== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 12 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 12 2009 ==

The Italian PostgreSQL Users Group will present an overview of
PostgreSQL to the students of the IT Department at University of Pisa
on Friday, May 8.
http://www.postgresql.org/about/event.856

PgDay Florianopolis will be May 22. Contact Dickson S. Guedes (guedes
AT guedesoft DOT net) to participate or submit a paper.
http://www.postgresql.org.br/eventos/pgday/sc

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

py-postgresql 0.8, a cluster of Python technologies for use inside and
outside the PostgreSQL engine, released.
http://python.projects.postgresql.org/docs/0.8/

== PostgreSQL 8.4 Feature of the Week ==

psql is now "version-aware", which means that your "backslash"
commands will work even if you connect to an older server version with
8.4's psql.

== PostgreSQL Tip of the Week ==

The easiest way to eliminate duplicate rows in a table with a missing
natural key is to CREATE TABLE AS ... GROUP BY to a new table,
TRUNCATE, and copy the data back in to the table.  And, of course,
replace the natural key!

== PostgreSQL Jobs for April ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-04/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PgDay Brasilia will be April 17.  Contact fernando.ike AT gmail DOT
com or eduardo DOT santos AT planejamento DOT gov DOT br to
participate.
http://www.postgresql.org.br/drupal6/eventos/pgday/df

Percona Performance Conference will be taking place at the Santa Clara
Convention Center, Santa Clara, California USA
http://conferences.percona.com/

CfP is open for PgDay Sao Paulo, which will be April 24.  Contact
marins DOT consultoria AT gmail DOT com or marcelojscosta AT gmail DOT
com to participate.

PostgreSQL Conference, U.S. (JDCon) will be holding a PgDay at
LinuxFest Northwest (April 25/26th). The call for papers is out at
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

There will also be PgDays on April 29 in Porto Velho, RO and on April
30 in Ji-Parana, RO.  Contact Luis Fernando Bueno: proflfbueno AT
gmail DOT com to participate.

Michael Renner will be giving a PostgreSQL replication workshop at
Netways OSDC 2009 on April 29 and 30 in Nuremberg, Germany.
http://www.netways.de/english/osdc/y2009/programm/w/michael_renner_postgresql_repliziert_ein_ueberblick/

PGCon 2009 will be held 21-22 May 2009, in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa.  It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 19-20 May
2009.
http://www.pgcon.org/2009/

PgDay Florianopolis will be May 22, 2009. Contact Dickson S. Guedes
(guedes AT guedesoft DOT net) to participate or submit a paper.
http://www.postgresql.org.br/eventos/pgday/sc

Save The Date: pgDay San Jose.  Sunday, July 19th 2009 immediately
before OSCON.  CfP, more info TBA!

PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in
Campinas, Sao Paulo state.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://planet.postgresql.org/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
and Josh Berkus.

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 ==

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- Rename the new CREATE DATABASE options to set collation and ctype
  into LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE, per discussion on pgsql-hackers.

- Tell gettext which codeset to use by calling
  bind_textdomain_codeset(). We already did that on Windows, but it's
  needed on other platforms too when LC_CTYPE=C. With other locales,
  we enforce (or trust) that the codeset of the locale matches the
  server encoding so we don't need to bind it explicitly. It should do
  no harm in that case either, but I don't have full faith in the PG
  encoding -> OS codeset mapping table yet. Per recent discussion on
  pgsql-hackers.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/init/postinit.c, oops, mustn't call
  textdomain() when compiling without --enable-nls

- Quote string literals correctly in the new CREATE SERVER statements
  and binary upgrade UPDATE statements.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- Fix 'all at one page bug' in picksplit method of R-tree emulation.
  Add defense  from buggy user-defined picksplit to GiST.

- Fix 'all at one page bug' in picksplit method of R-tree emulation.
  Add defense from buggy user-defined picksplit to GiST.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/keywords.sgml, correct keywords table for
  status of COLLATE vs LC_COLLATE.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/fuzzystrmatch.sgml, document the fact that
  fuzzystrmatch doesn't work in multibyte encodings.

- Add an optional parameter to pg_start_backup() that specifies
  whether to do the checkpoint in immediate or lazy mode.  This is to
  address complaints that pg_start_backup() takes a long time even
  when there's no need to minimize its I/O consumption.

- In pgsql/contrib/fuzzystrmatch/fuzzystrmatch.c, defend against
  non-ASCII letters in fuzzystrmatch code.  The functions still don't
  behave very sanely for multibyte encodings, but at least they won't
  be indexing off the ends of static arrays.

- In pgsql/contrib/pg_freespacemap/pg_freespacemap.c, remove useless
  (leftover?) extern declaration.

- Allow leading and trailing spaces around NaN in numeric_in.  Sam
  Mason, rewritten a bit by Tom Lane.

- Remove psql's ancient hack that suppressed functions taking or
  returning cstring from the output of \df.  Now that the default
  behavior is to exclude all system functions, the de-cluttering
  rationale for this behavior seems pretty weak; and it was always
  quite confusing/unhelpful if you were actually looking for I/O
  functions.  (Not to mention if you were looking for encoding
  converters or other cases that might take or return cstring.)

