== Postgres Weekly News - October 14 2007 ==

== Postgres Weekly News - October 14 2007 ==

New Survey Up: What 8.3 core feature are you most excited about?
http://www.postgresql.org/community/

8.3 beta 2 is coming soon because you tested 8.3 beta 1.  Keep testing!

== Postgres Product News ==

Bucardo 3.0.7 released.
http://bucardo.org/

pgAdmin III v1.8.0 RC 1 released.
http://pgadmin.org/

pgBouncer 1.1 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgbouncer/

ptop 3.6.1 beta 1 released.
http://ptop.projects.postgresql.org/

== Postgres Jobs for October ==

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

== Postgres Local ==

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/

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

New Zealand PUG's first meeting will take place in Wellington
November 6, 2007.  Details below.
http://pgug.org.nz

Check out the new German-language Postgres job board.
http://www.pg-forum.de/jobboerse-marktplatz/

== Postgres in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: 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 ==

Michael Meskes committed:

- Synced parser and keyword list in ecpg.

Neil Conway committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/config.sgml, replace a reference to
  "start_log_collector" with "logging_collector", per Guillaume
  Lelarge.
- Fix typo in REVOKE reference page. Guillaume Lelarge.

- Minor correction for full-text search limitations docs.  Heikki
  Linnakangas.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c, don't try to free
  pgpassfile since it's a stack variable.  Martin Pitt.

- In pgsql/src/port/chklocale.c, add missing codepage numbers for
  Windows.  Dave Page.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/contrib/txid, get rid of dependency on strtoull()  ---
  Marko Kreen.  Some additional minor editorializing by Tom.

- In pgsql/contrib/txid/txid.c, faster test for overflow in str2txid,
  from Marko.

- Clarify user of "postmaster" vs. "server" in FAQs.  Brendan Jurd

- Fix the plan-invalidation mechanism to treat regclass constants that
  refer to a relation as a reason to invalidate a plan when the
  relation changes.  This handles scenarios such as
  dropping/recreating a sequence that is referenced by nextval('seq')
  in a cached plan.  Rather than teach plancache.c all about digging
  through plan trees to find regclass Consts, we charge the planner's
  setrefs.c with making a list of the relation OIDs on which each plan
  depends.  That way the list can be built cheaply during a plan tree
  traversal that has to happen anyway.  Per bug #3662 and subsequent
  discussion.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/heap/tuptoaster.c, remove incorrect use
  of VARSIZE() on a toasted datum.  We can just remove it instead of
  fix it, since once we've set toast_action[i] to 'p' it no longer
  matters what toast_sizes[i] is.  Greg Stark

- Code review for txid patch: add binary I/O functions, avoid
  dependence on SerializableSnapshot, minor other cleanup.  Marko
  Kreen, some further editorialization by me.

- Remove hack in pg_tablespace_aclmask() that disallowed permissions
  on pg_global even to superusers, and replace it with checks in
  various other places to complain about invalid uses of pg_global.
  This ends up being a bit more code but it allows a more specific
  error message to be given, and it un-breaks pg_tablespace_size() on
  pg_global.  Per discussion.

- When telling the bgwriter that we need a checkpoint because too much
  xlog has been consumed, recheck against the latest value of
  RedoRecPtr before really sending the signal.  This avoids useless
  checkpoint activity if XLogWrite is executed when we have a very
  stale local copy of RedoRecPtr.  The potential for useless
  checkpoint is very much worse in 8.3 because of the walwriter
  process (which never does XLogInsert), so while this behavior was
  intentional, it needs to be changed.  Per report from Itagaki
  Takahiro.

- Teach planagg.c that partial indexes specifying WHERE foo IS NOT
  NULL can be used to perform MIN(foo) or MAX(foo), since we want to
  discard null rows in the indexscan anyway.  (This would probably
  fall out for free if we were injecting the IS NOT NULL clause
  somewhere earlier, but given the current anatomy of the MIN/MAX
  optimization code we have to do it explicitly.  Fortunately, very
  little added code is needed.)  Per a discussion with Henk de Wit.

- Fix ALTER COLUMN TYPE to preserve the tablespace and reloptions of
  indexes it affects.  The original coding neglected tablespace
  entirely (causing the indexes to move to the database's default
  tablespace) and for an index belonging to a UNIQUE or PRIMARY KEY
  constraint, it would actually try to assign the parent table's
  reloptions to the index :-(.  Per bug #3672 and subsequent
  investigation.  8.0 and 8.1 did not have reloptions, but the
  tablespace bug is present.

