== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 25 2012 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 25 2012 ==

== PostgreSQL Jobs for November ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2012-11/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The FOSDEM PGDay conference that will be held before FOSDEM in
Brussels, Belgium, on Feb 1st, 2013. The CfP for both this event and
for the PG track of FOSDEM are open.
http://fosdem2013.pgconf.eu/callforpapers/

PGDay NYC 2013 will be held on March 22, 2013 in New York City. The
CfP submission deadline is January 7th, 2013 at noon eastern time.
papers AT nycpug DOT org.
http://pgday.nycpug.org/speakers

== 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
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to pwn(at)arpug(dot)com(dot)ar(dot)

== Applied Patches ==

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Fix archive_cleanup_command. When I moved ExecuteRecoveryCommand()
from xlog.c to xlogarchive.c, I didn't realize that it's called from
the checkpoint process, not the startup process. I tried to use
InRedo variable to decide whether or not to attempt cleaning up the
archive (must not do so before we have read the initial checkpoint
record), but that variable is only valid within the startup process.
Instead, let ExecuteRecoveryCommand() always clean up the archive,
and add an explicit argument to RestoreArchivedFile() to say whether
that's allowed or not. The caller knows better. Reported by Erik
Rijkers, diagnosis by Fujii Masao. Only 9.3devel is affected.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/644a0a6379afc00803dd89ffe8416514f5dfc217

- Speed up operations on numeric, mostly by avoiding palloc()
overhead. In many functions, a NumericVar was initialized from an
input Numeric, to be passed as input to a calculation function. When
the NumericVar is not modified, the digits array of the NumericVar
can point directly to the digits array in the original Numeric, and
we can avoid a palloc() and memcpy(). Add init_var_from_num()
function to initialize a var like that. Remove dscale argument from
get_str_from_var(), as all the callers just passed the dscale of the
variable. That means that the rounding it used to do was not
actually necessary, and get_str_from_var() no longer scribbles on
its input. That makes it safer in general, and allows us to use the
new init_var_from_num() function in e.g numeric_out(). Also
modified numericvar_to_int8() to no scribble on its input either. It
creates a temporary copy to avoid that. To compensate, the callers
no longer need to create a temporary copy, so the net # of pallocs
is the same, but this is nicer. In the passing, use a constant for
the number 10 in get_str_from_var_sci(), when calculating
10^exponent. Saves a palloc() and some cycles to convert integer 10
to numeric. Original patch by Kyotaro HORIGUCHI, with further
changes by me. Reviewed by Pavel Stehule.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5cb0e335976befdcedd069c59dd3858fb3e649b3

- Avoid bogus "out-of-sequence timeline ID" errors in standby-mode.
When startup process opens a WAL segment after replaying part of it,
it validates the first page on the WAL segment, even though the page
it's really interested in later in the file. As part of the
validation, it checks that the TLI on the page header is >= the TLI
it saw on the last page it read. If the segment contains a timeline
switch, and we have already replayed it, and then re-open the WAL
segment (because of streaming replication got disconnected and
reconnected, for example), the TLI check will fail when the first
page is validated. Fix that by relaxing the TLI check when
re-opening a WAL segment. Backpatch to 9.0. Earlier versions had
the same code, but before standby mode was introduced in 9.0,
recovery never tried to re-read a segment after partially replaying
it. Reported by Amit Kapila, while testing a new feature.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/24c19e6bf96d556b3a9517ce42f54b5756ca0384

Tom Lane pushed:

- Improve handling of INT_MIN / -1 and related cases. Some platforms
throw an exception for this division, rather than returning a
necessarily-overflowed result. Since we were testing for overflow
after the fact, an exception isn't nice. We can avoid the problem
by treating division by -1 as negation. Add some regression tests
so that we'll find out if any compilers try to optimize away the
overflow check conditions. This ought to be back-patched, but I'm
going to see what the buildfarm reports about the regression tests
first. Per discussion with Xi Wang, though this is different from
the patch he submitted.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1f7cb5c30983752ff8de833de30afcaee63536d0

