== PostgreSQL Weekly News - February 10 2013 ==

From: David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org>
To: PostgreSQL Announce <pgsql-announce(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: == PostgreSQL Weekly News - February 10 2013 ==
Date: 2013-02-11 06:41:13
Message-ID: 20130211064113.GA1873@fetter.org
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== PostgreSQL Weekly News - February 10 2013 ==

Security releases 9.2.3, 9.1.8, 9.0.12, 8.4.16, and 8.3.23 are out.
Upgrade ASAP!
http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1446/

PG Day France is the major French-speaking PostgreSQL community event.
The deadline for sending proposals is Saturday, March 24, 2013 at
23:59 CEST.
http://pgday.fr/call_for_papers

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Barman 1.2.0, a backup and recovery manager for PostgreSQL, released.
http://www.pgbarman.org

pg_activity 0.3.0 released.
https://github.com/julmon/pg_activity/

pgpool-II 3.2.2, 3.1.6, 3.0.10, and pgpoolAdmin 3.2.2 released.
http://pgpool.net/mediawiki/index.php/Downloads

pg_statsinfo 2.4 is now available.
http://pgfoundry.org/frs/?group_id=1000422&release_id=2015

pg_stats_reporter 1.0 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/frs/?group_id=1000422&release_id=2008

Postgres-XC 1.0.2, a write-scalable multi-master symmetric cluster
based on PostgreSQL, released.
http://postgres-xc.sourceforge.net/

Pyrseas 0.6.1, a toolkit for PostgreSQL version control, released on PGXN.
http://pgxn.org/dist/pyrseas/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for February ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2013-02/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PyPgDay will be held on March 13th at the Santa Clara Convention
Center, the first day of PyCon. Info here:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PyPgDay2013

PGDay NYC 2013 will be held on March 22, 2013 in New York City.
http://pgday.nycpug.org/

PostgreSQL Session will be held on March 28th, 2013 in Paris,
France. The Call for Papers is open.
http://www.postgresql-sessions.org/en/5/

PGCon 2013 will be held May 23-24 2013, in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa.
http://www.pgcon.org/2013/

The 6th annual "Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day" conference,
organized by CSPUG (Czech and Slovak PostgreSQL Users Group), will be
held on May 30, 2013 at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles
University (Malostranske namesti 25, Prague). The CfP is open until
April 14, 2013 <info AT p2d2 DOT cz>. More information in Czech is at
http://www.p2d2.cz/

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

== Applied Patches ==

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Handle SPIErrors raised directly in PL/Python code. If a PL/Python
function raises an SPIError (or one if its subclasses) directly with
python's raise statement, treat it the same as an SPIError generated
internally. In particular, if the user sets the sqlstate attribute,
preserve that. Oskari Saarenmaa and Jan Urbański, reviewed by Karl
O. Pinc.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/316186f2893d37ecd8e32392ee7c910cca9b93eb

- Skip truncating ON COMMIT DELETE ROWS temp tables, if the
transaction hasn't touched any temporary tables. We could try
harder, and keep track of whether we've inserted to any temp tables,
rather than accessed them, and which temp tables have been inserted
to. But this is dead simple, and already covers many interesting
scenarios.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c9d7dbacd387ab3814bc6b38010a9e72a02ea4f5

- Allow pgbench to use a scale larger than 21474. Beyond 21474, the
number of accounts exceed the range for int4. Change the
initialization code to use bigint for account id columns when scale
is large enough, and switch to using int64s for the variables in
pgbench code. The threshold where we switch to bigints is set at
20000, because that's easier to remember and document than 21474,
and ensures that there is some headroom when int4s are used. Greg
Smith, with various changes by Euler Taveira de Oliveira, Gurjeet
Singh and Satoshi Nagayasu.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/89d00cbe01447fd36edbc3bed659f869b18172d1

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- REASSIGN OWNED: handle shared objects, too. Give away ownership of
shared objects (databases, tablespaces) along with local objects,
per original code intention. Try to make the documentation clearer,
too. Per discussion about DROP OWNED's brokenness, in bug #7748.
This is not backpatched because it'd require some refactoring of the
ALTER/SET OWNER code for databases and tablespaces.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ee22c55f5ad2e7b7032cd6c0243254d84d4496c7