- Fix the inadvertent libpq ABI breakage discovered by Martin Pitt:
  the renumbering of encoding IDs done between 8.2 and 8.3 turns out
  to break 8.2 initdb and psql if they are run with an 8.3beta1
  libpq.so.  For the moment we can rearrange the order of enum pg_enc
  to keep the same number for everything except PG_JOHAB, which isn't
  a problem since there are no direct references to it in the 8.2
  programs anyway.  (This does force initdb unfortunately.) Going
  forward, we want to fix things so that encoding IDs can be changed
  without an ABI break, and this commit includes the changes needed to
  allow libpq's encoding IDs to be treated as fully independent of the
  backend's.  The main issue is that libpq clients should not include
  pg_wchar.h or otherwise assume they know the specific values of
  libpq's encoding IDs, since they might encounter version skew
  between pg_wchar.h and the libpq.so they are using.  To fix, have
  libpq officially export functions needed for encoding name<=>ID
  conversion and validity checking; it was doing this anyway
  unofficially.  It's still the case that we can't renumber backend
  encoding IDs until the next bump in libpq's major version number,
  since doing so will break the 8.2-era client programs.  However the
  code is now prepared to avoid this type of problem in future.  Note
  that initdb is no longer a libpq client: we just pull in the two
  source files we need directly.  The patch also fixes a few places
  that were being sloppy about checking for an unrecognized encoding
  name.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/xml.c, guard against possible double
  free during error escape from XML functions.  Patch for the reported
  issue from Kris Jurka, some other potential trouble spots plugged by
  Tom.

- Strengthen type_sanity's check on pg_type.typarray.  It failed to
  complain about types that didn't have typarray set.  Noted while
  working on txid patch.

- Try to fix msvc build for recent initdb changes.

- Remove contrib/txid, in preparation for migrating it into core.

- Migrate the former contrib/txid module into core.  This will make it
  easier for Slony and Skytools to depend on it.  Per discussion.

- Ooops, forgot about adding -DFRONTEND to
  pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Mkvcbuild.pm

- In pgsql/src/include/Makefile, make install is supposed to install
  everything under src/include/, but it was missing a bunch of
  recently-added subdirectories.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Add to TODO: "Have ALTER SEQUENCE RENAME rename the sequence name
  stored in the sequence table."

- Add to TODO: "MONEY dumps in a locale-specific format making it
  difficult to restore to a system with a different locale."

- Add comment to pgsql/src/tools/pgcvslog

- Typo fix.  Euler Taveira de Oliveira

- Update Brazilian FAQ.  Euler Taveira de Oliveira

- Update sequence FAQ items, per suggestion from Pavel Stehule.

- Remove FAQ item about temp tables in plpsql having invalid oid
  problems, per suggestions from Pavel Stehule.

- In FAQ, add mention of full text indexing for word searches.

- Update Japanese FAQ.  Jun Kuwamura.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, back out release changes that
  weren't ready for commit.

- Whitespace cleanup in pgsql/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml.

- Update release notes in "major" and "migration" sections.  Still
  have remainder of release notes to review.

- Add missing word to pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/util/clauses.c, ensure that the
  result of evaluating a function during constant-expression
  simplification gets detoasted before it is incorporated into a Const
  node.  Otherwise, if an immutable function were to return a TOAST
  pointer (an unlikely case, but it can be made to happen), we would
  end up with a plan that depends on the continued existence of the
  out-of-line toast datum.

- In FAQ, attached some minor corrections, mainly completion of
  removal of the "relation with OID ##### does not exist" item, and
  some URL corrections.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Tom Lane sent in a patch from Sergey Karpov to fill in the lack of any
working code examples for user-written tsearch parsers and
dictionaries.

Sergey Karpov sent in two versions of a patch to create custom
tsearch2 dictionaries for /contrib.

Marko Kreen sent in a patch which adds txid to core.

Brendan Jurd sent in a patch which creates a quote_literal function
called quote_null which allows for NULLs and returns the text NULL.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch which makes VACUUMs to cancel blocking
auto{vacuum,analyze}s.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch intended to fix an assertion failure
with small (1K) compile-time block sizes.

Tom Lane sent in an updated patch for the examples in Sergey Karpov's
proposed contrib modules dict_int, dict_xsyn, and test_parser.