== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 03 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 03 2009 ==

OpenStreetMap moves to PostgreSQL:
http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2009/04/openstreetmap-moves-to-postgresql.html

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

autodoc 1.40, an automatic documentation system for PostgreSQL, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/autodoc/

== PostgreSQL 8.4 Feature of the Week ==

New Hash Indexes. As part of Google Summer of Code, our hash indexes
have been overhauled so that they now perform better than B-Tree
indexes for single-row lookups, and are worth using. Note, however,
that the new hash indexes are not yet recovery-safe, and may need to
be REINDEXed in the event of a system crash.

== PostgreSQL Tip of the Week ==

The "ltree" contrib module is an implementation of indexed trees, and
can be helpful in representing a filesystem or similar heirarchy in
your database.

== PostgreSQL Jobs for May ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-05/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 ==

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Proofreading adjustments for first two parts of documentation
(Tutorial and SQL).

- In pgsql/src/bin/scripts/vacuumdb.c, in VACUUM, FREEZE must be
before ANALYZE; fix this in vacuumdb. Docs are already correct.

- Blank line Makefile cleanups.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/parser/gram.y, move SERVER to the right place
in the alphabetically sorted keyword list.

- Add pgsql/src/tools/check_keywords.pl script to perform some basic
sanity checks to the keyword lists in gram.y and kwlist.h. It
checks that all lists are in alphabetical order, and that all
keywords present in gram.y are listed in kwlist.h in the right
category, and that all keywords in kwlist.h are also in gram.y.
What's still missing is to check that all keywords defined with
"%token <keyword>" in gram.y are present in one of the keyword lists
in gram.y.

- In pgsql/src/tools/check_keywords.pl, clean up check_keywords.pl
script, making it 'strict' and removing a few leftover unused
variables. Laurent Laborde.

Tom Lane committed:

- Improve pull_up_subqueries logic so that it doesn't insert
unnecessary PlaceHolderVar nodes in join quals appearing in or below
the lowest outer join that could null the subquery being pulled up.
This improves the planner's ability to recognize constant join
quals, and probably helps with detection of common sort keys
(equivalence classes) as well.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/datetime.c, when checking for
datetime field overflow, we should allow a fractional-second part
that rounds up to exactly 1.0 second. The previous coding rejected
input like "00:12:57.9999999999999999999999999999", with the exact
number of nines needed to cause failure varying depending on
float-timestamp option and possibly on platform. Obviously this
should round up to the next integral second, if we don't have enough
precision to distinguish the value from that. Per bug #4789 from
Robert Kruus. In passing, fix a missed check for fractional seconds
in one copy of the "is it greater than 24:00:00" code. Broken all
the way back, so patch all the way back.

- In pgsql/src/pl/plpgsql/src/gram.y, fix a couple of cases where the
plpgsql grammar looked for T_WORD and failed to consider the
possibility that it would get T_SCALAR, T_RECORD, or T_ROW instead
because the word happens to match a plpgsql variable name. In
particular, give "duplicate declaration" rather than generic "syntax
error" if the same identifier is declared twice in the same block,
as per my recent complaint. Also behave more sanely when
decl_aliasitem or proc_condition or opt_lblname is coincidentally
not T_WORD. Refactor the related productions a bit to reduce
duplication. This is a longstanding bug, but it doesn't seem
critical enough to back-patch.

- Fix plpgsql's EXIT so that an EXIT without a label only matches a
loop, never a BEGIN block. This is required for Oracle
compatibility and is also plainly stated to be the behavior by our
original documentation (up until 8.1, in which the docs were
adjusted to match the code's behavior; but actually the old docs
said the correct thing and the code was wrong). Not back-patched
because this introduces an incompatibility that could break working
applications. Requires release note.

- Split the release notes into a separate file for each (active) major
branch, as per my recent proposal. release.sgml itself is now just
a stub that should change rarely; ideally, only once per major
release to add a new include line. Most editing work will occur in
the release-N.N.sgml files. To update a back branch for a minor
release, just copy the appropriate release-N.N.sgml file(s) into the
back branch. This commit doesn't change the end-product
documentation at all, only the source layout. However, it makes it
easy to start omitting ancient information from newer branches'
documentation, should we ever decide to do that.

- We don't need major_release_split any more.

- Install some simple defenses in postmaster startup to help ensure a
useful error message if the installation directory layout is messed
up (or at least, something more useful than the behavior exhibited
in bug #4787). During postmaster startup, check that
get_pkglib_path resolves as a readable directory; and if
ParseTzFile() fails to open the expected timezone abbreviation file,
check the possibility that the directory is missing rather than just
the specified file. In case of either failure, issue a hint
suggesting that the installation is broken. These two checks cover
the lib/ and share/ trees of a full installation, which should take
care of most scenarios where a sysadmin decides to get cute.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-secure.c, fix already-obsolete hint
message ... sslverify parameter is no more.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc.c, fix
assign_pgstat_temp_directory() to ensure the directory path is
canonicalized. Avoid the need to elog(FATAL) on out-of-memory.

- Fix unintelligible description created by removing only part of a
parenthetical remark.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml, fix mis-description of XML Schema
functions, per discussion.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_resetxlog/pg_resetxlog.c, fix pg_resetxlog to
remove archive status files along with WAL segment files. Fujii
Masao.

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/postmaster.c, fix missed usage of
DLNewElem().

Tatsuo Ishii committed:

- pdate UTF-8 <--> EUC_KR, JOHAB, UHC mappings. Patch contributed by
Chuck McDevitt.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/postmaster.c, avoid a memory
allocation in the backend startup code, to avoid having to check
whether it failed. Modelled after catcache.c's usage of DlList, per
suggestion from Tom Lane.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Alvaro Herrera sent in a doc patch for autovacuum about when ANALYZE
is recommended.

Robert Haas sent in another revision of the ALTER COLUMN...SET
DISTINCT patch.

Robert Haas sent in a patch to replace a couple of references to files
that no longer exist in the source tree with references to the
appropriate URLs.