== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 17 2007 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 17 2007 ==

postgresql_autodoc, postgresql-pgpoolAdmin and postgresql-table_log
are now in Fedora.  You can install them with yum.

If you want to see an RPM of PostgreSQL related software, please send
email to devrim at commandprompt dot com.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgpool-II 1.1.1 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool

pycopg2 2.0.6 released.
http://www.initd.org/tracker/psycopg/wiki/PsycopgTwo

DB_Linq Linq Provider for Postgres released.
http://code2code.net/DB_Linq/index.html

Federico Campoli has published two Lulu books in Italian:
PostgreSQL DBA Base http://www.lulu.com/content/935235
PostgreSQL DBA Advanced http://www.lulu.com/content/939666

== PostgreSQL Jobs for June ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-06/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Registration for pgday.it in Prato, Tuscany, Italy on July 6 and 7 is
open.

Some Important URLs:

Registration: http://www.pgday.it/en/generale/registrazione
PGDay's web site: http://www.pgday.it/en/
Sponsorship campaign: http://www.pgday.it/en/sponsorizzazioni/come
How to get to Prato: http://www.pgday.it/en/logistica/raggiungere_prato
Accommodations in Prato: http://www.pgday.it/en/logistica/dove_dormire
PostgreSQL official T-shirts http://www.prato.linux.it/node/30
Sign up to tour Tuscany: http://www.pgday.it/it/node/158

== 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 Devrim GUNDUZ.

To get your submission into the upcoming issue, make sure it arrives
at david@fetter.org or in German at pwn@pgug.de by Sunday at 3:00pm
Pacific Time.

== Applied Patches ==

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- Implement a chunking protocol for writes to the syslogger pipe, with
  messages reassembled in the syslogger before writing to the log
  file. This prevents partial messages from being written, which mucks
  up log rotation, and messages from different backends being
  interleaved, which causes garbled logs. Backport as far as 8.0,
  where the syslogger was introduced.  Tom Lane and Andrew Dunstan

Neil Conway committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/tab-complete.c, schema-qualify several
  references to the builtin function length(), to avoid mistakenly
  calling a function of the same name that might happen to appear
  earlier in the schema search path.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Update TODO item to read: "Allow EXPLAIN output to be more easily
  processed by scripts, perhaps XML."

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- Avoid having autovacuum run multiple ANALYZE commands in a single
  transaction, to prevent possible deadlock problems.  Per request
  from Tom Lane.

- Avoid integer overflow issues in autovacuum.

- VPATH fixes for ECPG tests.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Add resultmap entries for mingw - same as for MSVC.

- Properly identify mingw as a win32 platform needing different diff
  options to deal with strange line endings.

- ECPG requires a local include directory to override the project-wide
  ones.  Add ability to add "prefix include directories", and use
  it...  With this, ecpg regression tests now pass on MSVC builds.

- Update documentation of resultmap file format.

- Specifying a dbname should override the default database, not add to
  it.  Fixes buildfarm failures on contribcheck.

- Fix missing variable initialization in
  pgsql/src/test/regress/pg_regress.c.

- Fix search/replace error in makefile for ecpg tests.

- Rewrite ECPG regression test driver in C, by splitting the standard
  regression driver into two parts and reusing half of it. Required to
  run ECPG tests without a shell on MSVC builds.  Fix ECPG thread
  tests for MSVC build (incl output files).  Joachim Wieland and
  Magnus Hagander.

Tom Lane committed:

- Revert an ill-considered portion of my patch of 12-Mar, which tried
  to save a few lines in sql_exec_error_callback() by using the
  function source string field that the patch added to SQL function
  cache entries.  This doesn't work because the fn_extra field isn't
  filled in yet during init_sql_fcache().  Probably it could be made
  to work, but it doesn't seem appropriate to contort the main code
  paths to make an error-reporting path a tad faster.  Per report from
  Pavel Stehule.

- Tweak the API for per-datatype typmodin functions so that they are
  passed an array of strings rather than an array of integers, and
  allow any simple constant or identifier to be used in typmods; for
  example create table foo (f1 widget(42,'23skidoo',point)); Of course
  the typmodin function has still got to pack this info into a
  non-negative int32 for storage, but it's still a useful improvement
  in flexibility, especially considering that you can do nearly
  anything if you are willing to keep the info in a side table.  We
  can get away with this change since we have not yet released a
  version providing user-definable typmods.  Per discussion.

- Add some simple defenses against null fields in pg_largeobject, and
  add comments noting that there's an alignment assumption now that
  the data field could be in 1-byte-header format.  Per discussion
  with Greg Stark.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/init/flatfiles.c, add some comments about
  the safety of accessing rolpassword without using the normal
  heap_getattr() machinery.  Per Greg Stark.

- Minor comment fixes in pgsql/src/include/utils/datetime.h.

- Fix DecodeDateTime to allow timezone to appear before year.  This
  had historically worked in some but not all cases, but as of 8.2 it
  failed for all timezone formats.  Fix, and add regression test cases
  to catch future regressions in this area.  Per gripe from Adam
  Witney.

- Improve UPDATE/DELETE WHERE CURRENT OF so that they can be used from
  plpgsql with a plpgsql-defined cursor.  The underlying mechanism for
  this is that the main SQL engine will now take "WHERE CURRENT OF $n"
  where $n is a refcursor parameter.  Not sure if we should document
  that fact or consider it an implementation detail.  Per discussion
  with Pavel Stehule.

- Minor wording improvement in PL/PgSQL docs.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Applied patch by Joachim Wieland to enable checktcp again.

- Fixed reduce/recuce problem due to CURRENT_P.

- Synced parser and keyword list.

- Should not try to unlink stdout.

- Fixed one memory leak in descriptor code.  Made sure ecpg deletes
  output file in case of an error.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Satoshi Nagayasu sent in a brand new patch to log checkpointing load
information which will help tune the bgwriter parameters.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch which fixes two aesthetic bugs in the
1-byte packed varlena code.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a new patch or split-sleep of
autovacuum_naptime.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch which allows people to use updatable
cursors in plpgsql.

Zdenek Kotala sent in a patch for 8.4 to rename the script binaries.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch to pgbench's random number generator.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of his Load Distributed
Checkpoints patch.

Simon Riggs sent in an update version of his Transaction Guarantee
patch.

Tom Lane sent in a WIP patch that rewrites numeric division for more
correctness.