== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 14 2013 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 14 2013 ==

Postgres-XC is going to have its first user/developer meeting after
the cluster summit.
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon2013CanadaClusterSummit#PostgresXC_Summit

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Ora2PG 11.1, a migration system for moving from Oracle to PostgreSQL, released.
http://www.dalibo.org/ora2pg_11_faster_oracle_to_postgresql_migrations

pg_activity 1.0.1 released.
https://github.com/julmon/pg_activity/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for April ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2013-04/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

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/

PG Day France is the major French-speaking PostgreSQL community event.
It will be held June 13, 2013 in Nantes, France.
http://pgday.fr/

The CfPs for Char(13) and PGday UK, July 11 and 12, 2013,
respectively, are out and close April 19, 2013. For Char(13), write
speakers AT char13 DOT info; for PGday UK, speakers AT
postgresqlusergroup DOT org DOT uk.

PostgreSQL Brazil will be held August 15-17, 2013 in Porto Velho, RO,
Brazil.
http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/2013/chamada.en.php

Save The Date!
Postgres Open 2013 will be in Chicago, IL, USA, September 16-18.
Hotel Sax:
https://reservations.ihotelier.com/crs/g_reservation.cfm?groupID=888761&hotelID=6865
Early Bird registration:
http://postgresopen-eac2.eventbrite.com/

PGConf.EU 2013 will be held on Oct 29-Nov 1, in at the Conrad Hotel in
downtown Dublin, Ireland.
http://2013.pgconf.eu/

== 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 ==

Simon Riggs pushed:

- Skip extraneous locking in XLogCheckBuffer(). Heikki reported
comment was wrong, so fixed code to match the comment: we only need
to take additional locking precautions when we have a shared lock on
the buffer.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5787c6730e7a848ef95d5c4194e27614ea8e6e41

- Avoid tricky race condition recording XLOG_HINT. We copy the buffer
before inserting an XLOG_HINT to avoid WAL CRC errors caused by
concurrent hint writes to buffer while share locked. To make this
work we refactor RestoreBackupBlock() to allow an XLOG_HINT to avoid
the normal path for backup blocks, which assumes the underlying
buffer is exclusive locked. Resulting code completely changes
layout of XLOG_HINT WAL records, but this isn't even beta code, so
this is a low impact change. In passing, avoid taking WALInsertLock
for full page writes on checksummed hints, remove related cruft from
XLogInsert() and improve xlog_desc record for XLOG_HINT. Andres
Freund Bug report by Fujii Masao, testing by Jeff Janes and Jaime
Casanova, review by Jeff Davis and Simon Riggs. Applied with changes
from review and some comment editing.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/47c4333189c9eb5ac1f95adc90213e61996f53c4

- Minor rewording of README comments
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e60d20a35e436cef3c454bfeab34d8ea71b54910

- README comments on checksums on page holes.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a4b94b85156192b839a3c840f8aaf0cf8699a8c8

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Fix calculation of how many segments to retain for
wal_keep_segments. KeepLogSeg function was broken when we switched
to use a 64-bit int for the segment number. Per report from Jeff
Janes.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/594041311c8263832258d35632aa3eebf9371fd1

Tom Lane pushed:

- Support indexing of regular-expression searches in contrib/pg_trgm.
This works by extracting trigrams from the given regular expression,
in generally the same spirit as the previously-existing support for
LIKE searches, though of course the details are far more
complicated. Currently, only GIN indexes are supported. We might
be able to make it work with GiST indexes later. The implementation
includes adding API functions to backend/regex/ to provide a view of
the search NFA created from a regular expression. These functions
are meant to be generic enough to be supportable in a standalone
version of the regex library, should that ever happen. Alexander
Korotkov, reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3ccae48f44d993351e1f881761bd6c556ebd6638

- Make contrib/pg_trgm also support regex searches with GiST indexes.
This wasn't addressed in the original patch, but it doesn't take
very much additional code to cover the case, so let's get it done.
Since pg_trgm 1.1 hasn't been released yet, I just changed the
definition of what's in it, rather than inventing a 1.2.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6f5b8beb64d481c28a483090d10099c8d619c797

- Clean up the mess around EXPLAIN and materialized views. Revert the
matview-related changes in explain.c's API, as per recent complaint
from Robert Haas. The reason for these appears to have been
principally some ill-considered choices around having
intorel_startup do what ought to be parse-time checking, plus a poor
arrangement for passing it the view parsetree it needs to store into
pg_rewrite when creating a materialized view. Do the latter by
having parse analysis stick a copy into the IntoClause, instead of
doing it at runtime. (On the whole, I seriously question the choice
to represent CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW as a variant of SELECT
INTO/CREATE TABLE Alexander Shulgin, because that means injecting
even more complexity into what was already a horrid legacy kluge.
However, I didn't go so far as to rethink that choice ... yet.) I
also moved several error checks into matview parse analysis, and
made the check for external Params in a matview more accurate. In
passing, clean things up a bit more around interpretOidsOption(),
and fix things so that we can use that to force no-oids for views,
sequences, etc, thereby eliminating the need to cons up "oids =
false" options when creating them. catversion bump due to change in
IntoClause. (I wonder though if we really need readfuncs/outfuncs
support for IntoClause anymore.)
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0b337904213337db5026ef0a756a447588023935

Robert Haas pushed:

- Adjust ExplainOneQuery_hook_type to take a DestReceiver argument.
The materialized views patch adjusted ExplainOneQuery to take an
additional DestReceiver argument, but failed to add a matching
argument to the definition of ExplainOneQuery_hook. This is a
problem for users of the hook that want to call ExplainOnePlan. Fix
by adding the missing argument.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0bf42a5f3b62cde41cb366d3442585429c6d9c50

