== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 11 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 11 2009 ==

The current commitfest ends this week, with alpha2 soon to follow.
Get ready to test!

Josh Berkus presents: The Mighty GUCS at SFPUG in San Francisco on
October 13, 7:00pm Pacific time. Details for the webcast, etc. below:
http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/11052731/

Federico Campoli will be presenting a PostgreSQL talk at GULP (Linux
Day Pisa) on October 24, 2009. Information in Italian below:
http://linuxday2009.gulp.linux.it/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PGLogAnalysis 0.5, a log analyzer for PostgreSQL, released.
http://code.google.com/p/pgloganalysis/

Oleg Bartunov has created a new contrib module for PostgreSQL: Plantuner
http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/wiki/plantuner

PostgreDAC ver. 2.5.3, a Delphi/C++ builder for PostgreSQL, released.
http://microolap.com/products/connectivity/postgresdac/download/

Prefix 1.0.0, a module for fast prefix searches, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/prefix/

Mark Kirkwood fixed a major performance bug in PDO_pgsql, a PHP module
for connecting to a PostgreSQL database.
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=48764

== PostgreSQL Jobs for October ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-10/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

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

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

Federico Campoli will be presenting a PostgreSQL talk at GULP (Linux
Day Pisa) on October 24, 2009. Information in Italian below:
http://linuxday2009.gulp.linux.it/

PGDay.EU 2009 will be at Telecom ParisTech in Paris, France on
November 6-7, 2009. Registration is open.
http://www.pgday.eu/

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/

JPUG 10th Anniversary Conference is November 20-21, 2009 in Tokyo, Japan.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2009-05/msg00018.php

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

Chemnitzer Linuxtage will be in Chemnitz, Germany on March 13-14, 2010.
http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter

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:

- Create an ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES command, which allows users to
adjust the privileges that will be applied to subsequently-created
objects. Such adjustments are always per owning role, and can be
restricted to objects created in particular schemas too. A notable
benefit is that users can override the traditional default privilege
settings, eg, the PUBLIC EXECUTE privilege traditionally granted by
default for functions. Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek.

- Change CREATE TABLE so that column default expressions coming from
different inheritance parent tables are compared using equal(),
instead of doing strcmp() on the nodeToString representation. The
old implementation was always a tad cheesy, and it finally fails
completely as of 8.4, now that the node tree might contain syntax
location information. equal() knows it's supposed to ignore those
fields, but strcmp() hardly can. Per recent report from Scott Ribe.

- Support use of function argument names to identify which actual
arguments match which function parameters. The syntax uses AS, for
example funcname(value AS arg1, anothervalue AS arg2). Pavel
Stehule.

- Update plhandler.sgml to describe validators and inline handlers for
procedural languages.

- Remove very ancient tuple-counting infrastructure (IncrRetrieved()
and friends). This code has all been ifdef'd out for many years,
and doesn't seem to have any prospect of becoming any more useful in
the future. EXPLAIN ANALYZE is what people use in practice, and I
think if we did want process-wide counters we'd be more likely to
put in dtrace events for that than try to resurrect this code. Get
rid of it so as to have one less detail to worry about while
refactoring execMain.c.

- Split the processing of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations out of
execMain.c. They are now handled by a new plan node type called
ModifyTable, which is placed at the top of the plan tree. In itself
this change doesn't do much, except perhaps make the handling of
RETURNING lists and inherited UPDATEs a tad less klugy. But it is
necessary preparation for the intended extension of allowing
RETURNING queries inside WITH. Marko (johto) Tiikkaja.