- DROP OWNED: don't try to drop tablespaces/databases. My "fix" for
bugs #7578 and #6116 on DROP OWNED at fe3b5eb08a1 not only misstated
that it applied to REASSIGN OWNED (which it did not affect), but it
also failed to fix the problems fully, because I didn't test the
case of owned shared objects. Thus I created a new bug, reported by
Thomas Kellerer as #7748, which would cause DROP OWNED to fail with
a not-for-user-consumption error message. The code would attempt to
drop the database, which not only fails to work because the
underlying code does not support that, but is a pretty dangerous and
undesirable thing to be doing as well. This patch fixes that bug by
having DROP OWNED only attempt to process shared objects when grants
on them are found, ignoring ownership. Backpatch to 8.3, which is
as far as the previous bug was backpatched.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ec41b8edc1192e87f4ad05471c176cc735bda2c9

- Restrict infomask bits to set on multixacts. We must only set the
bit(s) for the strongest lock held in the tuple; otherwise, a
multixact containing members with exclusive lock and key-share lock
will behave as though only a share lock is held. This bug was
introduced in commit 0ac5ad5134, somewhere along development, when
we allowed a singleton FOR SHARE lock to be implemented without a
MultiXact by using a multi-bit pattern. I overlooked that
GetMultiXactIdHintBits() needed to be tweaked as well. Previously,
we could have the bits for FOR KEY SHARE and FOR UPDATE
simultaneously set and it wouldn't cause a problem. Per report from
digoal(at)126(dot)com
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b78647a0e6f7b110273e98601f26d3d1db0ad931

- pgrowlocks: fix bogus lock strength output. Per report from
digoal(at)126(dot)com
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/77a3082fc546774808b76f58173caec3852ebf62

- Fix typo in freeze_table_age implementation. The original code used
freeze_min_age instead of freeze_table_age. The main consequence of
this mistake is that lowering freeze_min_age would cause full-table
scans to occur much more frequently, which causes serious issues
because the number of writes required is much larger. That feature
(freeze_min_age) is supposed to affect only how soon tuples are
frozen; some pages should still be skipped due to the visibility
map. Backpatch to 8.4, where the freeze_table_age feature was
introduced. Report and patch from Andres Freund
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/dd1569da67937b819d1589a9f664af9aa9657945

- Fill tuple before HeapSatisfiesHOTAndKeyUpdate. Failing to do this
results in almost all updates to system catalogs being non-HOT
updates, because the OID column would differ (not having been set
for the new tuple), which is an indexed column. While at it, make
sure to set the tableoid early in both old and new tuples as well.
This isn't of much consequence, since that column is seldom (never?)
indexed. Report and patch from Andres Freund.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9ee00ef4c7de991b9371f614ce9c03ff436ce383

- Improve error message wording. The wording changes applied in
0ac5ad513 were universally disliked. Per gripe from Andrew Dunstan
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cb9b66d31ad4bcd37226f20d651a213323621b89

- Split out list of XLog resource managers. The new rmgrlist.h
header, containing all necessary data about built-in resource
managers, allows other pieces of code to access them. In
particular, this allows a future pg_xlogdump program to extract
rm_desc function pointers, without having to keep a duplicate list
of them.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5a1cd89f8f4a0bc13c85810de47d48bb6386ea89

- Clean up c.h / postgres.h after Assert() move. Per Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/381d4b70a9854a7b5b9f12d828a0824f8564f1e7

- Fix Xmax freeze conditions I broke this in 0ac5ad5134; previously,
freezing a tuple marked with an IS_MULTI xmax was not necessary.
Per brokenness report from Jeff Janes.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5766228bc64268369b59b07cffa7d31cd4f9c9ff

- Move Assert() definitions to c.h. This way, they can be used by
frontend and backend code. We already supported that, but doing it
this way allows us to mix true frontend files with backend files
compiled in frontend environment. Author: Andres Freund
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e1d25de35a2b1f809e8f8d7b182ce0af004f3ec9

