== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 12 2010 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 12 2010 ==

Jonathan S. Katz will be speaking on ORMs: The Good, The Bad, and the
Necessary (with PostgreSQL Considerations) at NYPUG on September 13th
at Yodle's offices.  Details and RSVP below.
http://www.meetup.com/postgresql-3/calendar/14472452/

Surge 2010, the scalability and performance conference will be in
Baltimore, MD, USA on September 30 - October 1st, 2010.
http://omniti.com/surge/2010

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Dataware Quick Application Suite 1.5, a RAD tool which supports
PostgreSQL, released.
http://www.datawarestudio.com

pgbouncer 1.3.4, a lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgbouncer/

pgpool-II 3.0, a connection pooler and more, and pgpoolAdmin 3.0, a
GUI for pgpool, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2010-09/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Call for Papers for PGDay.EU 2010 held on December 6-8 in Stuttgart,
Germany is open.
http://2010.pgday.eu/callforpapers


== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

PostgreSQL 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 language
to pwn@pgug.de, Italian language to pwn@itpug.org.  Spanish language
to pwn@arpug.com.ar.

== Reviews ==

== Applied Patches ==

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Modify pg_upgrade to set/restore all environment variables related
  to collation/encoding to match English when reading controldata.
  This now matches the English variable setting used by pg_regress.c.
  Backpatch to 9.0.X.

- Doc fixes: 1. Remove excessive table cells.  2. Moving function
  parameters into function tags rather than having them being
  considered separate.  3. Add return type column on XML2 contrib
  module functions list and removing return types from function.  4.
  Add table header to XML2 contrib parameter table.  Thom Brown.
  Backpatch to 9.0.X.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/backup.sgml, re-add documentation for Win32
  copy syntax for archive_command.  Backpatch to 9.0.X.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/backup.sgml, don't try aligning comments for
  new archive_command Win32 doc example; it doesn't work.  Backpatch
  to 9.0.X.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/syntax.sgml, clarify that surrogate pairs are
  not encoded in UTF-8 directly.

- Add tip about building plpython 2 and 3.  Fix link to Python docs.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml, remove obsolete claim that
  gzip is needed while installing PG's documentation.  It isn't, now
  that we ship the docs as loose files rather than a sub-tarball.
  Also adjust the wording in a couple of places to make the lists of
  required software read more consistently.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Cursor names in the backend are not case-sensitve.  This change
  makes sure that ecpg also does not regard cursor names as
  case-sensitive.  Thanks to Zoltan Boszormenyi for the patch.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- Introduce latches.  A latch is a boolean variable, with the
  capability to wait until it is set.  Latches can be used to reliably
  wait until a signal arrives, which is hard otherwise because signals
  don't interrupt select() on some platforms, and even when they do,
  there's race conditions.  On Unix, latches use the so called
  self-pipe trick under the covers to implement the sleep until the
  latch is set, without race conditions.  On Windows, Windows events
  are used.  Use the new latch abstraction to sleep in walsender, so
  that as soon as a transaction finishes, walsender is woken up to
  immediately send the WAL to the standby.  This reduces the latency
  between master and standby, which is good.  Preliminary work by
  Fujii Masao.  The latch implementation is by me, with helpful
  comments from many people.

- In pgsql/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c, add missing #includes,
  needed on some platforms.  This should make the unixware buildfarm
  animals happy again.

Joe Conway committed:

- SERIALIZABLE transactions are actually implemented beneath the
  covers with transaction snapshots, i.e. a snapshot registered at the
  beginning of a transaction.  Change variable naming and comments to
  reflect this reality in preparation for a future, truly serializable
  mode, e.g. Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI).  For the moment
  transaction snapshots are still used to implement SERIALIZABLE, but
  hopefully not for too much longer.  Patch by Kevin Grittner and Dan
  Ports with review and some minor wording changes by me.

Robert Haas committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/catalogs.sgml, link from pg_shadow docs to
  pg_authid docs.  Per discussion with Josh Kupershmidt.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Dean Rasheed sent in two more revisions of the patch to add triggers
to views.

Thom Brown sent in a doc patch to fix some layout and markup issues.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a patch to fix a shortcoming in the
has_*_privilege() functions where PUBLIC wasn't a recognized role.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another patch to fix leaky views.

Teodor Sigaev sent in another revision of the patch for
gincostestimate.

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in another revision of the patch to make
all query list snapshot handling work like EXPLAIN ANALYZE's code
does.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch intended to reduce the persistent
allocated memory for tsearch and ispell dictionaries.

Sushant Sinha sent in another revision of the patch to add support for
multiple words in the same position in text search.

Hans-Juergen Schoenig sent in a patch to add an RB tree library in a
place where it can help with searching large numbers of partitions.

Pavel Stehule sent in new versions of the format() and stringfunc
patches.

Joe Conway sent in another revision of the patch to differentiate
transaction isolation from serializable isolation in code and
comments.

Magnus Hagander sent in two revisions of a patch to fix the issue
where sometimes Windows processes return 128.

Tom Lane sent in a patch intended to help fix an issue with phantom
files for the CVS to git migration.

Fujii Masao sent in another revision of the patch to add synchronous
replication.

Fujii Masao sent in two revisions of a patch intended to fix an issue
where walsender doesn't process options passed in the startup packet.