== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 01 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 01 2006 ==

There is a lively discussion of GSSAPI and like matters going on just
now.

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The PostgreSQL Dutch community website is active now.  The website will
serve as an information center for PostgreSQL users and companies in
the Netherlands.  Kudos to Gevik Babakhani and the rest of the
Netherlands PostgreSQL community who have made this happen.
http://www.postgresql.nl/

Look for the PostgreSQL BoF at Systems-de
http://www.systems-world.de/id/7672/cubesig/2994fecce6538ab8f4acfd1cb55ecf7b

== 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.

== Applied Patches ==

Neil Conway committed:

- More incremental improvements for the release notes.

Tom Lane committed:

- Updates to the release docs which explain that
  no-data-for-failed-tables is a pg_restore option.

- Fix notice message from DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS, and improve message
  for DROP AGGREGATE IF EXISTS.  Per report from Teodor Sigaev.

- Increase default value of effective_cache_size to 128MB, per
  discussion.

- Add a check to prevent overwriting valid data if smgrnblocks() gives
  a wrong answer, as has been seen to occur with a buggy Linux
  kernel.  Not really our bug, but it's a simple test in a
  seldom-used control path, so might as well have a defense.

- Fix some misuses of strncat().

- Remove separate strdup.h header file; it's redundant with port.h.

- Add strlcpy() to the set of functions supported by src/port/ when
  not available directly on the platform.  Per discussion, this
  function is sufficiently widely recognized to be treated as standard.

- Replace strncpy with strlcpy in selected places that seem possibly
  relevant to performance.  (A wholesale effort to get rid of strncpy
  should be undertaken sometime, but not during beta.)  This commit
  also fixes dynahash.c to correctly truncate overlength string keys
  for hashtables, so that its callers don't have to anymore.

- Fix IS NULL and IS NOT NULL tests on row-valued expressions to
  conform to the SQL spec, viz IS NULL is true if all the row's fields
  are null, IS NOT NULL is true if all the row's fields are not null.

- Add Josh Drake's uninstall scripts for adminpack and pgrowlocks.

- Add uninstall scripts for pg_freespacemap and sslinfo.

- Remove accented characters in comments for contrib/isn to avoid
  failures when this file is read with an incompatible client_encoding
  setting.  Per report from Tim N. van der Leeuw.

- Document that date_trunc also accepts 'quarter'.  Noted by Yoshihisa
  Nakano.

- Properly handle the case where strlcpy() exists in libc but isn't
  declared in the system headers.  Per report from Bruce than some
  BSDen are like this.

- Allow assignment to array elements not contiguous with those already
  present; intervening positions are filled with nulls.  This
  behavior is required by SQL99 but was not implementable before 8.2
  due to lack of support for nulls in arrays.  I have only made it
  work for the one-dimensional case, which is all that SQL99
  requires.

- Improve documentation of configure's readline/libedit switches.

- Fix overly enthusiastic Assert introduced in 8.1: it's expecting a
  CaseTestExpr, but forgot that the optimizer is sometimes able to
  replace CaseTestExpr by Const.

- Make some marginal performance improvements in reportErrorPosition(),
  which turns out to be a dominant part of the runtime in scenarios
  involving lots of parse-time warnings (such as Stephen Frost's
  example of an INSERT with a lot of backslash-containing strings).
  There's not a whole lot we can do about the character-at-a-time
  scanning, but we can at least avoid traversing the query twice.

- Do a CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS after emitting a message of less than
  ERROR severity.  This is to ensure the user can cancel a query
  that's spitting out lots of notice/warning messages, even if
  they're coming from a loop that doesn't otherwise contain a
  CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS.  Per gripe from Stephen Frost.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Fix name,  "Laurenz Albe" at request of author.

- Update wording of inheritance major release item.

- Split out inheritance major feature item in release notes.

- Change status of 'add command to archive partially filled
  write-ahead logs' to 'done' in TODO

- Added to TODO list: Consider adding per-user-and-database defaults
  so things like search_path can be defaulted for a specific user
  connecting to a specific database.

- BSD/OS doesn't have a prototype for strlcpy() but has the function,
  so work around that with defines.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Added Joachim's changes for MinGW.  Added SET DATESTYLE to one test
  so the output format is defined.

- New files for ecpg regression tests.

Alvarro Herrera committed:

- Degrade the transaction-id wraparound point message from LOG to
  DEBUG1, per discussion. Patch from Simon Riggs.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

David Fetter sent in a patch to clarify the error message on overflow
of NUMERIC types.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent a patch which changes units of the some default
values in postgresql.conf, modifies initdb to write MB-unit values.
Values greater than 8000kB are rounded out to MB.  The patch also adds
GUC_UNIT_XBLOCKS for wal_buffers, which is like GUC_UNIT_BLOCKS, but
uses XLOG_BLCKSZ instead of BLCKSZ.  It also cleans up the test of
GUC_UNIT_* flags in preparation to add more unit flags in fewer bits.

David Wheeler submitted a patch which documents the interaction
between autovacuum and stats_*_collector in the sample
postgresql.conf.

Robert Treat submitted a patch which brings the tsearch2 readme up to
date.

Jeremy Drake submitted a patch which updates the large object
regression test he has been working on.

Euler Taveira de Oliveira sent in a patch which changes some error
messages.

Andreas Seltenreich submitted a patch which fixes some characters
which can cause the texinfo target for the SGML docs to misbehave.