Tom Lane pushed:

- Provide database object names as separate fields in error messages.
This patch addresses the problem that applications currently have to
extract object names from possibly-localized textual error messages,
if they want to know for example which index caused a
UNIQUE_VIOLATION failure. It adds new error message fields to the
wire protocol, which can carry the name of a table, table column,
data type, or constraint associated with the error. (Since the
protocol spec has always instructed clients to ignore unrecognized
field types, this should not create any compatibility problem.)
Support for providing these new fields has been added to just a
limited set of error reports (mainly, those in the "integrity
constraint violation" SQLSTATE class), but we will doubtless add
them to more calls in future. Pavel Stehule, reviewed and
extensively revised by Peter Geoghegan, with additional hacking by
Tom Lane.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/991f3e5ab3f8196d18d5b313c81a5f744f3baaea

- Fix grammar for subscripting or field selection from a sub-SELECT
result. Such cases should work, but the grammar failed to accept
them because of our ancient precedence hacks to convince bison that
extra parentheses around a sub-SELECT in an expression are
unambiguous. (Formally, they *are* ambiguous, but we don't
especially care whether they're treated as part of the sub-SELECT or
part of the expression. Bison cares, though.) Fix by adding a
redundant-looking production for this case. This is a fine example
of why fixing shift/reduce conflicts via precedence declarations is
more dangerous than it looks: you can easily cause the parser to
reject cases that should work. This has been wrong since commit
3db4056e22b0c6b2adc92543baf8408d2894fe91 or maybe before, and
apparently some people have been working around it by inserting
no-op casts. That method introduces a dump/reload hazard, as
illustrated in bug #7838 from Jan Mate. Hence, back-patch to all
active branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/670a6c7a228aea1f31fb96f6bfa69969962e133e

- Fix plpgsql's reporting of plan-time errors in possibly-simple
expressions. exec_simple_check_plan and exec_eval_simple_expr
attempted to call GetCachedPlan directly. This meant that if an
error was thrown during planning, the resulting context traceback
would not include the line normally contributed by
_SPI_error_callback. This is already inconsistent, but just to be
really odd, a re-execution of the very same expression *would* show
the additional context line, because we'd already have cached the
plan and marked the expression as non-simple. The problem is easy
to demonstrate in 9.2 and HEAD because planning of a cached plan
doesn't occur at all until GetCachedPlan is done. In earlier
versions, it could only be an issue if initial planning had
succeeded, then a replan was forced (already somewhat improbable for
a simple expression), and the replan attempt failed. Since the
issue is mainly cosmetic in older branches anyway, it doesn't seem
worth the risk of trying to fix it there. It is worth fixing in 9.2
since the instability of the context printout can affect the results
of GET STACKED DIAGNOSTICS, as per a recent discussion on
pgsql-novice. To fix, introduce a SPI function that wraps
GetCachedPlan while installing the correct callback function. Use
this instead of calling GetCachedPlan directly from plpgsql. Also
introduce a wrapper function for extracting a SPI plan's
CachedPlanSource list. This lets us stop including spi_priv.h in
pl_exec.c, which was never a very good idea from a modularity
standpoint. In passing, fix a similar inconsistency that could
occur in SPI_cursor_open, which was also calling GetCachedPlan
without setting up a context callback.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0900ac2d0dba3168ba574e5b0b61170237b4fdea

- Don't use spi_priv.h in plpython. There may once have been a reason
to violate modularity like that, but it doesn't appear that there is
anymore.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2ab218b57698bf76fc31b03e6230d057f5187ba3

- Reject nonzero day fields in AT TIME ZONE INTERVAL functions. It's
not sensible for an interval that's used as a time zone value to be
larger than a day. When we changed the interval type to contain a
separate day field, check_timezone() was adjusted to reject nonzero
day values, but timetz_izone(), timestamp_izone(), and
timestamptz_izone() evidently were overlooked. While at it, make
the error messages for these three cases consistent.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9afc58396af75d59ea2eec467724faf68fe63890

