== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 21 2008 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 21 2008 ==

Watch for update releases 8.3.4, 8.2.10, 8.1.14, and 8.0.18 this week.

PostgreSQL User Group Germany is doing a talk and workshop at Open
Source day 2008 October 11 in Magdeburg, Germany.
http://www.open-source-tag.de/

Ohio LinuxFest 2008, held October 11 in Columbus, will once again have
a PostgreSQL booth this year.  Contact melanie AT dunslane DOT net to
volunteer.

Viktor Vislobokov has started a Russian translation of the PostgreSQL
manual.
http://postgresql.ru.net/manual/index.html

New Survey: What kind of application do you run on PostgreSQL?
http://www.postgresql.org/community

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Archiveopteryx 3.0.1.
http://www.archiveopteryx.org/3.0.1

OpenERP now supports PostgreSQL 8.3.
http://openerp.com/downloads.html

pgTAP 0.10 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/frs/?group_id=1000389

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-09/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PGCon Brazil 2008 will be on September 26-27 at Unicamp in Campinas.
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/index.en.html
Registration:
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/inscricoes.en.html

PgDay.fr will be October 4 in Toulouse.  The Call for Papers is open:
http://www.postgresqlfr.org/?q=node/1686
Registration:
http://www.pgday.fr/doku.php/inscription

The Highload++ conference will be October 6-8 in Moscow, Russia.
Gavin Roy, Asko Oja and Maxim Boguk will talk about things PostgreSQL.
http://highload.ru

PostgreSQL Conference West 2008 will be October 10-12 at Portland
State University in Portland, Oregon.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/
Talk submission at:
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/west08/talk_submission/

PGDay.(IT|EU) 2008 will be October 17 and 18 in Prato.  Registration
will open soon.
http://www.pgday.org/en/

PostgreSQL has a table at LinuxLive, Olympia, London, UK on 23-25
October, 2008.  Write to Dave Page to participate.
dpage AT pgamin DOT org

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
Josh Berkus, Andreas (ads) Scherbaum, and Josh Williams.

Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
Please send English language ones to david@fetter.org, German language
to pwn@pgug.de, Italian language to pwn@itpug.org.

== Applied Patches ==

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/client-auth.sgml, add missing quotes.

- Parse pg_hba.conf in postmaster, instead of once in each backend for
  each connection. This makes it possible to catch errors in the
  pg_hba file when it's being reloaded, instead of silently reloading
  a broken file and failing only when a user tries to connect.  This
  patch also makes the "sameuser" argument to ident authentication
  optional.

- In pgsql/doc/src/FAQ/FAQ_russian.html, convert Russian FAQ to UTF8,
  to make it render properly on the website.

- Polish and Turkish FAQ also needed converting to UTF8

- In pgsql/src/backend/libpq/hba.c, fix error messages from recent
  pg_hba parsing patch to use errcontext() to indicate where the error
  occurred.

- In pgsql/src/include/commands/trigger.h, mark SessionReplicationRole
  as PGDLLIMPORT so it can be used from Slony functions.  Per report
  from Hiroshi Saito.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/command.c, avoid compiler warning about
  variable used before assigned.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/nls.mk, add additional rules so that
  make init-po for ecpg gets up to date flex and bison output.
  Without these, make can sometimes be tempted to invoke its built-in
  rules using lex and yacc, which can fail if those commands are not
  available.  This was a main cause for the NLS web site breakage.

Tom Lane committed:

- Xiao Meng's patch to change hash indexes to store only the hash code
  rather than the whole indexed value.  This means that hash index
  lookups are always lossy and have to be rechecked when the heap is
  visited; however, the gain in index compactness outweighs this when
  the indexed values are wide.  Also, we only need to perform datatype
  comparisons when the hash codes match exactly, rather than for every
  entry in the hash bucket; so it could also win for datatypes that
  have expensive comparison functions.  A small additional win is
  gained by keeping hash index pages sorted by hash code and using
  binary search to reduce the number of index tuples we have to look
  at.  This commit also incorporates Zdenek Kotala's patch to isolate
  hash metapages and hash bitmaps a bit better from the page header
  datastructures.

