== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 07 2013 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 07 2013 ==

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

DataFiller version 1.1.2, a random data generator for PostgreSQL based
on the database schema + directives, released.
https://www.cri.ensmp.fr/people/coelho/datafiller.html

Postgres-XC 1.1 beta, a write-scalable multi-master symmetric cluster
based on PostgreSQL, released.
http://postgres-xc.sourceforge.net/docs/1_1_beta/release-xc-1-1.html

== PostgreSQL Jobs for July ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2013-07/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

We're going to have a booth at OSCON this year.  Please sign up and
hang out at the booth for an hour or two:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oscon_2013_signup

PGDay UK 2013 is July 12, 2013.  Registration is closing soon.  Book now!
http://postgresqlusergroup.org.uk

PostgreSQL Brazil will be held August 15-17, 2013 in Porto Velho, RO,
Brazil.
http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/2013/chamada.en.php

Postgres Open 2013 will be in Chicago, IL, USA, September 16-18.
http://postgresopen.org/

pgconf.EU 2013 will be held on Oct 29-Nov 1, 2013 at the Conrad Hotel
in downtown Dublin, Ireland.  The CfP is open.
http://2013.pgconf.eu/

PGConf.DE 2013 will be held November 8th, 2013, at the Rhineland
Industrial Museum in Oberhausen.  The CfP is open through September
15, 2013.
http://2013.pgconf.de/

== 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.

== Applied Patches ==

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Retry short writes when flushing WAL.  We don't normally bother
  retrying when the number of bytes written by write() is short of
  what was requested. It is generally assumed that a write() to disk
  doesn't return short, unless you run out of disk space.  While
  writing the WAL, however, it seems prudent to try a bit harder,
  because a failure leads to PANIC. The write() is also much larger
  than most write()s in the backend (up to wal_buffers), so there's
  more room for surprises.  Also retry on EINTR. All signals used in
  the backend are flagged SA_RESTART nowadays, so it shouldn't happen,
  but better to be defensive.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/79ce29c734c6a652b2f7193bda537cff0c8eb8c1

- Optimize pglz compressor for small inputs.  The pglz compressor has
  a significant startup cost, because it has to initialize to zeros
  the history-tracking hash table. On a 64-bit system, the hash table
  was 64kB in size. While clearing memory is pretty fast, for very
  short inputs the relative cost of that was quite large.  This patch
  alleviates that in two ways. First, instead of storing pointers in
  the hash table, store 16-bit indexes into the hist_entries array.
  That slashes the size of the hash table to 1/2 or 1/4 of the
  original, depending on the pointer width. Secondly, adjust the size
  of the hash table based on input size. For very small inputs, you
  don't need a large hash table to avoid collisions.  Review by Amit
  Kapila.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/031cc55bbea6b3a6b67c700498a78fb1d4399476

- Silence compiler warning in assertion-enabled builds.  With
  -Wtype-limits, gcc correctly points out that size_t can never be <
  0.  Backpatch to 9.3 and 9.2. It's been like this forever, but in <=
  9.1 you got a lot other warnings with -Wtype-limits anyway (at least
  with my version of gcc).  Andres Freund
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d2e71ff7573e67fc0a263d0ba6fe2ffbc175d1ad

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Remove undocumented -h (help) option.  The -h option was not supported
  by many tools, and not documented, so remove them for consistency
  from pg_upgrade, pg_test_fsync, and pg_test_timing.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/06b804377cc5628f24ff37de719995a65f6f5928

- Update LSB URL in pg_ctl.  Update Linux Standard Base Core
  Specification 3.1 URL mention in pg_ctl comments.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6d432152b9e5627532c52d6f1c9959cb3be52e29

- Add timezone offset output option to to_char().  Add ability for
  to_char() to output the timezone's UTC offset (OF).  We already have
  the ability to return the timezone abbeviation (TZ/tz).  Per request
  from Andrew Dunstan
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7408c5d29b53fbeae0d88ab8121a42c3b4d9ed64