- Create a psql command \gset to store query results into psql
variables. This eases manipulation of query results in psql
scripts. Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Piyush Newe, Shigeru Hanada,
and Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d2d153fdb08053d655bd0fef14187eed6a674193

- Prevent "\g filename" from affecting subsequent commands after an
error. In the previous coding, psql's state variable saying that
output should go to a file was only reset after successful
completion of a query returning tuples. Thus for example,
regression=# select 1/0 regression-# \g somefile ERROR: division by
zero regression=# select 1/2; regression=# ... huh, I wonder where
that output went. Even more oddly, the state was not reset even if
it's the file that's causing the failure: regression=# select 1/2 \g
/foo /foo: Permission denied regression=# select 1/2; /foo:
Permission denied regression=# select 1/2; /foo: Permission denied
This seems to me not to satisfy the principle of least surprise. \g
is certainly not documented in a way that suggests its effects are
at all persistent. To fix, adjust the code so that the flag is
reset at exit from SendQuery no matter what happened. Noted while
reviewing the \gset patch, which had comparable issues. Arguably
this is a bug fix, but I'll refrain from back-patching for now.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/101d6ae755656b675b7c18db655249511982b780

- Perform line wrapping and indenting by default in ruleutils.c. This
patch changes pg_get_viewdef() and allied functions so that
PRETTY_INDENT processing is always enabled. Per discussion, only
the PRETTY_PAREN processing (that is, stripping of "unnecessary"
parentheses) poses any real forward-compatibility risk, so we may as
well make dump output look as nice as we safely can. Also, set the
default wrap length to zero (i.e, wrap after each SELECT or FROM
list item), since there's no very principled argument for the former
default of 80-column wrapping, and most people seem to agree this
way looks better. Marko Tiikkaja, reviewed by Jeevan Chalke,
further hacking by Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/62e666400dddf605b9b6d9a7ac2918711b5c5629

- Update release notes for 9.2.3, 9.1.8, 9.0.12, 8.4.16, 8.3.23.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/318db6b2a05ca12d7ca7bae288bf473def4bdd42

- Fix possible failure to send final transaction counts to stats
collector. Normally, we suppress sending a tabstats message to the
collector unless there were some actual table stats to send.
However, during backend exit we should force out the message if
there are any transaction commit/abort counts to send, else the
session's last few commit/abort counts will never get reported at
all. We had logic for this, but the short-circuit test at the top
of pgstat_report_stat() ignored the "force" flag, with the
consequence that session-ending transactions that touched no
database-local tables would not get counted. Seems to be an
oversight in my commit 641912b4d17fd214a5e5bae4e7bb9ddbc28b144b,
which added the "force" flag. That was back in 8.3, so back-patch
to all supported versions.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c5aad8dc14d8ad9d7d55ee4a9b136b6273c7991a

- Repair bugs in GiST page splitting code for multi-column indexes.
When considering a non-last column in a multi-column GiST index,
gistsplit.c tries to improve on the split chosen by the
opclass-specific pickSplit function by considering penalties for the
next column. However, there were two bugs in this code: it failed
to recompute the union keys for the leftmost index columns, even
though these might well change after reassigning tuples; and it
included the old union keys in the recomputation for the columns it
did recompute, so that those keys couldn't get smaller even if they
should. The first problem could result in an invalid index in which
searches wouldn't find index entries that are in fact present; the
second would make the index less efficient to search. Both of these
errors were caused by misuse of gistMakeUnionItVec, whose API was
designed in a way that just begged such errors to be made. There is
no situation in which it's safe or useful to compute the union keys
for a subset of the index columns, and there is no caller that wants
any previous union keys to be included in the computation; so the
undocumented choice to treat the union keys as in/out rather than
pure output parameters is a waste of code as well as being
dangerous. Hence, rather than just making a minimal patch, I've
changed the API of gistMakeUnionItVec to remove the "startkey"
parameter (it now always processes all index columns) and treat the
attr/isnull arrays as purely output parameters. In passing, also
get rid of a couple of unnecessary and dangerous uses of static
variables in gistutil.c. It's remarkable that the one in
gistMakeUnionKey hasn't given us portability troubles before now,
because in addition to posing a re-entrancy hazard, it was unsafely
assuming that a static char[] array would have at least Datum
alignment. Per investigation of a trouble report from Tomas Vondra.
(There are also some bugs in contrib/btree_gist to be fixed, but
that seems like material for a separate patch.) Back-patch to all
supported branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/166d534fcd1d16edb7c6d57429b2ebde80c02ff7

