== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 03 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 03 2009 ==

OpenStreetMap moves to PostgreSQL:
http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2009/04/openstreetmap-moves-to-postgresql.html

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

autodoc 1.40, an automatic documentation system for PostgreSQL, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/autodoc/

== PostgreSQL 8.4 Feature of the Week ==

New Hash Indexes.  As part of Google Summer of Code, our hash indexes
have been overhauled so that they now perform better than B-Tree
indexes for single-row lookups, and are worth using.  Note, however,
that the new hash indexes are not yet recovery-safe, and may need to
be REINDEXed in the event of a system crash.

== PostgreSQL Tip of the Week ==

The "ltree" contrib module is an implementation of indexed trees, and
can be helpful in representing a filesystem or similar heirarchy in
your database.

== PostgreSQL Jobs for May ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-05/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

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

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 ==

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Proofreading adjustments for first two parts of documentation
  (Tutorial and SQL).

- In pgsql/src/bin/scripts/vacuumdb.c, in VACUUM, FREEZE must be
  before ANALYZE;  fix this in vacuumdb.  Docs are already correct.

- Blank line Makefile cleanups.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/parser/gram.y, move SERVER to the right place
  in the alphabetically sorted keyword list.

- Add pgsql/src/tools/check_keywords.pl script to perform some basic
  sanity checks to the keyword lists in gram.y and kwlist.h.  It
  checks that all lists are in alphabetical order, and that all
  keywords present in gram.y are listed in kwlist.h in the right
  category, and that all keywords in kwlist.h are also in gram.y.
  What's still missing is to check that all keywords defined with
  "%token <keyword>" in gram.y are present in one of the keyword lists
  in gram.y.

- In pgsql/src/tools/check_keywords.pl, clean up check_keywords.pl
  script, making it 'strict' and removing a few leftover unused
  variables.  Laurent Laborde.

Tom Lane committed:

- Improve pull_up_subqueries logic so that it doesn't insert
  unnecessary PlaceHolderVar nodes in join quals appearing in or below
  the lowest outer join that could null the subquery being pulled up.
  This improves the planner's ability to recognize constant join
  quals, and probably helps with detection of common sort keys
  (equivalence classes) as well.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/datetime.c, when checking for
  datetime field overflow, we should allow a fractional-second part
  that rounds up to exactly 1.0 second.  The previous coding rejected
  input like "00:12:57.9999999999999999999999999999", with the exact
  number of nines needed to cause failure varying depending on
  float-timestamp option and possibly on platform.  Obviously this
  should round up to the next integral second, if we don't have enough
  precision to distinguish the value from that.  Per bug #4789 from
  Robert Kruus.  In passing, fix a missed check for fractional seconds
  in one copy of the "is it greater than 24:00:00" code.  Broken all
  the way back, so patch all the way back.

- In pgsql/src/pl/plpgsql/src/gram.y, fix a couple of cases where the
  plpgsql grammar looked for T_WORD and failed to consider the
  possibility that it would get T_SCALAR, T_RECORD, or T_ROW instead
  because the word happens to match a plpgsql variable name.  In
  particular, give "duplicate declaration" rather than generic "syntax
  error" if the same identifier is declared twice in the same block,
  as per my recent complaint.  Also behave more sanely when
  decl_aliasitem or proc_condition or opt_lblname is coincidentally
  not T_WORD.  Refactor the related productions a bit to reduce
  duplication.  This is a longstanding bug, but it doesn't seem
  critical enough to back-patch.

- Fix plpgsql's EXIT so that an EXIT without a label only matches a
  loop, never a BEGIN block.  This is required for Oracle
  compatibility and is also plainly stated to be the behavior by our
  original documentation (up until 8.1, in which the docs were
  adjusted to match the code's behavior; but actually the old docs
  said the correct thing and the code was wrong).  Not back-patched
  because this introduces an incompatibility that could break working
  applications.  Requires release note.

- Split the release notes into a separate file for each (active) major
  branch, as per my recent proposal.  release.sgml itself is now just
  a stub that should change rarely; ideally, only once per major
  release to add a new include line.  Most editing work will occur in
  the release-N.N.sgml files.  To update a back branch for a minor
  release, just copy the appropriate release-N.N.sgml file(s) into the
  back branch.  This commit doesn't change the end-product
  documentation at all, only the source layout.  However, it makes it
  easy to start omitting ancient information from newer branches'
  documentation, should we ever decide to do that.

- We don't need major_release_split any more.

- Install some simple defenses in postmaster startup to help ensure a
  useful error message if the installation directory layout is messed
  up (or at least, something more useful than the behavior exhibited
  in bug #4787).  During postmaster startup, check that
  get_pkglib_path resolves as a readable directory; and if
  ParseTzFile() fails to open the expected timezone abbreviation file,
  check the possibility that the directory is missing rather than just
  the specified file.  In case of either failure, issue a hint
  suggesting that the installation is broken.  These two checks cover
  the lib/ and share/ trees of a full installation, which should take
  care of most scenarios where a sysadmin decides to get cute.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-secure.c, fix already-obsolete hint
  message ... sslverify parameter is no more.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc.c, fix
  assign_pgstat_temp_directory() to ensure the directory path is
  canonicalized.  Avoid the need to elog(FATAL) on out-of-memory.

- Fix unintelligible description created by removing only part of a
  parenthetical remark.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml, fix mis-description of XML Schema
  functions, per discussion.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_resetxlog/pg_resetxlog.c, fix pg_resetxlog to
  remove archive status files along with WAL segment files.  Fujii
  Masao.

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/postmaster.c, fix missed usage of
  DLNewElem().

Tatsuo Ishii committed:

- pdate UTF-8 <--> EUC_KR, JOHAB, UHC mappings.  Patch contributed by
  Chuck McDevitt.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/postmaster.c, avoid a memory
  allocation in the backend startup code, to avoid having to check
  whether it failed.  Modelled after catcache.c's usage of DlList, per
  suggestion from Tom Lane.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Alvaro Herrera sent in a doc patch for autovacuum about when ANALYZE
is recommended.

Robert Haas sent in another revision of the ALTER COLUMN...SET
DISTINCT patch.

Robert Haas sent in a patch to replace a couple of references to files
that no longer exist in the source tree with references to the
appropriate URLs.