== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 28 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 28 2009 ==

8.4.0 will be out soon. Meanwhile, keep testing!
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta

There will be a conference in Athens, Georgia, USA on September 19,
2009. The CfP is open.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/2009/pgday/athens

The PostgreSQL booth at FISL in Porto Alegre, Brazil was very busy.
Photos below:
http://picasaweb.google.com/diogob/FISL2009?feat=directlink

The German PostgreSQL User Group will have a dev room at FrOSCon on
Sunday, August 23, 2009. The Call for Papers is open:
http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/573-Call-for-Papers-fuer-den-PostgreSQL-Devroom-auf-der-FrOSCon-2009.html

There will be a conference in Seattle, Washington, USA October 16-18,
2009. The CfP is open.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/2009/west

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Andreas (ads) Scherbaum will be teaching a "PostgreSQL for Corporate
Use" course at the adult education center in Magdeburg, Germany on
September 7-11, 2009. Details below:
http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/574-PostgreSQL-als-Bildungsurlaub.html

MyJSQLView 3.03, a Java UI front-end for data editing, released.
http://myjsqlview.org/projects/MyJSQLView/index.html

py-postgresql 0.9.0 and 0.8.2, a Python programmer's client (driver)
for PostgreSQL and general toolkit for working with PostgreSQL in
Python, released.
http://python.projects.postgresql.org/?utm_source=release&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=py-postgresql-0.9.0

== PostgreSQL Tip of the Week ==

Need to send data to MS Excel? "COPY ... WITH CSV HEADERS"

== PostgreSQL Jobs for June ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-06/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

pgDay San Jose is Sunday, July 19th 2009 immediately before OSCON.
Sign up below:
http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/10626647

OpenSQL Camp will take place August 22-23, 2009 in St. Augustin,
Germany, close to Bonn and Cologne. Deadline for the CfP is July 19,
2009. Get your proposals in!
http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2009/Call_for_Participation

The CfP for PyCon Argentina is open until June 29th, 2009 23:59 ART.
The conference itself will be in Beunos Aires on September 4-5 2009.
http://ar.pycon.org/2009/rfp/

PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in
Campinas, Sao Paulo state. The CfP is open!
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/2009/chamadas.en.php

On October 1st, 2ndQuadrant will offer free support to the students of
the L'Aquila University in the Abruzzi region over a 15 month period.
For more information (in Italian):
http://blog.2ndquadrant.it/it/2009/06/2ndquadrant-universita-aquila.html

PGDay.EU 2009 will be at Telecom ParisTech in Paris, France on
November 6-7, 2009. The CfP is out. Submit!
http://www.pgday.eu/

JPUG 10th Anniversary Conference has started its Request for
Proposals. The conference is November 20-21, 2009 in Tokyo, Japan.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2009-05/msg00018.php

== 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/src/backend/utils/adt/arrayfuncs.c, revert dubious message
wording change.

- Make to_timestamp and friends skip leading spaces before an integer
field, even when not in Fujii Masao mode. This improves
compatibility with Oracle and with our pre-8.4 behavior, as per bug
#4862. Add a couple of regression test cases for this. In passing,
get rid of the labeling of the individual test cases; doesn't seem
to be good for anything except causing extra work when inserting a
test... Brendan Jurd and Tom Lane

- For bulk write operations (eg COPY IN), use a ring buffer of 16MB
instead of the 256KB limit originally enforced by a patch committed
2008-11-06. Per recent test results, the smaller size resulted in
an undesirable decrease in bulk data loading speed, due to COPY
processing frequently getting blocked for WAL flushing. This area
might need more tweaking later, but this setting seems to be good
enough for 8.4.

- Fix the makefiles to fail cleanly if Perl is needed but not present.
This used to work as intended, but got broken some time ago (a
quoted empty string is not an empty string), and got broken some
more by the changes to generate ecpg's preproc.y automatically.
Given all the unprotected uses of $(PERL) elsewhere, it seems best
to make use of the $(missing) script rather than trying to ensure
each such use is protected individually. Also fix various bits of
documentation that omitted to mention Perl as a requirement for
building from a CVS pull. Per a complaint from Robert Haas.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/geo_ops.c, fix an ancient error in
dist_ps (distance from point to line segment), which a number of
other geometric operators also depend on. It miscalculated the
slope of the perpendicular to the given line segment anytime that
slope was other than 0, infinite, or +/-1. In some cases the error
would be masked because the true closest point on the line segment
was one of its endpoints rather than the intersection point, but in
other cases it could give an arbitrarily bad answer. Per bug #4872
from Nick Roosevelt. Bug goes clear back to Berkeley days, so patch
all supported branches. Make a couple of cosmetic adjustments while
at it.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/dml.sgml, provide a link to the UPDATE
reference page in the 'Updating Data' section of the docs. Per
suggestion from Brad Bowman.

- In pgsql/contrib/pg_standby/pg_standby.c, make prior patch
pgindent-safe.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/error/elog.c, add
__attribute__((format_arg(1))) to the declaration of err_gettext(),
to restore gcc's ability to crosscheck format arguments within
elog.c. Noted in a test compilation with -Wformat-nonliteral
enabled.

