Gavin Roy, Asko Oja and Maxim Boguk will talk about things PostgreSQL.
http://highload.ru

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/

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

PostgreSQL has a table at LinuxLive, Olympia, London, UK on 23-25
October, 2008. Write to Dave Page to participate.
dpage AT pgamin DOT org

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
Josh Berkus, Andreas (ads) Scherbaum, and Josh Williams.

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/doc/src/sgml/client-auth.sgml, add missing quotes.

- Parse pg_hba.conf in postmaster, instead of once in each backend for
each connection. This makes it possible to catch errors in the
pg_hba file when it's being reloaded, instead of silently reloading
a broken file and failing only when a user tries to connect. This
patch also makes the "sameuser" argument to ident authentication
optional.

- In pgsql/doc/src/FAQ/FAQ_russian.html, convert Russian FAQ to UTF8,
to make it render properly on the website.

- Polish and Turkish FAQ also needed converting to UTF8

- In pgsql/src/backend/libpq/hba.c, fix error messages from recent
pg_hba parsing patch to use errcontext() to indicate where the error
occurred.

- In pgsql/src/include/commands/trigger.h, mark SessionReplicationRole
as PGDLLIMPORT so it can be used from Slony functions. Per report
from Hiroshi Saito.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/command.c, avoid compiler warning about
variable used before assigned.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/nls.mk, add additional rules so that
make init-po for ecpg gets up to date flex and bison output.
Without these, make can sometimes be tempted to invoke its built-in
rules using lex and yacc, which can fail if those commands are not
available. This was a main cause for the NLS web site breakage.

Tom Lane committed:

- Xiao Meng's patch to change hash indexes to store only the hash code
rather than the whole indexed value. This means that hash index
lookups are always lossy and have to be rechecked when the heap is
visited; however, the gain in index compactness outweighs this when
the indexed values are wide. Also, we only need to perform datatype
comparisons when the hash codes match exactly, rather than for every
entry in the hash bucket; so it could also win for datatypes that
have expensive comparison functions. A small additional win is
gained by keeping hash index pages sorted by hash code and using
binary search to reduce the number of index tuples we have to look
at. This commit also incorporates Zdenek Kotala's patch to isolate
hash metapages and hash bitmaps a bit better from the page header
datastructures.

- Fix caching of foreign-key-checking queries so that when a replan is
needed, we regenerate the SQL query text not merely the plan derived
from it. This is needed to handle contingencies such as renaming of
a table or column used in an FK. Pre-8.3, such cases worked despite
the lack of replanning (because the cached plan needn't actually
change), so this is a regression. Per bug #4417 from Benjamin
Bihler.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/xml.c, fix multiple memory leaks in
xml_out(). Per report from Matt Magoffin.

- Widen the nLocks counts in local lock tables from int to int64.
This forestalls potential overflow when the same table (or other
object, but usually tables) is accessed by very many successive
queries within a single transaction. Per report from Michael
Milligan. Back-patch to 8.0, which is as far back as the patch
conveniently applies. There have been no reports of overflow in
pre-8.3 releases, but clearly the risk existed all along.
(Michael's report suggests that 8.3 may consume lock counts faster
than prior releases, but with no test case to look at it's hard to
be sure about that. Widening the counts seems a good
future-proofing measure in any event.)

- Clean up a couple of weird corner cases in interval parsing: make
-yyyy-mm be interpreted as expected (the sign should affect months
too), and get rid of hard-wired assumption that unmarked signed
values must be hours (if integers) or seconds (if floats). The
former was just a bug in my previous patch, while the latter may
have made sense at one time but seems illogical now that we support
determination of the units from typmod information. Ron Mayer and
myself.

- Add an "events" system to libpq, whereby applications can get
callbacks that enable them to manage private data associated with
PGconns and PGresults. Andrew Chernow and Merlin Moncure

- Allow ShowBufferUsage() to report the number of reads/writes that
have occurred to temporary files. This replaces the unused
NDirectFileRead/NDirectFileWrite counters. Itagaki Takahiro

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2008f (DST law changes
in Argentina, Bahamas, Brazil, Mauritius, Morocco, Pakistan,
Palestine, Paraguay).

- Preliminary release notes for upcoming back branch releases.

- Update back-branch release notes.

- Improve the recently-added libpq events code to provide more
consistent guarantees about whether event procedures will receive
DESTROY events. They no longer need to defend themselves against
getting a DESTROY without a successful prior CREATE. Andrew
Chernow.

- Create a selectivity estimation function for the text search @@
operator. Jan Urbanski.

- Add a PQfireResultCreateEvents function to allow applications to
mimic the sequence of operations that libpq goes through while
creating a PGresult. Also, remove ill-considered "const" decoration
on parameters passed to event procedures.

- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/system_views.sql, simplify the
definitions of a couple of system views by using SELECT * instead of
listing all the columns returned by the underlying function. initdb
not forced since this patch doesn't actually change anything about
the stored form of the views. It just means there's one less place
to change if someone wants to add columns to them.

Marc Fournier committed:

- tag for 7.4.22, 8.0.18, 8.1.14, 8.2.10, and 8.3.4.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/file/fd.c, optimize CleanupTempFiles by
having a boolean flag that keeps track of whether there are
FD_XACT_TEMPORARY files to clean up at transaction end. Per
performance profiling results on AWeber's huge systems. Patch by me
after an idea suggested by Simon Riggs.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Tatsuo Ishii sent in three revisions of the Common Table Expressions
patch.

Fujii Masao sent in a patch to multiple event notifications with one
signal. This is in aid of synchronous logging replication.

George McCollister sent in a patch to improve the performance of
EncodeDateTime.

Greg Smith sent in another revision of his patch to expose GUC
boot_val as default_val.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in four revisions of Radek Strnad's collation
support patch.

Ron Mayer sent in two revisions of a patch to add a GUC variable to
set intervals to be one of: PostgreSQL traditional, SQL standard, ISO
8601.

Jeff Davis sent in a doc patch clarifying the use of OLD and NEW in
PL/PgSQL trigger functions.

Simon Riggs sent in another revision of his infrastructure change for
recovery.

Ryan Bradetich sent in another revision of his unsigned integer types
patch.

Joe Conway sent in three revisions of a patch to plug an access
control hole in dblink.