- pg_upgrade:  use "" rather than '', for Windows.  If we ever support
  unix sockets on Windows, we should use "" rather than '' for
  zero-length strings on the command-line, so use that.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3132a9b7ab3d76c15f88cfa29792fd888e7a959e

- pg_dump docs:  use escaped double-quotes, for Windows.  On Unix, you
  can embed double-quotes in single-quotes, and via versa.  However,
  on Windows, you can only escape double-quotes in double-quotes, so
  use that in the pg_dump -t/table example.  Backpatch to 9.3.  Report
  from Mike Toews
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/605b4c5a6b4708d9a72c205cb5b14b5f57bd53a8

- pg_upgrade:  revert changing '' to "".  On the command line, GUC
  option strings are handled by the guc parser, not by the shell
  parser, so '' is the proper way to represent a zero-length string.
  This reverts commit 3132a9b7ab3d76c15f88cfa29792fd888e7a959e.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cce5d851ed773dd01bfb0ba3e653636fb8f40f32

- pg_buffercache: document column meanings.  Improve documentation for
  usagecount and relforknumber.  Backpatch to 9.3.  Suggestion from
  Satoshi Nagayasu
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f71939cd1ac765ba618115f40de4d9c47955a9ef

- Add contrib function references in the doc index.  Backpatch to 9.3.
  Idea from Craig Ringer
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/20a1b9e71b18ba823858597dfd445174451ff5e7

- Add C comment about \copy bug in CSV mode.  Comment: This code
  erroneously assumes '\.' on a line alone inside a quoted CSV string
  terminates the \copy.
  http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/E1TdNVQ-0001ju-GO@wrigleys.postgresql.org
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/361b94c4b98b85b19b850cff37be76d1f6d4f8f7

- pg_upgrade:  document link options.  Document that tablespaces and
  pg_xlog can be on different file systems for pg_upgrade --link mode.
  Backpatch to 9.3.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/27aa1b960a8562163610bc5e3c1437c55badb090

Robert Haas pushed:

- Add a convenience routine makeFuncCall to reduce duplication.  David
  Fetter and Andrew Gierth, reviewed by Jeevan Chalke
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0d22987ae9fe5dc9861e314f1609c8b69d61bbfc

- Use an MVCC snapshot, rather than SnapshotNow, for catalog scans.
  SnapshotNow scans have the undesirable property that, in the face of
  concurrent updates, the scan can fail to see either the old or the
  new versions of the row.  In many cases, we work around this by
  requiring DDL operations to hold AccessExclusiveLock on the object
  being modified; in some cases, the existing locking is inadequate
  and random failures occur as a result.  This commit doesn't change
  anything related to locking, but will hopefully pave the way to
  allowing lock strength reductions in the future.  The major issue
  has held us back from making this change in the past is that taking
  an MVCC snapshot is significantly more expensive than using a static
  special snapshot such as SnapshotNow.  However, testing of various
  worst-case scenarios reveals that this problem is not severe except
  under fairly extreme workloads.  To mitigate those problems, we
  avoid retaking the MVCC snapshot for each new scan; instead, we take
  a new snapshot only when invalidation messages have been processed.
  The catcache machinery already requires that invalidation messages
  be sent before releasing the related heavyweight lock; else other
  backends might rely on locally-cached data rather than scanning the
  catalog at all.  Thus, making snapshot reuse dependent on the same
  guarantees shouldn't break anything that wasn't already subtly
  broken.  Patch by me.  Review by Michael Paquier and Andres Freund.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/568d4138c646cd7cd8a837ac244ef2caf27c6bb8

- Add support for multiple kinds of external toast datums.  To that
  end, support tags rather than lengths for external datums.  As an
  example of how this can be used, add support or "indirect" tuples
  which point to some externally allocated memory containing a toast
  tuple.  Similar infrastructure could be used for other purposes,
  including, perhaps, support for alternative compression algorithms.
  Andres Freund, reviewed by Hitoshi Harada and myself
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3682025015390a8e802e0752589162db7bd70b5d

