== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 02 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 02 2009 ==

FOSDEM 2010 will be in Brussels on February 6-7, 2010.
http://www.fosdem.org/

The first meeting of the Silicon Valley PUG was last week. Join their
Meetup to be notified of future meetings:
http://www.meetup.com/svpgsql/

OpenSQL Camp in Portland is looking for sponsors. Make your travel plans now! :)
http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2009/07/29/opensql-camp-comes-to-portland-november-14-15-2009/

Christophe Pettus has posted the video he shot of PGDay San Jose.
http://media.postgresql.org/pgday-sjc-09/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

DBD::Pg 2.14.1, a Perl connector for PostgreSQL, released.
http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBD-Pg/

PostgreSQL + Replication 8.3-1.8, formerly known as Mammoth
Replicator, released.
https://projects.commandprompt.com/public/replicator/wiki/getting_replicator

== PostgreSQL Jobs for August ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-08/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

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 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

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/

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

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

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

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

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 ==

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Project.pm, enable the use of multiple
CPUs/cores when building on MSVC. This only affects the C compiler
step - we still only build one target at a time.

- In pgsql/src/port/exec.c, fix minor memory leak in Win32 SID
handling functions. Not a big issue since it's only called during
process startup, thus no backpatch. Found by TAKATSUKA Haruka,
patch by Magnus Hagander and Andrew Chernow.

- In pgsql/contrib/pgbench/pgbench.c, make sure FD_SETSIZE is set
before we include any Windows header files. Josh Williams.

Tom Lane committed:

- Add system catalog columns pg_constraint.conindid and
pg_trigger.tgconstrindid. conindid is the index supporting a
constraint. We can use this not only for unique/primary-key
constraints, but also foreign-key constraints, which depend on the
unique index that constrains the referenced columns. tgconstrindid
is just copied from the constraint's conindid field, or is zero for
triggers not associated with constraints. This is mainly intended
as infrastructure for upcoming patches, but it has some virtue in
itself, since it exposes a relationship that you formerly had to
grovel in pg_depend to determine. I simplified one
information_schema view accordingly. (There is a pg_dump query that
could also use conindid, but I left it alone because it wasn't clear
it'd get any faster.)

- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/ipc/procarray.c, fix a thinko
introduced into CountActiveBackends by a recent patch: we should
ignore NULL array entries, not non-NULL ones. This had the effect
of disabling commit_delay, and could have caused a crash in the rare
race condition the patch was intended to fix. Bug report and
diagnosis by Jeff Janes, in bug #4952.

- Support deferrable uniqueness constraints. The current
implementation fires an AFTER ROW trigger for each tuple that looks
like it might be non-unique according to the index contents at the
time of insertion. This works well as long as there aren't many
conflicts, but won't scale to massive unique-key reassignments.
Improving that case is a TODO item. Dean Rasheed.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/date.c, fix time_part and timetz_part
(ie, EXTRACT() for those datatypes) to include a fractional part in
the output for MILLISECOND and SECOND cases, rather than truncating
the source value. This is what the float-timestamp code has always
done, and it was clearly the code author's intent to do the same for
integer timestamps, but he forgot about integer division in C. The
other datatypes supported by EXTRACT() already do this correctly.
Backpatch to 8.4, so that the default (integer) behavior of that
branch will match the default (float) behavior of older branches.
Arguably we should patch further back, but it's possible that
applications are expecting the broken behavior in older branches.
8.4 is new enough that expectations shouldn't be too settled. Per
report from Greg Stark.

- Merge the Constraint and FkConstraint node types into a single type.
This was foreseen to be a good idea long ago, but nobody had got
round to doing it. The recent patch for deferred unique constraints
made transformConstraintAttrs() ugly enough that I decided it was
time. This change will also greatly simplify parsing of deferred
CHECK constraints, if anyone ever gets around to implementing that.
While at it, add a location field to Constraint, and use that to
provide an error cursor for some of the constraint-related error
messages.

- Create a multiplexing structure for signals to Postgres child
processes. This patch gets us out from under the Unix limitation of
two user-defined signal types. We already had done something
similar for signals directed to the postmaster process; this adds
multiplexing for signals directed to backends and auxiliary
processes (so long as they're connected to shared memory). As proof
of concept, replace the former usage of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for
backends with use of the multiplexing mechanism. There are still
some hard-wired definitions of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for other process
types, but getting rid of those doesn't seem interesting at the
moment. Fujii Masao.

- Improve unique-constraint-violation error messages to include the
exact values being complained of. In passing, also remove the
arbitrary length limitation in the similar error detail message for
foreign key violations. Itagaki Takahiro.

- Department of second thoughts: let's show the exact key during
unique index build failures, too. Refactor a bit more since that
error message isn't spelled the same.

- Add ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET STATISTICS DISTINCT.
Robert Haas

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/tsquery_rewrite.c, fix incorrect
cleanup of tsquery in ts_rewrite(). Per bug #4933 by Aaron
Marcuse-Kubitza.

- Correct calculations of overlap and contains operations over
polygons.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

Fernando Ike de Oliveira's patch to list languages. Not updated in
time, returned with feedback.

Tsutomu Yamada's patch to support 64-bit platforms more portably.
Incomplete, returned with feedback.

Dickson S. Guedes's patch to display client and server versions in
psql prompt. Not updated in time, returned with feedback.

== Pending Patches ==

Teodor Sigaev sent in two patches to split up Oleg Bartunov's patch
for filtering dictionaries and unaccent in textsearch.

Josh Williams sent in a fix to the multi-threaded pgbench patch.

Sergey V. Karpov submitted two versions and Robert Haas and Tom Lane
reworked another revision of the patch to improve dict_xsyn.

Robert Haas sent in another revision of his machine-readable explain
output patch.

Steve Prentice sent in two revisions of a patch to make PL/pgsql's
input parameters writeable.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in a patch adding a lock_timeout GUC which
sets how long SELECT ... FOR UPDATE will wait. This defaults to 0,
meaning "wait forever if needed."

Bernd Helmle sent in a revised patch for mixed named notation in
PL/pgsql.

Tom Lane sent in an improvement to Kevin Grittner's patch to
revise parallel pg_restore's scheduling heuristic by getting rid of
the find_ready_items() scans, thus avoiding O(n^2) behavior.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in an updated version of the ALTER TABLE...ALTER
COLUMN...SET DISTINCT patch.

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in another WIP patch to allow write
operations inside CTEs.

Mark Kirkwood sent in an updated patch to show lock wait statistics.

Joe Conway sent in an updated version of Abhijit Menon-Sen's patch to
implement has_sequence_privilege().

Jeff Davis sent in a rework of Oleg Bartunov's patch to support prefix
in synonym dictionaries.