== Postgres Weekly News - October 07 2007 ==

== Postgres Weekly News - October 07 2007 ==

Postgres 8.3 beta 1 will be out this week.

== Postgres Product News ==

Borland Delphi-PostgreSQL-Interface released.
http://dbslim.berlios.de

psqlODBC 08.02.0500 released.
http://psqlodbc.projects.postgresql.org/release.html

pgtreelib version 1.0beta1 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtreelib/

PostgresDAC 2.4.0 released.
http://microolap.com/products/connectivity/postgresdac/

== Postgres Jobs for October ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-10/threads.php

== Postgres Local ==

Sean Chittenden will be speaking at SFPUG on I/O for DBAs on Tuesday,
October 9 at 7:30pm.  RSVP and more details below.
http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/6341717/

PostgreSQL Fall Conference will be October 20, 2007 in Portland.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

Simon Riggs will be giving a talk at Databases and the Web on October
16 in London.
http://www.ukuug.org/events/seminars/databases/booking/

== Postgres in the News ==

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

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

Postgres 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@fetter.org, German to
pwn@pgug.de.


== Applied Patches ==

Jan Wieck committed:

- Added the Skytools extended transaction ID module to contrib as
  discussed on CORE previously.  This module offers transaction ID's
  containing the original XID and the transaction epoch as a bigint
  value to the user level. It also provides a special txid_snapshot
  data type that contains an entire transactions visibility snapshot
  information, which is useful to determine if a particular txid was
  visible to a transaction or not.  The module has been tested by
  porting Slony-I from using its original xxid data type.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- A few improvements to analyze and vacuum sections in documentation:
  add "see also" entries for autovacuum in analyze and vacuum
  reference pages, and enhance usage of cross-references in the
  maintenance page.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml, change π to plain "pi" in index
  entry, to avoid double escaping issues.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/Makefile, clean up the doc makefile for draft
  HTML generation.  It no longer works to do "make DRAFT=Y html"; you
  need to use "make draft" (which was also supported previously).

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/Makefile, remove stylesheet.css file on "make
  clean", created only on VPATH builds.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/maintenance.sgml, fix missing parenthesis, per
  Guillaume Lelarge.

- Fix SGML markup, from Guillaume Lelarge.

Marc Fournier committed:

- tag it 8.3beta1 ... the beta cycle begins

Neil Conway committed:

- Two fixes for the release notes from Guillaume Smet. In passing,
  make a minor markup improvement.

- First pass at SGML-ifying the 8.3 release notes. Plenty of
  improvements left to made, but this is a start.

- Various minor improvements to the 8.3 release notes.

- Fix a compiler warning on Win32. Hannes Eder.

Michael Meskes committed:

- In ecpg, replaced tabs with spaces.

- In ecpg, removed newline at end of exports files.

- In ecpg, added def-files to all: target so they are build everytime.

- Argh, missing dll in filename in pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/compatlib
  and pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/pgtypeslib.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/compatlib/Makefile, add snprintf.c for
  some systems.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/compatlib/exports.txt, stripped two
  symbols that are needed.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/compatlib/Makefile, also build snprintf
  from pgport if needed.

- Remove exports.list into clean target.

- Also created export list for pgytpeslib and compatlib.  Set pgtypes
  library version to 3.0.  Set compat library version to 3.0.

- Cleaned up ecpglib and renamed functions that do not need to be
  exported.  Created export list for ecpglib.

- Hopefully fixed some stuff that causes Windows builds to fail on
  ecpg.

- In ecpg testing code, made new test also work without threading
  enabled.

- Removed pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/test/expected/thread-descriptor.stdout.diff.
  No idea where this file came from.

- In ecpg, ITAGAKI Takahiro added thread-safe descriptor handling.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/regex: regc_color.c, make dumpcolors() have
  tolerable performance when using 32-bit chr, as we do (and upstream
  Tcl doesn't).  The loop limit might be subject to negotiation if
  anyone ever tries to do regex debugging in Far Eastern languages,
  but for now 1000 seems plenty.  CHR_MAX was right out :-(

- Adjust some regex debugging printouts to not give wrong-format-width
  warnings on a 64-bit machine.  Noted while chasing a recent regex
  bug report.

- Adjust regcustom.h so that all those assert() calls in the regex
  package are converted to Postgres Assert() macros, instead of using
  <assert.h> as formerly.  No difference in production builds, but
  --enable-cassert debug builds will get better coverage for regex
  testing.

- Fix plperl and pltcl to include the name of the current function
  when passing on errors from the language interpreter.  (plpython
  seems fairly OK about this already.)  Per gripe from Robert
  Kleemann.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, remove some cross-references
  that don't seem to work in HISTORY generation ... we should figure
  this out later ...

- Fix distprep and maintainer-clean targets so that ecpg's .def files
  are made and removed at the correct times.

- Add .cvsignore files to suppress CVS gripes about ecpg .def files.

- Some desultory markup improvements in the new release notes.

- Results from buildfarm show that ecpglib was depending on
  pg_strcasecmp, which evidently it got as an unofficial export from
  pgtypeslib.

