== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 28 2013 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 28 2013 ==

The next meeting of the Indian PostgreSQL User Group will be in Pune
on November 16, 2013. Info and RSVP:
http://www.meetup.com/India-PostgreSQL-UserGroup-Meetup/events/146224752/
Papers:
http://www.meetup.com/India-PostgreSQL-UserGroup-Meetup/messages/boards/thread/38935632/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Ora2PG 12.0, a migration system for moving from Oracle to PostgreSQL, released.
http://ora2pg.darold.net/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for October ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2013-10/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

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

PGConf.DE 2013 will be held November 8th, 2013, at the Rhineland
Industrial Museum in Oberhausen. The CfP is open through September
15, 2013.
http://2013.pgconf.de/

The fourth edition of the Argentinian PostgreSQL Day will be held on
November 14 2013 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PGDay_Argentina_2013

PGDay Cuba will be November 28-29, 2013.
http://postgresql.uci.cu/?page_id=474

== 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 ==

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- doc: Improve setup for documentation building with FOP. Add a
makefile rule for building PDFs with FOP. Two new build targets in
doc/src/sgml are postgres-A4-fop.pdf and postgres-US-fop.pdf. Run
.fo output through xmllint for reformatting, so that errors are
easier to find. (The default output has hardly any line breaks, so
you might be looking for an error in column 20000.) Set some XSLT
parameters to optimize for building with FOP. Remove some redundant
or somewhat useless chapterinfo/author information, because it
renders strangely with the FO stylesheet. Reviewed-by: Álvaro
Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a5963efa8f2b46700c0591281c57aeea3d429c34

- Make use of psprintf() in recent changes
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/586a8fc75bf266214d635cdcf527176b80f808ea

- Tweak "line" test to avoid negative zeros on some platforms
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a0a546f0d94ec6cbb3cd6b1c82f58d801046615f

Tom Lane pushed:

- Fix blatantly broken record_image_cmp() logic for pass-by-value
fields. Doesn't anybody here pay attention to compiler warnings?
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/28858811472f316f73eba0e564837088fc8c6ccd

- Get rid of use of asprintf() in favor of a more portable
implementation. asprintf(), aside from not being particularly
portable, has a fundamentally badly-designed API; the psprintf()
function that was added in passing in the previous patch has a much
better API choice. Moreover, the NetBSD implementation that was
borrowed for the previous patch doesn't work with non-C99-compliant
vsnprintf, which is something we still have to cope with on some
platforms; and it depends on va_copy which isn't all that portable
either. Get rid of that code in favor of an implementation similar
to what we've used for many years in stringinfo.c. Also, move it
into libpgcommon since it's not really libpgport material. I think
this patch will be enough to turn the buildfarm green again, but
there's still cosmetic work left to do, namely get rid of
pg_asprintf() in favor of using psprintf(). That will come in a
followon patch.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/09a89cb5fc29b47c26d151e82293fd3bef592b7b

- Replace pg_asprintf() with psprintf(). This eliminates an awkward
coding pattern that's also unnecessarily inconsistent with backend
coding. psprintf() is now the thing to use everywhere.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2c66f9924c1162bfba27c77004ccf42fb6ea188d

- Suppress a couple of compiler warnings seen with older gcc versions.
To wit, bgworker.c: In function `RegisterDynamicBackgroundWorker':
bgworker.c:761: warning: `generation' might be used uninitialized in
this function dsm_impl.c: In function `dsm_impl_op': dsm_impl.c:197:
warning: control reaches end of non-void function Neither of these
represent actual bugs, but we may as well tweak the code so that
more compilers can tell that. This won't change the generated code
on compilers that do recognize that the cases are unreachable.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5f1ab4610102a73c124000788585c1af2a36284b

- Use improved vsnprintf calling logic in more places. When we are
using a C99-compliant vsnprintf implementation (which should be most
places, these days) it is worth the trouble to make use of its
report of how large the buffer needs to be to succeed. This patch
adjusts stringinfo.c and some miscellaneous usages in pg_dump to do
that, relying on the logic recently added in libpgcommon's
psprintf.c. Since these places want to know the number of bytes
written once we succeed, modify the API of pvsnprintf() to report
that. There remains near-duplicate logic in pqexpbuffer.c, but
since that code is in libpq, psprintf.c's approach of
exit()-on-error isn't appropriate for use there. Also note that I
didn't bother touching the multitude of places that call (v)snprintf
without any attempt to provide a resizable buffer.
Release-note-worthy incompatibility: the API of appendStringInfoVA()
changed. If there's any third-party code that's calling that
directly, it will need tweaking along the same lines as in this
patch. David Rowley and Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3147acd63e0135aff9a6c4b01d861251925d97d9