- Fix erroneous range-union logic for varlena types in
contrib/btree_gist. gbt_var_bin_union() failed to do the right
thing when the existing range needed to be widened at both ends
rather than just one end. This could result in an invalid index in
which keys that are present would not be found by searches, because
the searches would not think they need to descend to the relevant
leaf pages. This error affected all the varlena datatypes supported
by btree_gist (text, bytea, bit, numeric). Per investigation of a
trouble report from Tomas Vondra. (There is also an issue in
gbt_var_penalty(), but that should only result in inefficiency not
wrong answers. I'm committing this separately so that we have a git
state in which it can be tested that bad penalty results don't
produce invalid indexes.) Back-patch to all supported branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/94f565dcf1ada1f2a7c6905f205e14060c4ce08b

- Make contrib/btree_gist's GiST penalty function a bit saner. The
previous coding supposed that the first differing bytes in two
varlena datums must have the same sign difference as their overall
comparison result. This is obviously bogus for text strings in
non-C locales, and probably wrong for numeric, and even for bytea I
think it was wrong on machines where char is signed. When the
assumption failed, the function could deliver a zero or negative
penalty in situations where such a result is quite ridiculous,
leading the core GiST code to make very bad page-split decisions.
To fix, take the absolute values of the byte-level differences.
Also, switch the code to using unsigned char not just char, so that
the behavior will be consistent whether char is signed or not. Per
investigation of a trouble report from Tomas Vondra. Back-patch to
all supported branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9221f9d485b26d8c663fa2c381e6ecf59b6b3488

- Fix performance issue in EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, TIMING OFF). Commit
af7914c6627bcf0b0ca614e9ce95d3f8056602bf, which added the TIMING
option to EXPLAIN, had an oversight: if the TIMING option is
disabled then control in InstrStartNode() goes through an
elog(DEBUG2) call, which typically does nothing but takes a
noticeable amount of time to do it. Tweak the logic to avoid that.
In HEAD, also change the elog(DEBUG2)'s in instrument.c to
elog(ERROR). It's not very clear why they weren't like that to
begin with, but this episode shows that not complaining more
vociferously about misuse is likely to do little except allow bugs
to remain hidden. While at it, adjust some code that was making
possibly-dangerous assumptions about flag bits being in the
rightmost byte of the instrument_options word. Problem reported by
Pavel Stehule (via Tomas Vondra).
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bcc6c4c2914ab4f9a39e4a6673f9b6c36ad93914

- doc: Fix mistakes in the most recent set of release notes. Improve
description of the vacuum_freeze_table_age bug (it's much more
serious than we realized at the time the fix was committed), and
correct attribution of pg_upgrade -O/-o fix (Marti Raudsepp
contributed that, but Bruce forgot to credit him in the commit log).
No need to back-patch right now, it'll happen when the next set of
release notes are prepared.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/335c5e9206b40c2fac3945db2499a57b948cc996

- Prevent execution of enum_recv() from SQL. This function was
misdeclared to take cstring when it should take internal. This at
least allows crashing the server, and in principle an attacker might
be able to use the function to examine the contents of server
memory. The correct fix is to adjust the system catalog contents
(and fix the regression tests that should have caught this but
failed to). However, asking users to correct the catalog contents
in existing installations is a pain, so as a band-aid fix for the
back branches, install a check in enum_recv() to make it throw error
if called with a cstring argument. We will later revert this in
HEAD in favor of correcting the catalogs. Our thanks to Sumit Soni
(via Secunia SVCRP) for reporting this issue. Security:
CVE-2013-0255
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ab0f7b6089fd215f6ce6081e2e222c38d643a526