- Additional regression tests for CREATE OPERATOR.  Robins Tharakan,
  reviewed by Szymon Guz
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ada3e776c2a4825ed0387e4bcf335139b101ca98

- Regression tests for LISTEN/NOTIFY/UNLISTEN/pg_notify.  Robins
  Tharakan, reviewed by Szymon Guz
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/00a7767fcc2e4d90e3b4cacb87974ec5a0f32b8c

- Hopefully-portable regression tests for CREATE/ALTER/DROP COLLATION.
  The collate.linux.utf8 test covers some of the same territory, but
  isn't portable and so probably does not get run often, or on
  non-Linux platforms.  If this approach turns out to be sufficiently
  portable, we may want to look at trimming the redundant tests out of
  that file to avoid duplication.  Robins Tharakan, reviewed by
  Michael Paquier and Fabien Coelho, with further changes and cleanup
  by me.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/263645305b8f14a3821e04dffa96fa7c1bc2ae86

- Revert "Hopefully-portable regression tests for CREATE/ALTER/DROP
  COLLATION." This reverts commit
  263645305b8f14a3821e04dffa96fa7c1bc2ae86.  The buildfarm is sad.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f33c53ec5b27a90a0f00ac27d4e5178fcc33168f

- docs: Clarify flag dependencies for background workers.
  BGWORKER_BACKEND_DATABASE_CONNECTION can only be used if
  BGWORKER_SHMEM_ACCESS is also used.  Michael Paquier, with some
  tweaks by me.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5cbe935c9d6046f5600ff2e083b4bae6ee1f4aa2

- Add new GUC, max_worker_processes, limiting number of bgworkers.  In
  9.3, there's no particular limit on the number of bgworkers;
  instead, we just count up the number that are actually registered,
  and use that to set MaxBackends.  However, that approach causes
  problems for Hot Standby, which needs both MaxBackends and the size
  of the lock table to be the same on the standby as on the master,
  yet it may not be desirable to run the same bgworkers in both
  places.  9.3 handles that by failing to notice the problem, which
  will probably work fine in nearly all cases anyway, but is not
  theoretically sound.  A further problem with simply counting the
  number of registered workers is that new workers can't be registered
  without a postmaster restart.  This is inconvenient for
  administrators, since bouncing the postmaster causes an interruption
  of service.  Moreover, there are a number of applications for
  background processes where, by necessity, the background process
  must be started on the fly (e.g. parallel query).  While this patch
  doesn't actually make it possible to register new background workers
  after startup time, it's a necessary prerequisite.  Patch by me.
  Review by Michael Paquier.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6bc8ef0b7f1f1df3998745a66e1790e27424aa0c

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Fix regression test make dependencies.  The dependencies on the spi
  and dummy_seclabel contrib modules were incomplete, because they did
  not pick up automatically generated dependencies on header files.
  This will manifest itself especially when switching major versions,
  where the contrib modules would not be recompiled to contain the new
  version number, leading to regression test failures.  To fix this,
  use the submake approach already in use elsewhere, so that the
  contrib modules are built using their full rules.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/384f933046dc9e9a2b416f5f7b3be30b93587c63

- doc: Arrange See Also links in more consistent order
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5ecfa1f6a338760723ba57ea6e132844ddefe19d

- Add #include to make header file independent
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d86485268535c80426e5fbf2831704b2f8253c13

- doc: Remove i18ngurus.com link.  The web site is dead, and the
  Wayback Machine shows that it didn't have much useful content
  before.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/69e4fd4541979209d3bd238508d46d64c8ad46df

- pg_restore: Error about incompatible options.  This mirrors the
  equivalent error cases in pg_dump.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/614ce64f6c78a73861785e65d80deec8d280a5e9

- doc: Add event trigger C API documentation.  From: Dimitri Fontaine
  <dimitri@2ndQuadrant.fr>
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0fe21ad8aab03172d4ac2e790479f17edcd3dbbe

