== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 05 2010 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 05 2010 ==

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgpool-II 3.0beta3, a connection pooler and more, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2010-09/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Call for Papers for PGDay.EU 2010 held on December 6-8 in Stuttgart,
Germany is open.
http://2010.pgday.eu/callforpapers

== 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.
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== Applied Patches ==

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/ipc/procsignal.c, fix typo in comment.

Simon Riggs committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/ipc/procarray.c, teach GetOldestXmin()
about KnownAssignedXids during recovery. Very minor issue, though
this is required for a later patch. Reported by Heikki Linnakangas.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c, truncate subtrans after
each restartpoint. Issue reported by Harald Kolb, patch by Fujii
Masao, review by me.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c, fix misleading DEBUG2
issued during RemoveOldXlogFiles().

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/transam/xlogutils.c, fix oversight in
RelFileNodeBackend patch: CreateFakeRelcacheEntry needs to
initialize the rd_backend field of a fake Relation entry correctly.
Fortunately, that is easy, since only non-temp relations should ever
be mentioned in the WAL stream.

- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/ipc/procarray.c, cosmetic fixes for
KnownAssignedXidsGetOldestXmin, per Fujii Masao.

- In pgsql/src/include/port/solaris.h, back-port into 8.2 an old fix
to ensure that BYTE_ORDER gets set correctly on 64-bit Intel
Solaris. Per my proposal yesterday, 8.2 is where we will start
considering this platform supported. While this patch itself could
easily go into older branches, there's not a huge amount of point
unless we also make some significantly-more-invasive changes in the
spinlock support.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release-9.0.sgml, improve release notes'
description of Teodor Sigaev's fixes for polygon overlaps and
contains operators.

- Clarify documentation of handling of null arguments for aggregates.
Per discussion.

- Fix up flushing of composite-type typcache entries to be driven
directly by SI invalidation events, rather than indirectly through
the relcache. In the previous coding, we had to flush a
composite-type typcache entry whenever we discarded the
corresponding relcache entry. This caused problems at least when
testing with RELCACHE_FORCE_RELEASE, as shown in recent report from
Jeff Davis, and might result in real-world problems given the kind
of unexpected relcache flush that that test mechanism is intended to
model. The new coding decouples relcache and typcache management,
which is a good thing anyway from a structural perspective. The
cost is that we have to search the typcache linearly to find entries
that need to be flushed. There are a couple of ways we could avoid
that, but at the moment it's not clear it's worth any extra trouble,
because the typcache contains very few entries in typical operation.
Back-patch to 8.2, the same as some other recent fixes in this
general area. The patch could be carried back to 8.0 with some
additional work, but given that it's only hypothetical whether we're
fixing any problem observable in the field, it doesn't seem worth
the work now.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ecpg.sgml, clean up some bad grammar and
punctuation in description of ecpg's decimal type. Per KOIZUMI
Satoru.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ecpg.sgml, clean up description of ecpg's
dtcvfmtasc function. Per KOIZUMI Satoru.

- 9.1alpha1 release notes.

- In HEAD only, revert kluge solution for preventing misuse of
pg_get_expr(). A data-type-based solution, which is much cleaner
and more bulletproof, will follow shortly. It seemed best to make
this a separate commit though.

- Install a data-type-based solution for protecting pg_get_expr().
Since the code underlying pg_get_expr() is not secure against
malformed input, and can't practically be made so, we need to
prevent miscreants from feeding arbitrary data to it. We can do
this securely by declaring pg_get_expr() to take a new datatype
"pg_node_tree" and declaring the system catalog columns that hold
nodeToString output to be of that type. There is no way at SQL
level to create a non-null value of type pg_node_tree. Since the
backend-internal operations that fill those catalog columns operate
below the SQL level, they are oblivious to the datatype relabeling
and don't need any changes.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/ps_status.c, pad the ps_status
display with nulls, not blanks, on Darwin. A long time ago, this
didn't work nicely, but it seems to work on all recent versions of
OS X. The blank-pad method is less desirable since it results in
lots of extra space in ps' output. Per Alexey Klyukin.

- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/pg_constraint.c, GROUP BY can only
infer functional dependency from non-deferrable primary keys.
Peter's original patch had this right, but I dropped the check while
revising the code to search pg_constraint instead of pg_index.
Spotted by Dean Rasheed.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/create_aggregate.sgml, add missing markup
for translatability.

Robert Haas committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/objectaddress.c, fix typo. Pointed out
by Kevin Grittner.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in a patch to make all query list snapshot
handling work like EXPLAIN ANALYZE's code does. Apart from cleanup,
this is infrastructure for writeable CTEs.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in two more revisions of the "latch" patch,
now with Windows support.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the patch to add security
label support.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch to improve CLUSTER and CLUSTER
VERBOSE. It is intended to be applied atop
sorted_cluster-20100721.patch.

KaiGai Kohei sent in two more revisions of the patch to plug leaky
views.

Suchant Sinha sent in two revisions of a patch to support multiple
words in the same position in text search.

Pavel Stehule sent in another WIP patch to add "format" functions.

Pavel Stehule sent in another WIP patch to (de)serialize the
textsearch ISpell dictionary.

Hans-Juergen Schoenig sent in another revision of the patch to push
sorts into partitions.

Bruce Momjian sent in three revisions of a patch to force
pg_controldata into English.

KaiGai Kohei sent in a patch to allow external security providers to
check privileges to create a new relation and to inform the security
labels to be assigned on the new one.

Hans-Juergen Schoenig sent in an revision of the patch to do
merge-append, updated to 9.1-to-be.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a WIP patch to allow streaming a base
backup from a master.

Kevin Grittner sent in a patch correcting usages of "serializable" in
the code.