- Keep the planner from failing on "WHERE false AND something IN
  (SELECT ...)".  eval_const_expressions simplifies this to just
  "WHERE false", but we have already done pull_up_IN_clauses so the IN
  join will be done, or at least planned, anyway.  The trouble case
  comes when the sub-SELECT is itself a join and we decide to
  implement the IN by unique-ifying the sub-SELECT outputs: with no
  remaining reference to the output Vars in WHERE, we won't have
  propagated the Vars up to the upper join point, leading to "variable
  not found in subplan target lists" error.  Fix by adding an extra
  scan of in_info_list and forcing all Vars mentioned therein to be
  propagated up to the IN join point.  Per bug report from Miroslav
  Sulc.

- Stamp 8.3beta1, except in configure.in/configure.

- Update timezone data files to release 2007h of the zic database.
  Might as well have the latest when we wrap 8.3beta1.

- In ecpg, DLL_DEFFILE should be defined when PORTNAME is win32, not
  when it isn't, per the example of libpq/Makefile.

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/bgwriter.c, change Assert() to a
  plain test and elog, just to see if that works around the icc bug
  exhibited by buildfarm member dugong.

- Second pass at 8.3 release notes: put items in a bit more logical
  order where possible, add overview and incompatibilities lists,
  minor cleanups.  The SGML-ification still leaves much to be desired.

- Teach chklocale.c how to extract encoding info from Windows locale
  names.  ITAGAKI Takahiro

- Some editorial improvements for recently-added ALTER SEQUENCE/VIEW
  documentation.  Heikki and Tom

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/descriptor.c, suppress compiler
  warning in non-threaded build.

- Tweak recently-added tests to suppress scary-looking warnings on
  64-bit machines about casts between pointers and integers of
  different sizes.  While they're harmless, we shouldn't expect users
  to have to go through and figure that out for themselves.

- Minor improvements to hack for old OpenSSL libraries: avoid unused
  variable warning on Windows, improve comment.

- In gsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/compatlib/Makefile, fix command for
  fetching snprintf.c.

- First cut at 8.3 release notes.  SGML markup is nonexistent, and the
  'overview' and 'incompatibilities' summary lists remain to be
  written.  But I think all the raw info is there (indeed maybe too
  verbose).

- Cope with ERR_set_mark() and ERR_pop_to_mark() not existing in older
  OpenSSL libraries --- just don't call them if they're not there.
  This might possibly lead to misleading error messages, but we'll
  just have to live with that.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/catalogs.sgml, add catalogs.sgml documentation
  for text search catalogs.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml, add note warning against
  use of pre-8.4 multithreaded Tcl.

- Avoid assuming that struct varattrib_pointer doesn't get padded by
  the compiler --- at least on ARM, it does.  I suspect that the
  varvarlena patch has been creating larger-than-intended toast
  pointers all along on ARM, but it wasn't exposed until the latest
  tweak added some Asserts that calculated the expected size in a
  different way.  We could probably have fixed this by adding
  __attribute__((packed)) as is done for ItemPointerData, but struct
  varattrib_pointer isn't really all that useful anyway, so it seems
  cleanest to just get rid of it and have only struct varattrib_1b_e.
  Per results from buildfarm member quagga.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-secure.c, attempt to open
  certificate file "manually" using fopen before trying BIO functions.
  Helps problem with older versions of OpenSSL that lacks error stack
  functions and would show an incorrect error message for
  file-not-found-or-not-openable. The problem may still exist for
  other errors, but file open error is by far the most common one.

- Build two more .DEF files for ecpg instead of using default ones.

- More detailed error msg (with stack trace) if a file copy fails in
  pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Install.pm.

- Use snprintf from libpgport in ecpg compatlib. Required since we
  restricted exports from ecpglib.

- Fix commandlines for final two ECPG regression tests in
  pgsql/src/tools/msvc/ecpg_regression.proj.

- Fix typo in pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/exports.txt.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc, build DEF file for libecpg instead of
  generating a default one.

- Make ECPG regression tests run with -c only for array_of_struct.pgc
  on MSVC.  Fix strange nonstandard version of __stdcall specifyer in
  thread tests on win32.

- Fix typo in pgsql/src/tools/msvc/vcregress.pl.

- Default to thread safety on, and support more CPU options. Also make
  sure that a CPU option is actually chosen.  Hiroshi Saito

- Use BIO functions to avoid passing FILE * pointers to OpenSSL
  functions.  This fixes potential crashes on old versions of OpenSSL
  and the requirement on "Applink" in new versions when building with
  MSVC and using different runtimes.  Dave Page with fixes from me.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/win32.mak, build with /GS on 64-bit to
  work with modern Platform SDK.  Hiroshi Saito

- Enable __FUNCTION__ on MSVC builds.  Hannes Eder

D'Arcy J.M. Cain committed:

- Add some examples to pgsql/contrib/chkpass/README.chkpass.

- Fix a minor typo in pgsql/contrib/chkpass/README.chkpass.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/pgcvslog, add comment about cvs branch numbers.

- Add pgcvslog '-d' capability to allow stripping of commit messages
  that have back branch activity.  This will be useful for creating
  release notes for major releases.

- In pgsql/src/tools/pgcvslog, update pgcvslog text to simply
  "<branch>"

- Fixup for new pgcvslog feature.

- In pgsql/src/tools/pgcvslog, have pgcvslog mark back-branch commits
  with "<back-patch>".

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Richard Rowell sent in two revisions of a patch to inline stable SQL
set returning UDFs.

Brendan Jurd sent in a patch to get rid of some redundant code by
creating a widely useful set of functions to convert between text and
C string in the backend.

Euler Taveira de Oliveira sent in an updated FAQ in Brazilian
Portuguese.