- doc: Fix typo in event trigger documentation.  From: Dimitri
  Fontaine <dimitri@2ndQuadrant.fr>
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0d1795680d57d5997c244410e4d8a2eca22ae903

- PL/Python: Convert numeric to Decimal.  The old implementation
  converted PostgreSQL numeric to Python float, which was always
  considered a shortcoming.  Now numeric is converted to the Python
  Decimal object.  Either the external cdecimal module or the standard
  library decimal module are supported.  From: Szymon Guz
  <mabewlun@gmail.com> From: Ronan Dunklau <rdunklau@gmail.com>
  Reviewed-by: Steve Singer <steve@ssinger.info>
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7919398bac8bacd75ec5d763ce8b15ffaaa3e071

- PL/Python: Make regression tests pass with older Python versions.
  Avoid output formatting differences by printing str() instead of
  repr() of the value.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8182ffde5aa09d8378caa599d70e0d4e02ea8d7d

- pgbench: Silence compiler warning.  Explicitly ignore return value
  from write(), to silence warning.  This warning only appeared under
  --disable-thread-safety.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/55f100efc67a0054db586c1804760fb18cfc7b79

- pg_resetxlog: Make --help consistent with man page.  Use "MXID" as
  placeholder for -m option, instead of just "XID".
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e714d03142a87d572d95f70099537ef8ffd13508

- pg_isready: Make --help output more consistent with other utilities.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9b2543a4018c7f746bdb8d379c4ebc89c7d5f831

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Improve support for building PGXS modules with VPATH.  A VPATH build
  will be performed when the module's make file path is not the
  current directory or when USE_VPATH is set.  This will assist
  packagers and others who prefer to build without polluting the
  source directories.  There is still a bit of work to do here,
  notably documentation, but it's probably a good idea to commit what
  we have so far and let people test it out on their modules.  Cédric
  Villemain, with an addition from me.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6697aa2bc25c83b88d6165340348a31328c35de6

- Install all a Makefile's extension controls, not just the first.
  Bug introduced by commit 6697aa2bc25c83b88d6165340348a31328c35de6
  and reported by Robert Haas.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/82b0102650cf85268145a46f0ab488bacf6599a1

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- Mention extra_float_digits in floating point docs.  Make it easier
  for readers of the Florian Pflug docs to find out about possibly
  truncated values.  Per complaint from Tom Duffey in message
  F0E0F874-C86F-48D1-AA2A-0C5365BF5118@trillitech.com Author: Albe
  Laurenz Reviewed by: Abhijit Menon-Sen
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/148326b9940c6f3aa554df83a70c7d4563f67d86

- Unbreak postmaster restart-after-crash sequence.  In patch
  82233ce7ea42, AbortStartTime wasn't being reset appropriately after
  the restart sequence, causing subsequent iterations through
  ServerLoop to malfunction.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/620935ad088d4779ed7fa65f38a876b30e01dee4

Noah Misch pushed:

- Expose object name error fields in PL/pgSQL.  Specifically, permit
  attaching them to the error in RAISE and retrieving them from a
  caught error in GET STACKED DIAGNOSTICS.  RAISE enforces nothing
  about the content of the fields; for its purposes, they are just
  additional string fields.  Consequently, clarify in the protocol and
  libpq documentation that the usual relationships between error
  fields, like a schema name appearing wherever a table name appears,
  are not universal.  This freedom has other applications; consider a
  FDW propagating an error from an RDBMS having no schema support.
  Back-patch to 9.3, where core support for the error fields was
  introduced.  This prevents the confusion of having a release where
  libpq exposes the fields and PL/pgSQL does not.  Pavel Stehule,
  lexical revisions by Noah Misch.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7cd9b1371d8b18d063dc38bc4fa7b30bd92c07a3