- Don't launch new child processes after we've been told to shut down.
Once we've received a shutdown signal (SIGINT or SIGTERM), we should
not launch any more child processes, even if we get signals
requesting such. The normal code path for spawning backends has
always understood that, but the postmaster's infrastructure for hot
standby and autovacuum didn't get the memo. As reported by Hari
Babu in bug #7643, this could lead to failure to shut down at all in
some cases, such as when SIGINT is received just before the startup
process sends PMSIGNAL_RECOVERY_STARTED: we'd launch a bgwriter and
checkpointer, and then those processes would have no idea that they
ought to quit. Similarly, launching a new autovacuum worker would
result in waiting till it finished before shutting down. Also,
switch the order of the code blocks in reaper() that detect startup
process crash versus shutdown termination. Once we've sent it a
signal, we should not consider that exit(1) is surprising. This is
just a cosmetic fix since shutdown occurs correctly anyway, but
better not to log a phony complaint about startup process crash.
Back-patch to 9.0. Some parts of this might be applicable before
that, but given the lack of prior complaints I'm not going to worry
too much about older branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/27b2c6a1ef8ab5993e2aed4366d2c49c8989381a

- Fix pg_resetxlog to use correct path to postmaster.pid. Since we've
already chdir'd into the data directory, the file should be
referenced as just "postmaster.pid", without prefixing the directory
path. This is harmless in the normal case where an absolute PGDATA
path is used, but quite dangerous if a relative path is specified,
since the program might then fail to notice an active postmaster.
Reported by Hari Babu. This got broken in my commit
eb5949d190e80360386113fde0f05854f0c9824d, so patch all active
versions.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/455b8887cf79dc4d4b5fea0cf65f56f316baaaa2

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- In pg_upgrade, report errno string if file existence check returns
an error and errno != ENOENT.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b55743a5df13711b8143cd3f53c8abc3416ee520

- In pg_upgrade, fix a few place that used maloc/free rather than
pg_malloc/pg_free.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/16e1ae77f9eb64ba7d292fd5f71e289a0fcaa854

- In pg_upgrade, simplify function copy_file() by using pg_malloc()
and centralizing error/shutdown code.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6b711cf37c228749b6a8cef50e16e3c587d18dd4

Michael Meskes pushed:

- Applied patch by Chen Huajun <chenhj AT cn DOT fujitsu DOT com> to
make ecpg able to cope with very long structs.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c50b8a4637bcaab2f0e1fb69c39fdcec7e535874

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Remove -Wlogical-op from standard compiler flags. It creates too
many warnings with GCC 4.3 and 4.4.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bc5430aa95ac672a82bedb88e3f5081a8fdadb1c

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Heikki Linnakangas sent in three more revisions of a patch to allow
switching timelines over streaming replication.

Alvaro Herrera sent in two more revisions of the patch to add custom
background worker processes.

Alexander Korotkov sent in four more revisions of a patch to allow
certain types of regex to use trigrams, i.e. indexes.

Marcin Mańk sent in a WIP patch to speed up headline generation in
textsearch.

Robert Haas sent in three more revisions of a patch to implement a
binary heap.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in five more revisions of a patch to enable
pg_basebackup to configure and start a standby.

Andrew Dunstan sent in a patch to fix an infelicity in names on the
Windows platform.

Andrew Dunstan sent in two revisions of a patch to enhance JSON
generation.

Magnus Hagander and Zoltan Boszormenyi traded patches to add a
PQconninfo() function.

Shigeru HANADA sent in another revision of a patch to add a FDW for
PostgreSQL.

Jeff Davis sent in two more revisions of a patch to remove
PD_ALL_VISIBLE.

Etsuro Fujita sent in another revision of a patch to add PRE- and
POST- options to COPY.

Fujii Masao sent in another revision of a patch to add a
pg_stat_ginindex to pg_stattuple.

Asif Rehman sent in two more revisions of a patch to allow PL/pgsql to
return a row expression in certain cases.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to allow
postgresql.conf values to be changed via SQL.

Alvaro Herrera sent in another revision of a patch to split up the
*_desc routines.

Bruce Momjian sent in a patch to fix a performance issue in pg_upgrade
in the many-tables case.

Jeff Janes and Bruce Momjian traded patches to fix a performance issue
in pg_upgrade in the many-tables case...another approach.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to fix an infelicity in the interaction
of CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY and HOT update.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of a patch to implement
row-level access control.

Jeff Davis sent in another revision of a patch to enable page
checksums.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix an infelicity in max()/min() in
certain cases. The patch changes the behavior of
mutate_eclass_expressions().