== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 26 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 26 2009 ==

The Spanish-speaking PostgreSQL community now has its own web site. Kudos!
http://www.postgresql-es.org/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

DBD::Pg 2.13.1, a Perl connector for PostgreSQL, released.
http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBD-Pg/

pgFouine 1.1, a PostgreSQL log processor and report generator, released.
http://pgfouine.projects.postgresql.org/

pgpool-II 2.2.1, a connection pooler and more, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/

Slony-ctl 1.0, a set of scripts for creating and managing Slony
clusters, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/slony1-ctl/

== PostgreSQL 8.4 Feature of the Week ==

pg_stat_functions: this new system view shows you how many times a
given function was called and how much time it spent executing.

== PostgreSQL Tip of the Week ==

PostgreSQL supports subselects in the SELECT, FROM, and WHERE clauses.
So think about where to put that subselect so it will perform well and
give you the results you want.

== 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 ==

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Install.pm, read nls.nk files to determine
the proper name of NLS catalogs to install. Hiroshi Inoue, with
minor modifications by me.

- Move gettext encoding names into encnames.c, so we only have one
place to update. Per discussion.

- Remove sslverify parameter again, replacing it with two new sslmode
values: "verify-ca" and "verify-full". Since "prefer" remains the
default, this will make certificate validation off by default, which
should lead to less upgrade issues.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, remove sslverify parameter from
release notes, mention that sslmode is used instead.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, more clearly document what the
different sslmode options mean, both the new and the old ones.
Consistently talk about certificate verification, and not
validation.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Add agg/normal/trigger/window flags for psql \df and in \df output.
David Fetter.

- Merge psql \df options into a single \? line, and update docs.

- Improve psql \df error handling. David Fetter.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/help.c, use brackets in psql \df \? help.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml, improve server spoofing wording,
per request from Magnus Hagander.

- Remove HELIOS Software GmbH name and copyright from AIX dynloader
files, per approval from Helmut Tschemernjak, President. Only back
branches; files removed from CVS HEAD.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/port/dynloader/osf.c, fix obsolete
cross-reference (this file isn't called alpha.c anymore)

- Remove the long-obsolete homebrew dl*() functions for AIX, in favor
of just using the system functions all the time. (These files are
now just copies of the osf.* files.) The homebrew functions were
not getting used anyway on AIX versions that have dlopen(), that is
4.3 and up, so they are not needed on any AIX that is even remotely
supported by the vendor anymore. We'd have probably left them here
anyway, except some questions were raised about the copyright.

- Change the default value of max_prepared_transactions to zero, and
add documentation warnings against setting it nonzero unless active
use of prepared transactions is intended and a suitable transaction
manager has been installed. This should help to prevent the type of
scenario we've seen several times now where a prepared transaction
is forgotten and eventually causes severe maintenance problems (or
even anti-wraparound shutdown). The only real reason we had the
default be nonzero in the first place was to support regression
testing of the feature. To still be able to do that, tweak
pg_regress to force a nonzero value during "make check". Since we
cannot force a nonzero value in "make installcheck", add a variant
regression test "expected" file that shows the results that will be
obtained when max_prepared_transactions is zero. Also, extend the
HINT messages for transaction wraparound warnings to mention the
possibility that old prepared transactions are causing the problem.
All per today's discussion.

- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/dbcommands.c, don't use the result of
strcmp as if it were a boolean. A service of your local coding
style police.

- In pgsql/src/backend/libpq/ip.c, suppress some 'variable may be used
uninitialized' warnings from gcc 4.4.

- In pgsql/src/backend/parser/parse_func.c, fix some more 'variable
may be used uninitialized' warnings from gcc 4.4.

- Fix the handling of sub-SELECTs appearing in the arguments of an
outer-level aggregate function. By definition, such a sub-SELECT
cannot reference any variables of query levels between itself and
the aggregate's semantic level (else the aggregate would've been
assigned to that lower level instead). So the correct, most
efficient implementation is to treat the sub-SELECT as being a
sub-select of that outer query level, not the level the aggregate
syntactically appears in. Not doing so also confuses the heck out
of our parameter-passing logic, as illustrated in bug report from
Daniel Grace. Fortunately, we were already copying the whole Aggref
expression up to the outer query level, so all that's needed is to
delay SS_process_sublinks processing of the sub-SELECT until control
returns to the outer level. This has been broken since we
introduced spec-compliant treatment of outer aggregates in 7.4; so
patch all the way back.

- Update citext expected output to exactly match the real output,
rather than having some whitespace discrepancy. Although whitespace
is supposed to be ignored in our regression tests, for some reason
buildfarm member spoonbill doesn't like it.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/copy.c, remove Windows-specific definition of
S_ISDIR(). This should not be here; if there are any Windows
configurations where port/win32.h fails to provide the macro, it
should be fixed in the latter file not here.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, some more work on the 8.4
release notes. Document a few changes that Bruce apparently found
uninteresting, and do minor wordsmithing on a number of the existing
entries.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c, after archive recovery,
mark the last WAL segment from the parent timeline ready for
archival. It was marked at the next checkpoint anyway, but waiting
for the next checkpoint is an unnecessary delay. Fujii Masao.

- varstr_cmp and any comparison function that piggybacks on it can
return any negative or positive number, not just -1 or 1. Fix
comment on varstr_cmp and citext test case accordingly. As pointed
out by Zdenek Kotala, and buildfarm member gothic moth.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/maintenance.sgml, improve the documentation on
8.4 visibility map related VACUUM changes. Explain how
vacuum_freeze_table_age should be tuned, and how it relates to the
other settings. Mention that vacuum_freeze_table_age also affects
when autovacuum scans the whole table.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/storage.sgml, mention that tables have a
visibility map fork alongside the main fork and FSM.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of his patch to add
transformation hooks into the parser.

Fujii Masao sent in two more revisions of the stats_temp_directory
patch.

Hiroshi Inoue sent in a patch which adds some encoding conversion
logic on Windows.

Fujii Masao sent in another revision of the pg_standby trigger patch.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix a performance regression in hash
joins.

Robert Haas sent in an experimental patch to change NTUP_PER_BUCKET
into a GUC called hash_load, and add EXPLAIN support to show the
number of buckets and batches.

Brendan Jurd sent in an updated version of Pavel Stehule's patch to
add scientific notation to to_char().

Hannu Valtonen sent in a patch to add support for integer and text
arrays to PL/PythonU.