== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 27 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 27 2006 ==

Lots of patches are going in.  See below for details.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Pg::Snapshot 0.2 is out.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/snapshot/

Karel Zak has decided to leave the project.  Thanks for your
contributions over the years, Karel, and feel free to come back any
time.

GNUmed 0.2 is using PostgreSQL for its data store.
http://wiki.gnumed.de/

Npgsql 1.0RC3 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/npgsql/

== Applied Patches ==

Michael Meskes committed:

- A patch which fixes a memory leak reported by Coverity.  It was
  worth fixing because it was in a loop.

- A set of patches for ecpg which enables single-quoted connection
  targets, fixes a memory leak/segfault in unsuccessful connection,
  and makes a few changes to the ecpg regression tests.

Tom Lane committed:

- His patch which make the server track an 'XID epoch', that is,
  maintain higher-order bits of the transaction ID counter.  Nothing
  is done with the epoch except to store it in checkpoint records, but
  this provides a foundation with which add-on code can pretend that
  XIDs never wrap around.  This is a severely trimmed and rewritten
  version of the xxid patch submitted by Marko Kreen.  Per discussion,
  the epoch counter seems the only part of xxid that really needs to
  be in the core server.

- A doc patch which removes some no-longer-true advice about casting
  BOOLEANs.

- Magnus Hagander's patch which fixes encrypted LDAP support so that
  it doesn't cause the server to fail entirely on older Windows
  platforms without the needed library function.

- Add some  Magnus Hagander's debug logging code to AllocateFile's
  failure path to log the specific Windows error code (GetLastError).
  This is a (we hope) temporary hack to try to diagnose rare failures.

- A code rearrangement to save a few cycles in RI_FKey_check when the
  subject tuple is already deleted: we need not open the pk_rel until
  after we check that.

- Heikki Linnakangas's patch which improves mergejoin performance by
  optimizing the case where a btree indexscan has current and mark
  positions on the same index page.

- The Greg Stark/Tom Lane patch which lets people do CREATE INDEX ...
  ONLINE, which in turn means that people can create indexes
  asynchronously without blocking concurrent writes to the table.

- Move xact.c's partial support for Lists of TransactionIds into
  pg_list.h.  Needed because lock.c is now going to use the same type
  of list.

- A new function GetLockConflicts() to lock.c to report xacts holding
  locks that would conflict with a specified lock request, without
  actually trying to get that lock.  This will help implementing
  CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY.

- Make saveHistory work properly on OS X when HISTFILE is set to
  /dev/null.

- A patch to SPI and all the bundled PLs which gets them working with
  the new INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE ... RETURNING idiom.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- John Gray's patch which adds xpath_table to the contrib/xml2 docs.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- A patch that fixes a compare bug in tsvector: problem was in
  aligment.  Per Stefan Kaltenbrunner and Phil Frost.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Joshua Drake sent in a patch to pgbench intended to produce a more
realistic workload.

Pavel Stehule submitted a patch to allow any expression in return
statement and it does simply casting from non type record into typed
records. Allows same casting as assign statement.

Greg Sabino Mullane sent a patch which fixes one of the final
remaining FIXMEs in the information schema.

Peter Eisentraut posted WIP (Work In Progress) showing libpq
attempting to select a client encoding form the systems locale
settings.

Jeremy Kronuz submitted an ISBN/ISSN/ISMN/EAN13 for possible inclusion
in /contrib.

Bernd Helmle posted the current version of his updateable views work.

Dhanaraj M reposted a patch adding display of sequence current values
to psql output.

Peter Eisentraut cleaned up and reposted Victor B. Wagner's patch to
add a module for examining client SSL certificates.

Zoltán Böszörményi sent in another version of his COPY (SELECT...)
patch.  Alvaro Herrera made some improvements and code
simplifications.

Sven Suursoho sent in some patches which update PL/PythonU and its
docs.  The patch adds named parameters, allows PL/PythonU to return
composite types as dictionaries, and lets you return result sets as
lists, iterators or generators.

Michael Glaesemann sent in a patch which improves the rounding in
date arithmetic along with regression tests for same.

== PostgreSQL Jobs for August ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-08/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Everything this week was global.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
and Dave Page.