- Fix caching of foreign-key-checking queries so that when a replan is
  needed, we regenerate the SQL query text not merely the plan derived
  from it.  This is needed to handle contingencies such as renaming of
  a table or column used in an FK.  Pre-8.3, such cases worked despite
  the lack of replanning (because the cached plan needn't actually
  change), so this is a regression.  Per bug #4417 from Benjamin
  Bihler.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/xml.c, fix multiple memory leaks in
  xml_out().  Per report from Matt Magoffin.

- Widen the nLocks counts in local lock tables from int to int64.
  This forestalls potential overflow when the same table (or other
  object, but usually tables) is accessed by very many successive
  queries within a single transaction.  Per report from Michael
  Milligan.  Back-patch to 8.0, which is as far back as the patch
  conveniently applies.  There have been no reports of overflow in
  pre-8.3 releases, but clearly the risk existed all along.
  (Michael's report suggests that 8.3 may consume lock counts faster
  than prior releases, but with no test case to look at it's hard to
  be sure about that.  Widening the counts seems a good
  future-proofing measure in any event.)

- Clean up a couple of weird corner cases in interval parsing: make
  -yyyy-mm be interpreted as expected (the sign should affect months
  too), and get rid of hard-wired assumption that unmarked signed
  values must be hours (if integers) or seconds (if floats).  The
  former was just a bug in my previous patch, while the latter may
  have made sense at one time but seems illogical now that we support
  determination of the units from typmod information.  Ron Mayer and
  myself.

- Add an "events" system to libpq, whereby applications can get
  callbacks that enable them to manage private data associated with
  PGconns and PGresults.  Andrew Chernow and Merlin Moncure

- Allow ShowBufferUsage() to report the number of reads/writes that
  have occurred to temporary files.  This replaces the unused
  NDirectFileRead/NDirectFileWrite counters.  Itagaki Takahiro

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2008f (DST law changes
  in Argentina, Bahamas, Brazil, Mauritius, Morocco, Pakistan,
  Palestine, Paraguay).

- Preliminary release notes for upcoming back branch releases.

- Update back-branch release notes.

- Improve the recently-added libpq events code to provide more
  consistent guarantees about whether event procedures will receive
  DESTROY events.  They no longer need to defend themselves against
  getting a DESTROY without a successful prior CREATE.  Andrew
  Chernow.

- Create a selectivity estimation function for the text search @@
  operator.  Jan Urbanski.

- Add a PQfireResultCreateEvents function to allow applications to
  mimic the sequence of operations that libpq goes through while
  creating a PGresult.  Also, remove ill-considered "const" decoration
  on parameters passed to event procedures.

- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/system_views.sql, simplify the
  definitions of a couple of system views by using SELECT * instead of
  listing all the columns returned by the underlying function.  initdb
  not forced since this patch doesn't actually change anything about
  the stored form of the views.  It just means there's one less place
  to change if someone wants to add columns to them.

Marc Fournier committed:

- tag for 7.4.22, 8.0.18, 8.1.14, 8.2.10, and 8.3.4.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/file/fd.c, optimize CleanupTempFiles by
  having a boolean flag that keeps track of whether there are
  FD_XACT_TEMPORARY files to clean up at transaction end.  Per
  performance profiling results on AWeber's huge systems.  Patch by me
  after an idea suggested by Simon Riggs.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Tatsuo Ishii sent in three revisions of the Common Table Expressions
patch.

Fujii Masao sent in a patch to multiple event notifications with one
signal.  This is in aid of synchronous logging replication.

George McCollister sent in a patch to improve the performance of
EncodeDateTime.

Greg Smith sent in another revision of his patch to expose GUC
boot_val as default_val.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in four revisions of Radek Strnad's collation
support patch.

Ron Mayer sent in two revisions of a patch to add a GUC variable to
set intervals to be one of: PostgreSQL traditional, SQL standard, ISO
8601.

Jeff Davis sent in a doc patch clarifying the use of OLD and NEW in
PL/PgSQL trigger functions.

Simon Riggs sent in another revision of his infrastructure change for
recovery.

Ryan Bradetich sent in another revision of his unsigned integer types
patch.

Joe Conway sent in three revisions of a patch to plug an access
control hole in dblink.