- Improve similar_escape() in two different ways: 1. Stop escaping ?
and {. As of SQL:2008, SIMILAR TO is defined to have
POSIX-compatible interpretation of ? as well as {m,n} and related
constructs, so we should allow these things through to our regex
engine. 2. Escape ^ and $. It appears that our regex engine will
treat ^^ at the beginning of the string the same as ^, and similarly
for $$ at the end of the string, which meant that SIMILAR TO was
effectively ignoring ^ at the start of the pattern and $ at the end.
Since these are not supposed to be metacharacters, this is a bug.
The second part of this is arguably a back-patchable bug fix, but
I'm hesitant to do that because it might break applications that are
expecting something like "col SIMILAR TO '^foo$'" to work like a
POSIX pattern. Seems safer to only change it at a major version
boundary. Per discussion of an example from Doug Gorley.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/Makefile, unbreak doc/src/sgml
maintainer-clean rule on VPATH builds.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/Makefile, really unbreak maintainer-clean.
(Or rather, unbreak what the previous commit broke)

- Fix snapshot management, take two. Partially revert the previous
patch I installed and replace it with a more general fix: any time a
snapshot is pushed as Active, we need to ensure that it will not be
modified in the future. This means that if the same snapshot is
used as CurrentSnapshot, it needs to be copied separately. This
affects serializable transactions only, because CurrentSnapshot has
already been copied by RegisterSnapshot and so PushActiveSnapshot
does not think it needs another copy. However,
CommandCounterIncrement would modify CurrentSnapshot, whereas
ActiveSnapshots must not have their command counters incremented. I
say "partially" because the regression test I added for the previous
bug has been kept. (This restores 8.3 behavior, because before
snapmgr.c existed, any snapshot set as Active was copied.) Per bug
report from Stuart Bishop.

- Make it possibly to specify GUC params per user and per database.
Create a new catalog pg_db_role_setting where they are now stored,
and better encapsulate the code that deals with settings into its
realm. The old datconfig and rolconfig columns are removed. psql
has gained a \drds command to display the settings. Backwards
compatibility warning: while the backwards-compatible system views
still have the config columns, they no longer completely represent
the configuration for a user or database. Catalog version bumped.

- Add the new psql command \drds to the psql docs, help and tab
completion. I also thank Bernd Helmle for the documentation help on
the previous settings patch, which I forgot on the commit message.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/Makefile, clean up the clean rules of the
documentation. Most things should be cleaned by "make clean",
except the parts that are shipped in the tarball. These rules had
gotten a bit out of whack after the various restructurings of the
documentation build rules.

- Use pg_get_triggerdef in pg_dump. Add a variant of
pg_get_triggerdef with a second argument "pretty" that causes the
output to be formatted in the way pg_dump used to do. Use this
variant in pg_dump with server versions >= 8.5. This insulates
pg_dump from most future trigger feature additions, such as the
upcoming column triggers patch. Itagaki Takahiro.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- Fix off-by-one bug in bitncmp(): When comparing a number of bits
divisible by 8, bitncmp() may dereference a pointer one byte out of
bounds. Chris Mikkelson (bug 5101).

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the buffer usage patch
for EXPLAIN and pg_stat_statements.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another revision of the SQLDA patch for
ECPG.

Martin Pihlak sent in a patch to fix a regression test breakage in
foreign data wrappers when a system user exists with the same name.

Andrew (RhodiumToad) Gierth sent in a WIP patch to add ORDER BY to
array_agg() per SQL:2008.

Emmanuel Cecchet sent in another revision of the COPY enhancement
patch.

Roger Leigh sent in four more revisions of the patch to do Unicode
pretty-printing in psql.

KaiGai Kohei sent in two more revisions of the patch for large object
access controls.

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum sent in another revision of the patch to add
CREATE OR REPLACE LANGUAGE.

Simon Riggs sent in another revision of the Hot Standby patch.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the patch to fix the
console and eventlog issues on Win32.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to add more "if (InHotStandby)" tests to
Hot Standby.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to fix a subtransaction issue in Hot
Standby.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in two more revisions of the SQLDA patch for
ECPG along with a doc patch intended to go with.

Laurenz Albe sent in patches to add a hook which allows checking
cryptographic strength of passwords, a module which uses the hook and
documentation for the module.

Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek sent in another revsion of the GRANT ON ALL IN
SCHEMA patch.