- Fix the plpgsql memory leak exhibited in bug #4677.  That leak was
  introduced by my patch of 2007-01-28 to use per-subtransaction
  ExprContexts/EStates: since we re-prepared any expression tree when
  the current subtransaction ID changed, we'd accumulate more and more
  leaked expression state trees in the outermost subtransaction if the
  same function was executed at multiple levels of subtransaction
  nesting.  To fix, go back to the previous scheme where there was
  only one EState per transaction for simple plpgsql expressions.  We
  really only need an ExprContext per subtransaction, not a whole
  EState, so it's possible to keep prepared expression state trees in
  the one EState throughout the transaction.  This should be more
  efficient as well as not leaking memory for cases involving lots of
  subtransactions.  The added regression test is the case that
  inspired the 2007-01-28 patch in the first place, just to make sure
  we didn't go backwards.  The current memory leak complaint is
  unfortunately hard to test for in the regression test framework,
  though manual testing shows it's fixed.  Although this is a
  pre-existing bug, I'm not back-patching because I'd like to see this
  method get some field testing first.  Consider back-patching if it
  gets through 8.4beta unscathed.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc-file.l, treat EOF like \n for
  line-counting purposes in ParseConfigFile, per bug #4752.  Fujii
  Masao

- Remove SQL-compatibility function cardinality().  It is not exactly
  clear how this ought to behave for multi-dimensional arrays.  Per
  discussion, not having it at all seems better than having it with
  what might prove to be the wrong behavior.  We can always add it
  later when we have consensus on the correct behavior.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/gin.sgml, update GIN limitations documentation
  to match current reality.

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2009e: DST law changes
  in Argentina/San_Luis, Cuba, Jordan (historical correction only),
  Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, update release notes through
  yesterday; some minor wordsmithing.

- Add cross-references from the DECLARE and FETCH reference pages to
  the plpgsql documentation about cursors.  Per a suggestion from
  Matthew Wakeling.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_dumpall.c, fix pg_dumpall so that when
  --clean is specified, it drops roles and tablespaces in an order
  that has some chance of working.  Per a complaint from Kevin Bailey.
  This is a pre-existing bug, but given the lack of prior complaints
  I'm not sure it's worth back-patching.  In most cases failure of the
  DROP commands wouldn't be that important anyway.  In passing, fix
  syntax errors in dumpCreateDB()'s queries for old servers; these
  were apparently introduced in recent binary_upgrade patch.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/tab-complete.c, adjust psql tab completion for
  new \d 'S' flag behavior;  adjust code to be more flexible about
  additional modifiers for \d commands.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/maintenance.sgml, add documentation mention of
  'check_postgres.pl' in Routine Database Maintenance Tasks section.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/maintenance.sgml, doc change in new patch,
  stand-alone -> standalone.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/postgresql.conf.sample, display
  postgresql.conf unit options in an easier-to-understand, 2-column
  format.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/postgresql.conf.sample, document in
  postgresql.conf that the default units for log_min_duration_statement
  is milliseconds.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/postgresql.conf.sample, properly
  align equals signs in new postgresql.conf units comments.

- Add unit documentation for various postgresql.conf settings.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/trigger.sgml, add doc link to section about
  how to compile triggers.

- Remove FAQ and FAQ_DEV ASCII and HTML files from CVS;  now on the
  wiki.  Per-language files kept for transator usage.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, add release note item: Add
  Japanese message translations

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, add attribution for: Add
  Japanese message translations (Japan PostgreSQL Users Group).

- More GUC units doc updates.  Euler Taveira de Oliveira.

- Disable effective_io_concurrency on Solaris because posix_fadvise()
  is no-op on that platform.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc.c, revert addition of units to
  GUC descriptions; doesn't affect postgresql.conf.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/tab-complete.c, improve tab completion for
  \ef.  Andrew (RhodiumToad) Gierth.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/wal.sgml, improve documentation about how
  checkpoint spreads I/O activity.

- In pgsql/src/tools/RELEASE_CHANGES, no more need to update FAQs.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/monitoring.sgml, clarify documentation
  references to pg_stat_get_blocks_fetched and pg_stat_get_blocks_hit,
  per suggestion from Robert Haas.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/monitoring.sgml, document how *_blks_read
  statistics columns are computed.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, clarify SSL _user_
  authentication in release notes.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/client-auth.sgml, wording improvement for SSL
  user certificate authentication.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/client-auth.sgml, wording improvement.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, better document libpq sslverify
  behavior as requiring root.crt.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, more wording clarification of
  sslverify setting.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/mb/mbutils.c, add entry in the encoding
  number to OS name table for KOI8-U.

- XMLATTRIBUTES() should send the attribute values through
  map_sql_value_to_xml_value() instead of directly through the data
  type output function.  This is per SQL standard, and consistent with
  XMLELEMENT().

- Translation updates for 8.4 beta.

- Update config.guess and config.sub

- In pgsql/src/tools/RELEASE_CHANGES, add URL for config.guess/sub
  updates.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/help.c, message improvement.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/print.c, message fix (I guess this was a
  cruise replace mistake.)

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Mkvcbuild.pm, support Perl 5.10 and TCL 8.5
  in MSVC builds.  We should probably have a better way to do this
  (meaning something not hardcoded) eventually, but this fixes the
  problem for 8.4.  Dave Page.

Marc Fournier committed:

- Commit and tag beta1.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/common.c, make string more alike other similar
  messages.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_backup_archiver.c, fix logic to detect
  conflicts or blocks involving exclusive locks in parallel restore
  items.  If a currently running item needs an exclusive lock on any
  item that the candidate items needs any sort of lock on, or vice
  versa, then the candidate item is not allowed to run now, and must
  wait till later.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of his transformationHook
patch.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to add EEEE format support to to_char.

Taro Minowa(Higepon) sent in a patch to auto-delete large objects when
the referencing row is deleted.

Fujii Masao sent in another revision of his new trigger option for
standby patch.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to fix path separator issues on
Windows.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in an updated version of the sampling profiler
patch.

David Fetter sent in three patches to account for windowing functions
in psql.

Abhijit Menon-Sen sent in a patch to add tests for quoting and other
abuses in functions.