== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 19 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 19 2009 ==

PostgreSQL 8.1 beta 1 released. Test!
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta

"PostgreSQL in the Cloud" video is up. Thanks to Christophe Pettus
for the camera work and Dirk Jagdmann for running the live streaming
during the event.
http://media.postgresql.org/sfpug/sfpug-cloud-20090408.mov
http://www.vimeo.com/4144396

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Archiveopteryx 3.1.1, a PostgreSQL-based email handler, released.
http://www.archiveopteryx.org/3.1.1

Benetl 2.7, an ETL tool for files using PostgreSQL, released.
http://www.benetl.net

DBD::Pg 2.13.0, a Perl connector for PostgreSQL, released.
http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBD-Pg/

== PostgreSQL 8.4 Feature of the Week ==

FSM Autotuning: did you love the GUC settings max_fsm_relations and
max_fsm_pages? Well, too bad. They're gone, thanks to Heikki
Linnakangas; now those settings tune themselves.

== PostgreSQL Tip of the Week ==

Postgresql supports the SQL Standard INFORMATION_SCHEMA, which
contains information about tables, columns, constraints, and views in
a standard tabular format which is the same as used by Oracle, DB2 and
MySQL. It's in the builtin schema "information_schema".

== PostgreSQL Jobs for April ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-04/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PgDay Florianopolis will be May 22. Contact Dickson S. Guedes (guedes
AT guedesoft DOT net) to participate or submit a paper.
http://www.postgresql.org.br/eventos/pgday/sc

Percona Performance Conference will be taking place at the Santa Clara
Convention Center, Santa Clara, California USA
http://conferences.percona.com/

CfP is open for PgDay Sao Paulo, which will be April 24. Contact
marins DOT consultoria AT gmail DOT com or marcelojscosta AT gmail DOT
com to participate.

PostgreSQL Conference, U.S. (JDCon) will be holding a PgDay at
LinuxFest Northwest (April 25/26th). The call for papers is out at
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

There will also be PgDays on April 29 in Porto Velho, RO and on April
30 in Ji-Parana, RO. Contact Luis Fernando Bueno: proflfbueno AT
gmail DOT com to participate.

Michael Renner will be giving a PostgreSQL replication workshop at
Netways OSDC 2009 on April 29 and 30 in Nuremberg, Germany.
http://www.netways.de/english/osdc/y2009/programm/w/michael_renner_postgresql_repliziert_ein_ueberblick/

PGCon 2009 will be held 21-22 May 2009, in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 19-20 May
2009.
http://www.pgcon.org/2009/

PgDay Florianopolis will be May 22, 2009. Contact Dickson S. Guedes
(guedes AT guedesoft DOT net) to participate or submit a paper.
http://www.postgresql.org.br/eventos/pgday/sc

Save The Date: pgDay San Jose. Sunday, July 19th 2009 immediately
before OSCON. CfP, more info TBA!

PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in
Campinas, Sao Paulo state.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://planet.postgresql.org/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
and Josh Berkus.

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:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, make a copy-editing pass over
the 8.4 release notes.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/textsearch.sgml, do some copy-editing on
description of ts_headline().

- In pgsql/src/backend/parser/scan.l, fix broken {xufailed} production
that made HEAD fail on select u&42 from table-with-a-u-column; Also
fix missing SET_YYLLOC() in the {dolqfailed} production that I
suppose this was based on. The latter is a pre-existing bug, but
the only effect is to misplace the error cursor by one token, so
probably not worth backpatching.

- Fix planner to restore its previous level of intelligence about
pushing constants through full joins, as in SELECT * FROM tenk1 a
FULL JOIN tenk1 b USING (unique1) WHERE unique1 = 42; which should
generate a fairly cheap plan where we apply the constraint unique1 =
42 in each relation scan. This had been broken by my patch of
2008-06-27, which is now reverted in favor of a more invasive but
hopefully less incorrect approach. That patch was meant to prevent
incorrect extraction of OR'd indexclauses from OR conditions above
an outer join. To do that correctly we need more information than
the outerjoin_delay flag can provide, so add a nullable_relids field
to RestrictInfo that records exactly which relations are nulled by
outer joins that are underneath a particular qual clause. A side
benefit is that we can make the test in create_or_index_quals more
specific: it is now smart enough to extract an OR'd indexclause into
the outer side of an outer join, even though it must not do so in
the inner side. The old coding couldn't distinguish these cases so
it could not do either.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/path/costsize.c, bump disable_cost up
from 1e8 to 1e10, per gripe from Kris Jurka.

