== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 29 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 29 2009 ==

PostgreSQL RPM packages for Fedora-12 released:
http://yum.pgsqlrpms.org/news-fedora12-packages-released.php

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

apgdiff 1.4, a tool for comparing PostgreSQL schemas, released.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/apgdiff/

Karoo, a web GUI based on PostgreSQL, released.
http://www.zwartberg.com/cave.html

MyJSQLView 3.05, a Java-based GUI for PostgreSQL, released.

== PostgreSQL Jobs for November ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-11/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The third edition of the Italian PostgreSQL Day will be held at the
University of Pisa on the 4th of December.  Entrance is free.
Sponsors are welcome.
http://www.pgday.it/

Stefan Keller will be teach a course called, "Introducion to
PostGIS/PostgreSQL" at the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil
(HSR) on January 14, 2010 in Zurich, Switzerland.
http://www.gis.hsr.ch/wiki/Agenda

FOSDEM 2010 will be in Brussels, Belgium on February 6-7, 2010.
http://www.fosdem.org/

Chemnitzer Linuxtage will be in Chemnitz, Germany on March 13-14, 2010.
http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
and Devrim GUNDUZ.

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:

- Fix an old bug in multixact and two-phase commit.  Prepared
  transactions can be part of multixacts, so allocate a slot for each
  prepared transaction in the "oldest member" array in multixact.c.  On
  PREPARE TRANSACTION, transfer the oldest member value from the
  current backends slot to the prepared xact slot.  Also save and
  recover the value from the 2PC state file.  The symptom of the bug
  was that after a transaction prepared, a shared lock still held by
  the prepared transaction was sometimes ignored by other
  transactions.  Fix back to 8.1, where both 2PC and multixact were
  introduced.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/win32.mak, add missing library to
  standalone libpq build on Win32.  Hiroshi Saito.

Tom Lane committed:

- Use diff's -w switch only on Windows, to avoid problems with
  inconsistent newline representations.  Per buildfarm results and
  subsequent discussion.  Sync up a couple of other places that had
  their own policies.

- Simplify psql's new linestyle behavior to default to linestyle=ascii
  all the time, rather than hoping we can tell whether the terminal
  supports UTF8 characters.  Per discussion.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release-8.5.sgml, fix missing end tag, per
  Jeff Davis.

- Eliminate a lot of list-management overhead within
  join_search_one_level by adding a requirement that build_join_rel
  add new join RelOptInfos to the appropriate list immediately at
  creation.  Per report from Robert Haas, the list_concat_unique_ptr()
  calls that this change eliminates were taking the lion's share of
  the runtime in larger join problems.  This doesn't do anything to
  fix the fundamental combinatorial explosion in large join problems,
  but it should push out the threshold of pain a bit further.  Note:
  because this changes the order in which joinrel lists are built, it
  might result in changes in selected plans in cases where different
  alternatives have exactly the same costs.  There is one example in
  the regression tests.

- Add support for an application_name parameter, which is displayed in
  pg_stat_activity and recorded in log entries.  Dave Page, reviewed
  by Andres Freund.

- Add support for anonymous code blocks (DO blocks) to PL/Perl.  Patch
  by Joshua Tolley, reviews by Brendan Jurd and Tim Bunce.

- Make pg_stat_activity.application_name visible to all users, rather
  than being hidden when current_query is.  Relocate it to a column
  position more consistent with that behavior.  Per discussion.

- Add some opr_sanity checks that the lengths of the various
  argument-info arrays in a pg_proc entry match.  Seems like an easy
  mistake to make when manually adjusting these values in a pg_proc.h
  entry.

- In pgsql/src/pl/plperl/plperl.c, fix session-lifespan memory leak
  when a plperl function is redefined: we have to tell Perl it can
  release its compiled copy of the function text.  Noted by Alexey
  Klyukin.  Back-patch to 8.2 --- the problem exists further back, but
  this patch won't work without modification, and it's probably not
  worth the trouble.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Add PG_MODULE_MAGIC and some missing include files to examples.
  Euler Taveira de Oliveira.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml, fix syntax in extract() examples.
  Erik Rijkers.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c, remove prefix "ERROR:"
  from some messages, to make everything consistent

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c, error when a specified
  connection service is not found, instead of ignoring it.

Michael Meskes committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/misc.c, made function better
  readable.

- Added dynamic cursor names to ecpg. Almost the whole patch was done
  by Boszormenyi Zoltan, with only a minor tweak or two from me.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/ecpg.addons, synced addon rules
  after some renamings.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ChangeLog, forgot to add dynamic
  cursors to Changelog.

- In ECPG, added missing files.

- In ECPG, added script to check if all rule re-definition in
  ecpg.addons are indeed used in the build process. If not the build
  process will stop with an error message.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/data.c, if no result is given
  NOTFOUND should be returned. Check for empty result string too.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/ecpg.addons, remove */
  characters from declare cursor statements before putting them into a
  comment.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/vacuumdb.sgml, document ath vacuumdb
  --analyze does analyze _also_, not in place of vacuum.

- Improve test descriptions displayed during test_fsync;  increase
  default loops to 5k.

- Add link to external fsync testing script and our fsync test tool.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in another revision of the writeable CTE
patch.  Tom Lane responded with another one.

Teodor Sigaev sent in a patch to add red-black trees to GIN.

Teodor Sigaev sent in a patch to add some point operations for GiST.

Teodor Sigaev sent in a patch to add a supplied module which does
K-nearest-neighbor efficiently using GiST.

Alexey Klyukin sent in a patch to improve PL/Perl's support for
PostgreSQL arrays.

Daniel Farina sent in a group of patches to allow COPY TO FUNCTION and
add support to same to dblink.

Andrew Dunstan sent in a patch to allow ragged COPYing.

Per a review by Jeff Janes, ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision
of the patch to add a BUFFERS option to EXPLAIN.

Tim Bunch sent in two revisions of a patch refactoring PL/Perl[U] per
discussion.

Zdenek Kotala sent in a patch to refactor the path Docbook uses so it
works better on Solaris.

Jeff Davis sent on three more revisions of the operator exclusion
constraints patch.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the partitioning syntax
patch.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to add git to the PostgreSQL official
documentation.

Teodor Sigaev sent in two revisions of a WIP patch to add
k-nearest-neighbor searches to GiST.

Robert Haas sent in another revision of the patch to allow people to
set random_page_cost and seq_page_cost per tablespace.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to fix some issues in hot standby.

Jeff Davis sent in a doc patch atop the new VACUUM FULL patch.

Hitoshi Harada sent in another revision of the patch to add more ROWS
options for frames in windowing functions.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to fix LDAP.

Kurt Harriman sent in a patch to remove a gcc dependency in the
definition of inline functions.