- Fix gist_box_same and gist_point_consistent to handle fuzziness
correctly. While there's considerable doubt that we want fuzzy
behavior in the geometric operators at all (let alone as currently
implemented), nobody is stepping forward to redesign that stuff. In
the meantime it behooves us to make sure that index searches agree
with the behavior of the underlying operators. This patch fixes two
problems in this area. First, gist_box_same was using fuzzy
equality, but it really needs to use exact equality to prevent
not-quite-identical upper index keys from being treated as
identical, which for example would prevent an existing upper key
from being extended by an amount less than epsilon. This would
result in inconsistent indexes. (The next release notes will need
to recommend that users reindex GiST indexes on boxes, polygons,
circles, and points, since all four opclasses use gist_box_same.)
Second, gist_point_consistent used exact comparisons for upper-page
comparisons in ~= searches, when it needs to use fuzzy comparisons
to ensure it finds all matches; and it used fuzzy comparisons for
point <@ box searches, when it needs to use exact comparisons
because that's what the <@ operator (rather inconsistently) does.
The added regression test cases illustrate all three misbehaviors.
Back-patch to all active branches. (8.4 did not have GiST
point_ops, but it still seems prudent to apply the gist_box_same
patch to it.) Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Noah Misch
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3c29b196b0ce46662cb9bb7a1f91079fbacbcabb

- Simplify box_overlap computations. Given the assumption that a
box's high coordinates are not less than its low coordinates, the
tests in box_ov() are overly complicated and can be reduced to about
half as much work. Since many other functions in geo_ops.c rely on
that assumption, there doesn't seem to be a good reason not to use
it here. Per discussion of Alexander Korotkov's GiST fix, which was
already using the simplified logic (in a non-fuzzy form, but the
equivalence holds just as well for fuzzy).
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f806c191a3d5faa1af1e5032d394fc6c5f93df86

- Add support for ALTER RULE ... RENAME TO. Ali Dar, reviewed by Dean
Rasheed.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c61e26ee3e447c0277c6c4e5a8a452dbefdc502d

- Add an example of attaching a default value to an updatable view.
This is probably the single most useful thing that ALTER VIEW can
do, particularly now that we have auto-updatable views. So show an
explicit example.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3a1f8cdfa90443117049c601364009b71eaad3d1

- Reduce log level of picksplit-doesn't-support-secondary-split
whining. This was agreed to back in 2007, but never actually done.
Josh Hansen
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a187c96d26520695fc392edb1c8f38d86b16ef5b

- Document and clean up gistsplit.c. Improve comments, rename some
variables and functions, slightly simplify a couple of APIs, in an
attempt to make this code readable by people other than its original
author. Even though this is essentially just cosmetic, back-patch
to all active branches, because otherwise it's going to make
back-patching future fixes in this file very painful.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0fd0f3688b7a8ab0b907d431cf7022098110cfc8

- Remove vestigial secondary-split support in gist_box_picksplit().
Not only is this implementation of secondary-split not better than
the default implementation in gistsplit.c, it's actually worse. The
gistsplit.c code at least looks to see if switching the left and
right sides would make a better merge with the previously-split
tuples, while this doesn't. In any case it's rather useless to
support secondary split only in an edge case. There used to be more
complete support for it here (in chooseLR()), but that was removed
in commit 7f3bd86843e5aad84585a57d3f6b80db3c609916. It appears to
me though that the chooseLR() code was really isomorphic to the
default implementation, since it was still based on choosing the
cheaper way of adding two sub-split vectors that had been chosen
without regard to the primary split initially. I think an
implementation of secondary split that could beat the default
implementation would have to be pretty fully integrated into the
split algorithm, not plastered on at the end. Back-patch to 9.2,
but not further; previous branches have the chooseLR() code which I
don't feel a great need to mess with. This is mainly so we just
have two behaviors and not three among the various branches (IOW,
this patch is cleanup for commit
7f3bd86843e5aad84585a57d3f6b80db3c609916's incomplete removal of
secondary-split support).
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/dacc185f52e9937e9c2fe1bf29c6e92e0c16ae14