- Remove duplicate initialization in XLogReadRecord. Per a note from
Dickson S. Guedes.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4cff7b9dd6d39ed5f6bb3914870c7d0602f88242

- sepgql: Use getObjectIdentity rather than getObjectDescription.
KaiGai Kohei, based on a suggestion from Álvaro Herrera
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b620fdabba3fd3c00587fb586f74eb7dc6eca223

- Minor wording corrections for object-access hook stuff. KaiGai
Kohei
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d017bf41a32d08885f00a274603ed2e50816fe7f

- sepgsql: Enforce db_procedure:{execute} permission. To do this, we
add an additional object access hook type, OAT_FUNCTION_EXECUTE.
KaiGai Kohei
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f8a54e936bdf4c31b395a2ab7d7bc98eefa6dbad

Kevin Grittner pushed:

- Create a distinction between a populated matview and a scannable
one. The intent was that being populated would, long term, be just
one of the conditions which could affect whether a matview was
scannable; being populated should be necessary but not always
sufficient to scan the relation. Since only CREATE and REFRESH
currently determine the scannability, names and comments
accidentally conflated these concepts, leading to confusion. Also
add missing locking for the SQL function which allows a test for
scannability, and fix a modularity violatiion. Per complaints from
Tom Lane, although its not clear that these will satisfy his
concerns. Hopefully this will at least better frame the discussion.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/52e6e33ab495cb2b0e694ee480ba7c6394315053

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Fix hstore_to_json_loose example in docs. Marti Raudsepp.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/66c01707c6ac9ce7cc7a7e45d0892f6506f1680b

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- Make worker_spi sample code more complete. Make use of some GUC
variables, and add SIGHUP handling to reload the config file. Patch
submitted by Guillaume Lelarge. Also, report to pg_stat_activity.
Per report from Marc Cousin, add setting of statement start time.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e543631f3c162ab5f6020b1d0209e0353ca2229a

- Fix SIGUSR1 handling by unconnected bgworkers. Latch activity was
not being detected by non-database-connected workers; the SIGUSR1
signal handler which is normally in charge of that was set to
SIG_IGN. Create a simple handler to call latch_sigusr1_handler
instead. Robert Haas (bug report and suggested fix)
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f62ab623adc63023c6aee22e2a6fe190439ca0c3

- Fix SIGHUP handling by unconnected bgworkers. Add a
SignalUnconnectedWorkers() call so that non-database-connected
background workers are also notified when postmaster is SIGHUPped.
Previously, only database-connected workers were. Michael Paquier
(bug report and fix)
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/61a7d576f2a287ef59071da9d9d7a0cd473ed98b

- Remove quotes around SQL statement in error message
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6cd18a88b604ec2a9940d894f36e1bfdb22daf78

- Fix confusion between ObjectType and ObjectClass. Per report by
Will Leinweber and Peter Eisentraut
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6a76edb1880d99744453dd275f30e0361281caab

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Update the description for the graphical installers. Remove
references to "one click", as we're not supposed to call them that
anymore.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d334b337b41e0c2e660324af2502dc9a5a691a02

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- doc: Update DTrace information. The old web site link no longer
worked, and some information was outdated.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/82b55c9769ac1ae6146ab34b6e5fe49251e79a90

- Fix sporadic rebuilds for .pc files. The build of .pc (pkg-config)
files depends on all makefiles in use, and in dependency tracking
mode, the previous coding ended up including /dev/null as a
makefile. Apparently, on some platforms the modification time of
/dev/null changes sporadically, and so the .pc files would end up
being rebuilt every so often. Fix that by changing the makefile
code to do without using /dev/null.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ba66752d278818b6b8797aec2e36cccf727db055

- pg_ctl: Add idempotent option. This changes the behavior of the
start and stop actions to exit successfully if the server was
already started or stopped. This changes the default behavior of
the start action: Before, if the server was already running, it
would print a message and succeed. Now, that situation will result
in an error. When running in idempotent mode, no message is printed
and pg_ctl exits successfully. It was considered to just make the
idempotent behavior the default and only option, but pg_upgrade
needs the old behavior.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/87306184580c9c49717b00d48a2f9e717f21e0a8

- Add serial comma
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e08fdf13107b6685047cf055c7966845c8c96f90

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Document that git_changelog needs updating for major version
stamping.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/be55f3b85966034028a8f162b8a6ca1deca66103

- pgindent: fix downloading of BSD indent binary. Also fix accessing
pgentab binary and tar. Gurjeet Singh
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8daa4e960e15eb31e141585968c91cc666889585

- pgindent: improve error messages. per suggestion from Gurjeet Singh
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5003f94f661d3eff0c44774576fe2f1ae202da86

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Etsuro Fujita sent in a patch to remove unused targets from the tlist.

KaiGai Kohei sent in a flock of patches to improve sepgsql.

Ants Aasma and Simon Riggs traded patches to improve page checksums.

Jeff Davis sent in two more patches to clarify and improve page
checksums.

Christoph Berg sent in a patch to pg_regress accept --host=/tmp.

Jeff Janes sent in a patch to improve autovacuum's locking behavior.

Miguel Angel de Blas Burdalo sent in a patch to creat a function
SPI_gettypmod(), which returns a field's typemod from a TupleDesc.

Robins Tharakan sent in a patch to add regression tests for COLLATE.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in another revision of a patch to improve and
clarify the sql_drop event for event triggers feature.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to reduce the memory usage of index
relcache entries.

Stephen Frost sent in a patch to modify ExecChooseHashTableSize() so
it ignore NTUP_PER_BUCKET, essentially treating it as 1, when work_mem
is large enough to fit the entire hash table, which also implies that
there is only one batch.