== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 28 2008 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 28 2008 ==

A lively discussion of SE-PostgreSQL continues on -hackers.

Registration for PGDay.IT is open.
https://register.pgday.org/

ArcGIS 9.3 now supports PostgreSQL.
http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/geodatabase/about/whats-new.html

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

check_postgres 2.2.1 released.
http://bucardo.org/check_postgres/

MyJSQLView 2.91 released.
http://myjsqlview.sourceforge.net/

PL/Proxy 2.0.7 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/plproxy/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

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

== PostgreSQL Local ==

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 Russian PostgreSQL Users' Group meeting will be October 6th in
Moscow. Special guests expected include Gavin Roy of MyYearbook.com
and Asko Oja and Marko Kreen of Skype.
http://forum.postgresmen.ru/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=38

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/

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.

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/

The European PostgreSQL Day (PGDay 2008) will be October 17 and 18 in
Prato, Tuscany, Italy. Registration is open at
http://register.pgday.org/ 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
Jean-Paul Argudo, Gabriele Bartolini, Nikolay Samokhvalov, and Andreas
(ads) Scherbaum.

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 dblink_connect() so that it verifies that a password is supplied
in the conninfo string *before* trying to connect to the remote
server, not after. As pointed out by Marko Kreen, in certain
not-very-plausible situations this could result in sending a
password from the postgres user's .pgpass file, or other places that
non-superusers shouldn't have access to, to an untrustworthy remote
server. The cleanest fix seems to be to expose libpq's
conninfo-string-parsing code so that dblink can check for a password
option without duplicating the parsing logic. Joe Conway, with a
little cleanup by Tom Lane.

- Get rid of pgpass_from_client tracking inside libpq --- given the
conclusion that presence of the password in the conninfo string must
be checked *before* risking a connection attempt, there is no point
in checking it afterwards. This makes the specification of
PQconnectionUsedPassword() a bit simpler and perhaps more generally
useful, too.

- In pgsql/src/pl/plpgsql/src/pl_exec.c, fix unportable syntax used in
recent patch. Per results from buildfarm member 'bear'.

- In pgsql/src/backend/rewrite/rewriteHandler.c, fix more problems
with rewriter failing to set Query.hasSubLinks when inserting a
SubLink expression into a rule query. We missed cases where the
original query contained a sub-SELECT in a function in FROM, a
multi-row VALUES list, or a RETURNING list. Per bug #4434 from Dean
Rasheed and subsequent investigation. Back-patch to 8.1; older
releases don't have the issue because they didn't try to be smart
about setting hasSubLinks only when needed.

- Establish the rule that array types should have the same typdelim as
their element types. Since the backend doesn't actually pay
attention to the array type's delimiter, this has no functional
effect, but it seems better for the catalog entries to be
consistent. Per gripe from Greg Mullane and subsequent discussion.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/like_match.c, make LIKE throw an
error if the escape character is at the end of the pattern (ie, has
nothing to quote), rather than silently ignoring the character as
has been our historical behavior. This is required by SQL spec and
should help reduce the sort of user confusion seen in bug #4436.
Per discussion. This is not so much a bug fix as a definitional
change, and it could break existing applications; so not
back-patched. It might deserve being mentioned as an
incompatibility in the 8.4 release notes.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/formatting.c, fix pointer-advancement
bugs in MS and US cases of new to_timestamp() code. Alex Hunsaker.

- Add hooks to let plugins override the planner's lookups in
pg_statistic. Simon Riggs, with some editorialization by me.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/selfuncs.c, dept of second thoughts:
let's make sure that get_index_stats_hook is only applied to
expression indexes, not to plain relations. The original coding in
btcostestimate conflated the two cases, but it's not hard to use
get_relation_stats_hook instead when we're looking to the underlying
relation.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- Make LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE database-level settings. Collation and
ctype are now more like encoding, stored in new datcollate and
datctype columns in pg_database. This is a stripped-down version of
Radek Strnad's patch, with further changes by me.

- Tighten the check in initdb and CREATE DATABASE that the chosen
encoding matches the encoding of the locale. LC_COLLATE is now
checked in addition to LC_CTYPE.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_dump.c, fix pg_dump bug in the
database-level collation patch. "datcollate" and "datctype" columns
were misspelled. Per report from Chris Browne.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Mention battery-backed cache under hardware selection options.

- Add comment about the use of EXEC_BACKEND.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/charset.sgml, fix markup tag error, envvar ->
envar.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/datetime.c, fix integral timestamps
so the output is consistent in all cases to round: select interval
'0:0:0.7', interval '@ 0.70 secs', interval '0.7 seconds'; Ron
Mayer.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/plpgsql.sgml, add documentation about when
trigger values NEW/OLD return NULL. Jeff Davis.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc.c, only show source file and
line numbers to superusers, for consistent security level with other
parts of the system. Per gripe from Tom.

- Make sure pg_control is opened in binary mode, to deal with
situtations when the file contains an EOF maker (0x1A) on Windows.
ITAGAKI Takahiro.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_resetxlog/pg_resetxlog.c, silence compiler
warning caused by recent collation patch.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/like_match.c, compare escaped chars
case insensitively for ILIKE - per gripe from TGL.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Gregory Stark sent in another patch to do prefetching for bitmap heap
scans and index scans, sets POSIX_FADV_SEQUENTIAL for bulk sequential
scans, and fixes autoconf tests for posix_fadvise.

Simon Riggs sent in two more revisions of his infrastructure changes
for recovery.

Andrew Dunstan sent in three WIP patches for parallel restore.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in doc changes for the FSM rewrite.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the SE-PostgreSQL patches.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in two more revision of his FSM rewrite, this
time without WAL logging.

Tatsuo Ishii, Jeff Davis and Tom Lane sent in more work on the CTE
patch.

Benedek Laszlo sent in another revision of his patch to add roles to
pg_dump.

Peter Eisentraut sent in another revision of his patch to fix some
issues in vpath builds.