- Remove useless picksplit-doesn't-support-secondary-split log spam.
This LOG message was put in over five years ago with the evident
expectation that we'd make all GiST opclasses support secondary
split directly. However, no such thing ever happened, and indeed
the number of opclasses supporting it decreased to zero in 9.2. The
reason is that improving on the default implementation isn't that
easy --- the opclass-specific code that did exist, before 9.2,
doesn't appear to have been any improvement over the default.
Hence, remove the message altogether. There's certainly no point in
nagging users about this in released branches, but I doubt that
we'll ever implement complete opclass-specific support anyway.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/db3d7e9f0d7d2a7edf57d154f62dff0a18f1b1f9

- Further cleanup of gistsplit.c. After further reflection I was
unconvinced that the existing coding is guaranteed to return valid
union datums in every code path for multi-column indexes. Fix that
by forcing a gistunionsubkey() call at the end of the recursion.
Having done that, we can remove some clearly-redundant calls
elsewhere. This should be a little faster for multi-column indexes
(since the previous coding would uselessly do such a call for each
column while unwinding the recursion), as well as much harder to
break. Also, simplify the handling of cases where one side or the
other of a primary split contains only don't-care tuples. The
previous coding used a very ugly hack in removeDontCares() that
essentially forced one random tuple to be treated as non-don't-care,
providing a random initial choice of seed datum for the secondary
split. It seems unlikely that that method will give
better-than-random splits. Instead, treat such a split as
degenerate and just let the next column determine the split, the
same way that we handle fully degenerate cases where the two sides
produce identical union datums.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c352ea2d74c4e317bf2a1471ec1f750f9f072276

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- entab: Fix some compiler warnings
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5bb2ddc0af62cfcd538e0e51460fc1f4f91ee333

- pg_regress: Allow overriding diff options. By setting the
environment variable PG_REGRESS_DIFF_OPTS, custom diff options can
be passed. reviewed by Jeevan Chalke
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/574f7643214d8381a03083ffbb08ecceec44d6b2

- PL/Tcl: Fix compiler warnings with Tcl 8.6. Some constification was
added in the Tcl APIs, so add the modifiers in PL/Tcl as well.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b1980f6d03f79ab57da8f32aa8cd9677dbe1d58f

- Add CREATE RECURSIVE VIEW syntax. This is specified in the SQL
standard. The CREATE RECURSIVE VIEW specification is transformed
into a normal CREATE VIEW statement with a WITH RECURSIVE clause.
reviewed by Abhijit Menon-Sen and Stephen Frost
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/583905269378bf41c24585773885b1e226a998ce

- doc: Tiny whitespace fix
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f4987049ef7dd28d810a77c3b15a0a202ad493f8

- PL/Python: Add result object str handler. This is intended so that
say plpy.debug(rv) prints something useful for debugging query
execution results. reviewed by Steve Singer
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/330ed4ac6c55294c62bfd975d6e1aafda274e096

- doc: Rewrite how to get the source code. Instead of hardcoding a
specific link, give a general link to the download section of the
web site. This gives the user more download options and the
sysadmins more flexibility. Also, the previously presented link
didn't work for devel versions.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/858ef718ba6301b24e245bbe3ecf20aa10cb60a4

- scripts: Add build prerequisite on libpgport. Without this,
building in src/bin/scripts directly will fail if libpgport wasn't
built first. Other bin components are handled the same way. Phil
Sorber
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4760142146ffc0a88a17b7ef477b8a84b041238e

- Exclude access/rmgrlist.h from cpluspluscheck. It is not meant to
be included standalone.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cf4d67e819e05d46836d896cce2a2b52f4a194d0

- psql: Improve unaligned expanded output for zero rows. This used to
erroneously print an empty line. Now it prints nothing.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0343a59d119de3fb835234fa34fbcd697b9335db

