== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 10 2014 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 10 2014 ==

PGDay Campinas 2014 will take place in Campinas on September 10th.
Sign-up and Lightning Talk submissions are open.
http://pgdaycampinas.com.br/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for August ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2014-08/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PgDay Portland, Oregon 2014 will be held Saturday September 6, 2014.
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PDXPUGDay2014

Postgres Open 2014 will be in Chicago, IL, USA, September 17-19.
Tickets and Tutorials now available for purchase.
https://postgresopen.org/2014/tickets/
http://postgresopen.org/2014/callforpapers/

The 4th PgDay Ecuador will be held on Tuesday 7th in October at the
city of Quito, as part of the 5th International Congress of Free
Software. Send talk proposals to ecpug AT postgresql DOT org.

The sixth PGDay Cubano be held on 13 and 14 October 2014 in Habana.
https://postgresql.uci.cu/?p=380

PGConf.EU 2014 in Madrid, Spain on October 21-24 is now open for
registration.
http://2014.pgconf.eu/registration/

PGDay.IT 2014 will take place in Prato on November the 7th 2014. The
International Call For Papers is now open:
http://2014.pgday.it/call-for-papers-en/

== 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:

- Windows doesn't have M_PI; define it ourselves when needed. This
should fix the Windows build, broken by commit ed802e7d.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cd74a151b5a2498f0909074ebc9e8d8fbe6915b1

- Improve comment. Based on the old comment, it took me a while to
figure out what the problem was. The importnat detail is that
SSL_read() can return WANT_READ even though some raw data was
received from the socket.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ec903d20e3b4c1a543dbf057055e4ddbfad4d59e

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- pg_upgrade: remove reference to autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age.
autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age was added as a pg_ctl start
parameter in 9.3.X to prevent autovacuum from running. However,
only some 9.3.X releases have autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age as
it was added in a minor PG 9.3 release. It also isn't needed
because -b turns off autovacuum in 9.1+. Without this fix, trying
to upgrade from an early 9.3 release to 9.4 would fail. Report by
EDB Backpatch through 9.3
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b4bd6f6b054f62a4ed70065b7b3fa95c012ae89a

- pg_upgrade: assume user is install user. The user specified to the
upgrade was effectively the install user, but that was not clearly
stated in the comments, documentation, or error messages.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ee646df59ae76d14f76e6fd305c1f9f2eeafd682

- pg_upgrade: prevent oid conflicts with new-cluster TOAST tables.
Previously, TOAST tables only required in the new cluster could
cause oid conflicts if they were auto-numbered and a later
conflicting oid had to be assigned. Backpatch through 9.3
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4c6780fd17aa43ed6362aa682499cc2f9712cc8b

Robert Haas pushed:

- Improve some JSON error messages. These messages are new in 9.4,
which hasn't been released yet, so back-patch to REL9_4_STABLE.
Daniele Varrazzo
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0ef99bdce3a6cd3195d7df12093042c16328c71c

- Fix alternate regression test output file. Commit
0ef99bdce3a6cd3195d7df12093042c16328c71c broke this. Jeff Janes
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/873de34b710196d1e3ce593bd85fa24768e58d6b

- Don't require sort support functions to provide a comparator. This
could be useful for datatypes like text, where we might want to
optimize for some collations but not others. However, this patch
doesn't introduce any new sortsupport functions that work this way;
it merely revises the code so that future patches may do so. Patch
by me. Review by Peter Geoghegan.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1d41739e5a04b0e93304d24d864b6bfa3efc45f2

- Add PG_RETURN_UINT16 macro. Manuel Kniep
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/73cfa37afe3243c0ccdc6ae72cfcc53a37761521

Kevin Grittner pushed:

- Fix typo in C comment.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/49d1e03d64f36a345c92901c4d13bf683f99eeec

Fujii Masao pushed:

- Change ParseConfigFp() so that it doesn't process unused entry of
each parameter. When more than one setting entries of same
parameter exist in the configuration file, PostgreSQL uses only
entry appearing last in configuration file scan. Since the other
entries are not used, ParseConfigFp() doesn't need to process them,
but previously it did that. This problematic behavior caused the
configuration file scan to detect invalid settings of unused entries
(e.g., existence of multiple entries of PGC_POSTMASTER parameter)
and log the messages complaining about them. This commit changes
the configuration file scan so that it processes only last entry of
each parameter. Note that when multiple entries of same parameter
exist both in postgresql.conf and postgresql.auto.conf, unused
entries in postgresql.conf are still processed only at postmaster
startup. The problem has existed since old version, but a user is
more likely to encounter it since 9.4 where ALTER SYSTEM command was
introduced. So back-patch to 9.4. Amit Kapila, slightly modified
by me. Per report from Christoph Berg.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e3da0d4d1a47e2049ae16aa30bb7bf3105dc8c45

- Refactor pg_receivexlog main loop code, for readability, take 2.
Previously the source codes for processing the received data and
handling the end of stream were included in pg_receivexlog main
loop. This commit splits out them as separate functions. This is
useful for improving the readability of main loop code and making
the future pg_receivexlog-related patch simpler.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6805e02c66eac3857ef1a3d6cfd1ffeea64d9447