- Ignore SIGSYS during initdb. This prevents the recently-added probe
for shm_open() from crashing on platforms that are impolite enough
to deliver a signal rather than returning ENOSYS for an
unimplemented kernel call. At least on the one known example (HPUX
10.20), ignoring SIGSYS does result in the desired behavior of
getting an ENOSYS error return instead. Per discussion, we might
later wish to do this in the backend as well, but for now it seems
sufficient to do it in initdb.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5e1e47c7c00d01d1b2fd3a4354f48be427a30f67

- Suppress -0 in the C field of lines computed by
line_construct_pts(). It's not entirely clear why some PPC machines
are generating -0 here, since the underlying computation should be
exactly 0 - 0. Perhaps there's some wider-than-nominal-precision
calculations happening? Anyway, the best way to avoid
platform-dependent results seems to be to explicitly reset -0 to
regular zero.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/43fe90f66a0b200f6c32507428349afb45f661ca

- Revert "Tweak "line" test to avoid negative zeros on some platforms"
This reverts commit a0a546f0d94ec6cbb3cd6b1c82f58d801046615f. It
seems better to tweak the code to suppress -0 results during
line_construct_pts(), which I'll do in the next commit.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1f7a47912af2206698d14650f2149fa951b8ce07

- Improve pqexpbuffer.c to use modern vsnprintf implementations
efficiently. When using a C99-compliant vsnprintf, we can use its
report of the required buffer size to avoid making multiple loops
through the formatting logic. This is similar to the changes
recently made in stringinfo.c, but we can't use psprintf.c here
because in libpq we don't want to exit() on error. (The behavior
pqexpbuffer.c has historically used is to mark the PQExpBuffer as
"broken", ie empty, if it runs into any fatal problem.) To avoid
duplicating code more than necessary, I refactored printfPQExpBuffer
and appendPQExpBuffer to share a subroutine that's very similar to
psprintf.c's pvsnprintf in spirit.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9f9d9b51f068a19ad243fd8fe500c9970999db9b

- Use unaligned output in selected regression queries to reduce diff
noise. The rules regression test prints all known views and rules,
which is a set that changes regularly. Previously, a change in one
rule would frequently lead to whitespace changes across the entire
output of this query, which is painful to verify and causes
undesirable conflicts between unrelated patch sets. Use \a mode to
improve matters. Also use \t mode to suppress the total-rows count,
which was also a source of unnecessary patch conflicts. Likewise
modify the output mode for the list of indexed tables generated in
sanity_check.sql. There might be other places where we should use
this idea, but these are the ones that have caused the most
problems. Andres Freund
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9c339eb4f853e44c462f53587f69e4a11e89c09b

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Adjust cube.out expected output for new test queries. Previous
commit modified the test case, but I didn't update cube.out expected
output file in previous commit because it was not needed by the
platforms I have easy access to. Buildfarm animal 'dugong', running
"Debian 4.0 icc 10.1.011 ia64", has now gone red because of that, so
update it now. Also adjust cube_3.out. According to git history, it
was added to support 64-bit MinGW. There is no such animal in the
buildfarm, so I'm doing this blindly, but it was added quite
recently so maybe someone still cares.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/36f4c7843cf3d201279855ed9a6ebc1deb3c9463

- Extend cube on-disk format to pack points more tightly. If the
lower left and upper right corners of a cube are the same, set a
flag in the cube header, and only store one copy of the coordinates.
That cuts the on-disk size into half for the common case that the
cube datatype is used to represent points rather than boxes. The
new format is backwards-compatible with the old one, so pg_upgrade
still works. However, to get the space savings, the data needs to be
rewritten. A simple VACUUM FULL or REINDEX is not enough, as the old
Datums will just be moved to the new heap/index as is. A pg_dump and
reload, or something similar like casting to text and back, will do
the trick. This patch deliberately doesn't update all the
alternative expected output files, as I don't have access to
machines that produce those outputs. I'm not sure if they are still
relevant, but if they are, the buildfarm will tell us and produce
the diff required to fix it. If none of the buildfarm animals need
them, they should be removed altogether. Patch by Stas Kelvich.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/08612f45a0e236bd01db3fc96cc1fa7bfabc927c