- psql: Improve expanded print output in tuples-only mode. When there
are zero result rows, in expanded mode, "(No rows)" is printed. So
far, there was no way to turn this off. Now, when tuples-only mode
is turned on, nothing is printed in this case.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8ade58a4ea318d0ab8548ab94e49a3b80fdbeb0d

Tatsuo Ishii pushed:

- Add --aggregate-interval option. The new option specifies length of
aggregation interval (in seconds). May be used only together with
-l. With this option, the log contains per-interval summary (number
of transactions, min/max latency and two additional fields useful
for variance estimation). Patch contributed by Tomas Vondra,
reviewed by Pavel Stehule. Slight change by Tatsuo Ishii, suggested
by Robert Hass to emit an error message indicating that the option
is not currently supported on Windows.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6a651d85eb6b2df7cbcbdf4b2f82a1660e691d12

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Properly zero-pad the day-of-year part of the win32 build number
This ensure the version number increases over time. The first three
digits in the version number is still set to the actual PostgreSQL
version number, but the last one is intended to be an ever
increasing build number, which previosly failed when it changed
between 1, 2 and 3 digits long values. Noted by Deepak
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bfb8a8d3818972faf1976eccedddfaee7eb0f613

- Fix typo in comment. Etsuro Fujita
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/733701d2748b6bbbe5f3cdc6421fdc83f6aa0c01

- Fix another typo in a comment. Noted by Thom Brown
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c572bfaf39d87b0c603f28e1ff385cd85b0a0879

Simon Riggs pushed:

- Switch timelines if we crash soon after promotion. Previous patch
to skip checkpoints at end of recovery didn't correctly perform
crash recovery, fumbling the timeline switch. Now we record the
minRecoveryPointTLI of the newly selected timeline, so that we crash
recover to the correct timeline. Bug report from Fujii Masao,
investigated by me.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3f0ab052330905f1ad2183684e75e6a2cbfa0c76

- Fast promote mode skips checkpoint at end of recovery. pg_ctl
promote -m fast will skip the checkpoint at end of recovery so that
we can achieve very fast failover when the apply delay is low. Write
new WAL record XLOG_END_OF_RECOVERY to allow us to switch timeline
correctly for downstream log readers. If we skip synchronous end of
recovery checkpoint we request a normal spread checkpoint so that
the window of re-recovery is low. Simon Riggs and Kyotaro
Horiguchi, with input from Fujii Masao. Review by Heikki
Linnakangas
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/fd4ced5230162b50a5c9d33b4bf9cfb1231aa62e

- Mark vacuum_defer_cleanup_age as PGC_POSTMASTER. Following bug
analysis of #7819 by Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/84725aa5efe11688633b553e58113efce4181f2e

- Reset master xmin when hot_standby_feedback disabled. If walsender
has xmin of standby then ensure we reset the value to 0 when we
change from hot_standby_feedback=on to hot_standby_feedback=off.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bd56e74127dea4102d1fc761d65fefbb32146713

- Reset vacuum_defer_cleanup_age to PGC_SIGHUP. Revert commit
84725aa5efe11688633b553e58113efce4181f2e
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f480e294498533820f3ef3e6de4dcb8ff5401140

- Rely only on checkpoint 1 at end of recovery. Searching for
checkpoint 2 (previous) is not correct in all cases. Bug report
from Heikki Linnakangas
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/072521b8c804cc15800e503244661d17c6202ccc

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- pg_upgrade docs: mention modification of postgresql.conf in new
cluster Mention it might be necessary to modify postgresql.conf in
the new cluster to match the old cluster. Backpatch to 9.2.
Suggested by user.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a11e15c7b66c647269ecad73560be0e717ffc400

- Adjust COPY FREEZE error message to be more accurate and consistent.
Per suggestions from Noah Misch and Tom Lane.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e8ae01966115a35d3815e0445da5f78878f6dd14

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Enable building with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012. Backpatch to
release 9.2 Brar Piening and Noah Misch, reviewed by Craig Ringer.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e1c1e2173248f39c1b15fca7b2a31ad7b5199ce7

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

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