- Revise plpgsql's scanner to process comments and string literals in
a way more nearly matching the core SQL scanner. The user-visible
effects are: 1. Block comments (slash-star comments) now nest, as
per SQL spec. 2. In standard_conforming_strings mode, backslash as
the last character of a non-E string literal is now correctly taken
as an ordinary character; formerly it was misinterpreted as escaping
the ending quote. (Since the string also had to pass through the
core scanner, this invariably led to syntax errors.) 3. Formerly,
backslashes in the format string of RAISE were always treated as
quoting the next character, regardless of mode. Now, they are
ordinary characters with standard_conforming_strings on, while with
it off, they introduce the same set of escapes as in the core SQL
scanner. Also, escape_string_warning is now effective for RAISE
format strings. These changes make RAISE format strings work just
like any other string literal. This is implemented by copying and
pasting a lot of logic from the core scanner. It would be a good
idea to look into getting rid of plpgsql's scanner entirely in favor
of using the core scanner. However, that involves more change than
I can justify making during beta --- in particular, the core scanner
would have to become re-entrant. In passing, remove the kluge that
made the plpgsql scanner emit T_FUNCTION or T_TRIGGER as a made-up
first token. That presumably had some value once upon a time, but
now it's just useless complication for both the scanner and the
grammar.

- Fix estimate_num_groups() to not fail on PlaceHolderVars, per report
from Stefan Kaltenbrunner. The most reasonable behavior (at least
for the near term) seems to be to ignore the PlaceHolderVar and
examine its argument instead. In support of this, change the API of
pull_var_clause() to allow callers to request recursion into
PlaceHolderVars. Currently estimate_num_groups() is the only
customer for that behavior, but where there's one there may be
others.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/textsearch.sgml, fix textsearch documentation
examples to not recommend concatenating separate fields without
putting a space between. Per gripe from Rick Schumeyer.

- Fix de-escaping checks so that we will reject \000 as well as other
invalidly encoded sequences. Per discussion of a couple of days
ago.

- Rethink the idea of having plpgsql depend on parser/gram.h. Aside
from the fact that this is breaking the MSVC build, it's probably
not really a good idea to expand the dependencies of gram.h any
further than the core parser; for instance the value of SCONST might
depend on which bison version you'd built with. Better to expose an
additional call point in parser.c, so move what I had put into
pl_funcs.c into parser.c. Also PGDLLIMPORT'ify the reference to
standard_conforming_strings, per buildfarm results.

- Assorted portability fixes for Borland C, from Pavel Golub.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_restore.c, make new strings more alike
previously existing messages.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_restore.c, pg_restore -jN does not
equate "multiple jobs", so partly revert the previous patch. Per
note from Tom Lane.

- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/dbcommands.c, add missing periods.

- In pgsql/src/backend/libpq/hba.c, add missing gettext calls around
some strings. Also remove quotes around the %s that they expand to,
per comment from Tom Lane.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/arrayfuncs.c, substitute extraneous
underscores with spaces.

- In pgsql/src/test/regress/expected/arrays.out, fix the regression
test error message for array_fill, too. Per note from Andrew
Dunstan.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-secure.c, add libpq error message
text on how to handle missing root.crt file.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, reformat 'sslmode' options into an
SGML table; improve wording.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, fix SGML markup I broke yesterday.

- Remove mention of pre-7.1 inheritance behavior from /ref pages; keep
mentions in main documentation.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, add Ron Mayer as primary
contributor for, "support the IS0 8601 interval syntax" based on
private email from Ron.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/contrib/pgcrypto/crypt-md5.c, remove beer-ware license from
crypt-md5.c, per approval from Poul-Henning Kamp. This makes the
file the same standard 2-clause BSD as the rest of PostgreSQL.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

KaiGai Kohei's patch to separate the ACL for SELECT ... FOR UPDATE
from UPDATE. Not needed.

== Pending Patches ==

Abhijit Menon-Sen sent in another revision of his patch to test
quoting in PL/pgSQL.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch to implement GetPlatformEncoding()
and convert absolute file paths from database encoding to platform
encoding.

David Fetter sent in three patches to make \df describe whether a
function is normal, aggregate, trigger or windowing and let people
choose any or all of those to see.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a WIP patch to solve server-side encoding
issues.

Fujii Masao sent in another revision of his trigger patch for
pg_standby.

Marko Kreen sent in a patch to add \u and \U as unicode escapes.

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