- Add -F option to pg_receivexlog, for specifying fsync interval.
This allows us to specify the maximum time to issue fsync to ensure
the received WAL file is safely flushed to disk. Without this,
pg_receivexlog always flushes WAL file only when it's closed and
which can cause WAL data to be lost at the event of a crash. Furuya
Osamu, heavily modified by me.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3dad73e71f08abd86564d5090a58ca71740e07e0

Tom Lane pushed:

- Fix typo in docs. s/XIDs XIDs/XIDs/ in one place in
maintenance.sgml. Guillaume Lelarge
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1add956ac70384a99ed6606e2963a5a53f567add

- Reject duplicate column names in foreign key referenced-columns
lists. Such cases are disallowed by the SQL spec, and even if we
wanted to allow them, the semantics seem ambiguous: how should the
FK columns be matched up with the columns of a unique index? (The
matching could be significant in the presence of opclasses with
different notions of equality, so this issue isn't just academic.)
However, our code did not previously reject such cases, but instead
would either fail to match to any unique index, or generate a
bizarre opclass-lookup error because of sloppy thinking in the
index-matching code. David Rowley
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9da86753735ab89b0ee685aea985b25c4218ca0b

- Further cleanup of JSON-specific error messages. Fix an obvious
typo in json_build_object()'s complaint about invalid number of
arguments, and make the errhint a bit more sensible too. Per
discussion about how to word the improved hint, change the few
places in the documentation that refer to JSON object field names as
"names" to say "keys" instead, since that's what we've said in the
vast majority of places in the docs. Arguably "name" is more
correct, since that's the terminology used in RFC 7159; but we're
stuck with "key" in view of the naming of json_object_keys() so
let's at least be self-consistent. I adjusted a few code comments
to match this as well, and failed to resist the temptation to clean
up some odd whitespace choices in the same area, as well as a
useless duplicate PG_ARGISNULL() check. There's still quite a bit
of code that uses the phrase "field name" in non-user- visible ways,
so I left those usages alone.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/495cadda5ed55f63db9a91d174b6fad0e1816204

- Clean up handling of unknown-type inputs in json_build_object and
friends. There's actually no need for any special case for
unknown-type literals, since we only need to push the value through
its output function and unknownout() works fine. The code that was
here was completely bizarre anyway, and would fail outright in cases
that should work, not to mention suffering from some copy-and-paste
bugs.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/92f57c9ae95668636bc77d3cda3edbdfd83320d9

- Clarify type resolution behavior for domain types. The user
documentation was vague and not entirely accurate about how we treat
domain inputs for ambiguous operators/functions. Clarify that, and
add an example and some commentary. Per a recent question from Adam
Mackler. It's acted like this ever since we added domains, so
back-patch to all supported branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6aa61580e08d58909b2a8845a4087b7699335ee0

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Small message fixes
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f25e0bf5e0af01a687395a76e676dadeb4a60d0a

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Dilip Kumar sent in another revision of a patch to allow parallel
cores to be used by vacuumdb.

Etsuro Fujita sent in another revision of a patch to optimize writes
to foreign tables using the PostgreSQL FDW.

Alexander Korotkov sent in another revision of a patch to add KNN-GiST
with recheck.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to create an SSL regression test
suite.

Fabien COELHO sent in two more revisions of a patch to add modulo to
pgbench.

Jeff Davis sent in two more revisions of a patch to implement better
memory accounting, infrastructure for a memory-bounded HashAgg.

Fujii Masao sent in a patch to add PGC_SU_BACKEND.

Jeff Janes sent in a patch to fix one of the regression tests changed
by another patch which fixed redundant i18n strings in json.

Fujii Masao sent in two more revisions of a patch to add a
synchrounous mode to pg_receivexlog.

Robert Haas and Peter Geoghegan traded patches to add an optional
comparator for B-Tree sort support.

David Rowley sent in two more revisions of a patch to allow certain
SEMI and ANTI join removals.

Alvaro Herrera and Heikki Linnakangas traded patches to implement
minmax indexes.

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in another revision of a patch to add
plpgsql.extra_warnings='num_into_expressions'.

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in two revisions of a patch to enable PGP
signatures in the pgcrypto extenstion.

Tatsuo Ishii and Fabien COELHO started patching pgbench to ensure that
its parameters are checked better.

Etsuro Fujita sent in two revisions of a patch to compute attr_needed
for child rels. As there were already two different places this
functionality was used, this patch factored out the functionality in
order to add a third use case, namely allowing foreign tables to be in
table inheritance hierarchies.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of a patch to Invent a new
internal API for interfacing with SSLv3.

Fujii Masao sent in a patch to enable specifying the unit in storage
parameters.

Pavel Stehule and Fujii Masao traded patches to allow tab completion
for \pset variables in psql.

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in a patch to add PGP armor headers in the
pgcrypto extension.

MauMau sent in another revision of a patch to fix an unconditional
truncation that should have been a conditional truncation for
temporary relations.

Fujii Masao sent in a patch to add a new GIN index storage parameter
"PENDING_LIST_CLEANUP_SIZE" which specifies the maximum size of GIN
pending list.

Michael Paquier sent in a patch to add support for N synchronous
standby servers for N > 1.

Jeff Davis sent in a patch to enable memory-bounded HashAgg.