- Fix two bugs in setting the vm bit of empty pages. Use a critical
section when setting the all-visible flag on an empty page, and
WAL-logging it. log_newpage_buffer() contains an assertion that it
must be called inside a critical section, and it's the right thing
to do when modifying a buffer anyway. Also, the page should be
marked dirty before calling log_newpage_buffer(), per the comment in
log_newpage_buffer() and src/backend/access/transam/README. Patch
by Andres Freund, in response to my report. Backpatch to 9.2, like
the patch that introduced these bugs (a6370fd9).
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/83eb54001cb69d6ee8f0813c4e280be876823068

- Fix typos in comments.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4d6d425ab8d9b00c097d8bb8ce85302ea62887a3

- Fix memory leak when an empty ident file is reloaded. Hari Babu
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bb598456dcdad5080f6dee980bc5cc94d2e9f574

- Plug memory leak when reloading config file. The absolute path to
config file was not pfreed. There are probably more small leaks here
and there in the config file reload code and assign hooks, and in
practice no-one reloads the config files frequently enough for it to
be a problem, but this one is trivial enough that might as well fix
it. Backpatch to 9.3 where the leak was introduced.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/138184adc5f7c60c184972e4d23f8cdb32aed77d

- Improve documentation of random() function. Move random() and
setseed() to a separate table, to have them grouped together. Also
add a notice that random() is not cryptographically secure.
Original patch by Honza Horak, although I didn't use his version.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/75fdcec14543b60cc0c67483d8cc47d5c7adf1a8

- Increase the number of different values used when seeding random().
When a backend process is forked, we initialize the system's random
number generator with srandom(). The seed used is derived from the
backend's pid and the timestamp. However, we only used the
microseconds part of the timestamp, and it was XORed with the pid,
so the total range of different seed values chosen was 0-999999.
That's quite limited. Change the code to also use the seconds part
of the timestamp in the seed, and shift the microseconds so that all
32 bits of the seed are used. Honza Horak
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/98c50656cac2e6b873419fd09569a9119c02148c

Robert Haas pushed:

- Simplify tab completion rules for views and foreign tables. Since
an increasing number of views and foreign tables are now able to be
updated, complete with any table, view, or foreign table in the
relevant contexts. This avoids the need to use a complex query that
may be both confusing to end-users and nonperformant to construct
the list of possible completions. Dean Rasheed, persuant to a
complaint from Bernd Helme and a suggestion from Peter Eisentraut
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5c4dd2cd9a26cadb3e5234badf2a5eedf89423a2

Noah Misch pushed:

- Add large object functions catering to SQL callers. With these, one
need no longer manipulate large object descriptors and extract
numeric constants from header files in order to read and write large
object contents from SQL. Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Rushabh
Lathia.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c50b7c09d852b6dc292bf24c72a0ffcac6cb2cab

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Hari Babu sent in two more revisions of a patch to fix a race
condition where a large table will continue to bloat despite being
vacuumed.

Laurenz Albe sent in another revision of a patch to add a deprecation
message for LDAP as needed.

Alexander Korotkov sent in another revision of a patch to add some
more information to GIN indexes to make them more useful.

Andres Freund sent in two more flocks of patches which are
infrastructure for logical replication.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a patch to track the timestamp of transaction
commits.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to add some locks needed to ensure safe
operation of materialized views during refresh in case of crash during
DDL.

Dean Rasheed and Andres Freund traded patches to correct the locking
behavior of INSERT INTO VIEW when it's defined WITH CHECK OPTION.

Craig Ringer sent in a patch to testing row-level access control with
SECURITY DEFINER functions returning refcursors.

Nigel Heron sent in another revision of a patch to collect network
stats.

Abhijit Menon-Sen sent in another revision of a patch to use
MAP_HUGETLB where supported.

Thomas Munro sent in three revisions of a patch to implement CLUSTER
FREEZE.

Hari Babu sent in a patch to improve test coverage of schema commands,
and user and tablespace files.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI sent in a patch to fix a situation where UNION ALL
on partitioned tables doesn't use indexes.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to fix an issue where failure while
inserting a parent tuple into a B-tree could corrupt data.

Robert Haas sent in a patch to change dynamic shared memory to use
Size instead of uint64 for size.

Etsuro Fujita sent in two more revisions of a patch to fix the
documentation for ALTER FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER to reflect current
realities.

Hugo Mercier sent in a patch to detect nested function calls.

Rodolfo Campero sent in a patch to implement domains over arrays in
PL/Python.