- Cleanup and code review for the patch that made bgwriter active
during archive recovery. Invent a separate state variable and
inquiry function for XLogInsertAllowed() to clarify some tests and
make the management of writing the end-of-recovery checkpoint less
klugy. Fix several places that were incorrectly testing InRecovery
when they should be looking at RecoveryInProgress or
XLogInsertAllowed (because they will now be executed in the bgwriter
not startup process). Clarify handling of bad LSNs passed to
XLogFlush during recovery. Use a spinlock for setting/testing
SharedRecoveryInProgress. Improve quite a lot of comments. Heikki
Linnakangas and Tom Lane.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/backup.sgml, marginal improvement of
description of recovery_end_command.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/monitoring.sgml, add a note about SystemTap vs
DTrace spelling of probe names.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release-8.4.sgml, update release notes in
final preparation for 8.4.0.

- In pgsql/doc/Makefile, revert addition of "o" to tar options. This
was intended to fix bug #4883, but the cure appears to be worse than
the disease. It turns out that GNU tar versions 1.14.x misinterpret
-o as --same-owner, not --no-same-owner, leading to exactly the
wrong behavior for both root and nonroot users. While that bug has
been fixed for nearly five years, these tar versions are still found
in the wild, notably in OS X 10.4. Given that #4883 was the first
complaint we'd heard, it's definitely not worth fixing at the risk
of breaking things for other users. Perhaps revisit at a later date
when we're not up against a release deadline.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/move.sgml, add more explicit note that the
parameters of MOVE are identical to FETCH. Per David Wheeler.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/gist/gistsplit.c, correct grammar in
picksplit debug messages

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/Makefile, man pages back to lowercase names,
with additional fixup to make the .so links work.

- In pgsql/doc/Makefile, use $(TAR) instead of tar in makefiles.

- In pgsql/doc/Makefile, extract tarballs with "o" option (tar xof),
to behave reasonably when run as root, as would usually be the case
during make install. Per bug #4883.

- Translation updates for 8.4 release. File that are translated less
than 80% have been removed, as per new translation team policy.

Marc Fournier committed:

- Bundle RC2.

- Bundle v8.4.0.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Properly initialize SSL engines when used from libpq. This is
required for most external engines. Per report and initial code
from Lars Kanis.

- In pgsql/src/backend/libpq/hba.c, parse_ident_usermap() should use
ereport(LOG) and not ERROR, and put the return value in the *error_p
variable. Noted by Tom Lane.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/client-auth.sgml, fix incorrect LDAP example,
noted by Tom Lane.

- In pgsql/src/backend/libpq/auth.c, disallow empty passwords in LDAP
authentication, the same way we already do it for PAM.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- Disable pg_standby -l option because the backend doesn't expect the
recovered file to be a symlink. We tried to fix this issue with an
earlier server-side patch, but it didn't fix the whole issue. The
same bug is present in older releases as well, but the 8.4 train is
about to leave the station, and I'm not sure if have consensus on
whether we can remove the -l option in back-branches or do we need
to attempt a server-side fix to make symlinking safe. Patch by
Simon Riggs, per discussion on bug identified by Fujii Masao.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/transam/twophase.c, the code to unlink
dropped relations in FinishPreparedTransaction() was acting like
runs inside WAL recovery, but it doesn't. I must've copy-pasted
this from a redo-function in the relation forks patch. Noticed by
Tom Lane while he was looking through callers of smgrdounlink().

- Fix some serious bugs in archive recovery, now that bgwriter is
active during it: When bgwriter is active, the startup process can't
perform mdsync() correctly because it won't see the fsync requests
accumulated in bgwriter's private pendingOpsTable. Therefore make
bgwriter responsible for the end-of-recovery checkpoint as well,
when it's active. When bgwriter is active (= archive recovery), the
startup process must not accumulate fsync requests to its own
pendingOpsTable, since bgwriter won't see them there when it
performs restartpoints. Make startup process drop its
pendingOpsTable when bgwriter is launched to avoid that. Update
minimum recovery point one last time when leaving archive recovery.
It won't be updated by the end-of-recovery checkpoint because
XLogFlush() sees us as out of recovery already. This fixes bug
#4879 reported by Fujii Masao.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch to add missing_ok to GetUserMapping()
and makes dblink use it.

Robert Haas sent in a patch to make pg_listener.h conform better to
PostgreSQL coding standards.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in a patch to add dynamic cursors and SQLDA to
ECPG.

Fujii Masao and Magnus Hagander traded patches to remove pg_standby's
dependency on libpq.so.5.

KaiGai Kohei sent in a patch to add DAC security checks on large
objects.

Scara Maccai sent in a patch to add a query progress indicator.

Tsutomu Yamada sent in a patch to make PostgreSQL more portable to
64-bit platforms.

Nedyalko Borisov sent in a JOIN optimization for partitioned tables.

Robert Haas sent in a patch to make generated header files work better
with building subsystems.