- Use type "int64" for memory accounting in tuplesort.c/tuplestore.c.
  Commit 263865a48973767ce8ed7b7788059a38a24a9f37 switched tuplesort.c
  and tuplestore.c variables representing memory usage from type
  "long" to type "Size".  This was unnecessary; I thought doing so
  avoided overflow scenarios on 64-bit Windows, but guc.c already
  limited work_mem so as to prevent the overflow.  It was also
  incomplete, not touching the logic that assumed a signed data type.
  Change the affected variables to "int64".  This is perfect for
  64-bit platforms, and it reduces the need to contemplate
  platform-specific overflow scenarios.  It also puts us close to
  being able to support work_mem over 2 GiB on 64-bit Windows.  Per
  report from Andres Freund.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/79e0f87a15643efa9a94e011da509746dbb96798

- Update messages, comments and documentation for materialized views.
  All instances of the verbiage lagging the code.  Back-patch to 9.3,
  where materialized views were introduced.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/02d2b694ee42a9e241d37ce67df122fff43d5bb9

Tom Lane pushed:

- Fix handling of auto-updatable views on inherited tables.  An INSERT
  into such a view should work just like an INSERT into its base
  table, ie the insertion should go directly into that table ... not
  be duplicated into each child table, as was happening before, per
  bug #8275 from Rushabh Lathia.  On the other hand, the current
  behavior for UPDATE/DELETE seems reasonable: the update/delete
  traverses the child tables, or not, depending on whether the view
  specifies ONLY or not.  Add some regression tests covering this
  area.  Dean Rasheed
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5530a826434a8d4bc6ba7387d05aa14755406199

- Rename a function to avoid naming conflict in parallel regression
  tests.  Commit 31a891857a128828d47d93c63e041f3b69cbab70 added some
  tests in plpgsql.sql that used a function rather unthinkingly named
  "foo()".  However, rangefuncs.sql has some much older tests that
  create a function of that name, and since these test scripts run in
  parallel, there is a chance of failures if the timing is just right.
  Use another name to avoid that.  Per buildfarm (failure seen today
  on "hamerkop", but probably it's happened before and not been
  noticed).
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0cd787802f84583c4086b1af0a74015f230dfb70

- Fix planning of parameterized appendrel paths with expensive join
  quals.  The code in set_append_rel_pathlist() for building
  parameterized paths for append relations (inheritance and UNION ALL
  combinations) supposed that the cheapest regular path for a child
  relation would still be cheapest when reparameterized.  Which might
  not be the case, particularly if the added join conditions are
  expensive to compute, as in a recent example from Jeff Janes.  Fix
  it to compare child path costs *after* reparameterizing.  We can
  short-circuit that if the cheapest pre-existing path is already
  parameterized correctly, which seems likely to be true often enough
  to be worth checking for.  Back-patch to 9.2 where parameterized
  paths were introduced.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5372275b4b5fc183c6c6dd4517cfd74d5b641446

Fujii Masao pushed:

- Get rid of pg_class.reltoastidxid.  Treat TOAST index just the same
  as normal one and get the OID of TOAST index from pg_index but not
  pg_class.reltoastidxid.  This change allows us to handle multiple
  TOAST indexes, and which is required infrastructure for upcoming
  REINDEX CONCURRENTLY feature.  Patch by Michael Paquier, reviewed by
  Andres Freund and me.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2ef085d0e6960f5087c97266a7211d37ddaa9f68

- Fix typo in comment.  Michael Paquier
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7842d41df56ab8ad9aff76bc5bd8e96c3d215cde

Michael Meskes pushed:

- Applied patch by MauMau <maumau307@gmail.com> to escape filenames in
  #line statements.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9ce9dfdb999960aa7596bb219db02ccdbe2da855

- Also escape double quotes for ECPG's #line statement.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/43c3aab123560b326bab894c44b667e2bdddc0e4

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Fix spelling error.  Reported by Kevin Hale Boyes
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c3cb14de334e2c513d63a57387d217ee59cfb66d

- Remove stray | character.  Erikjan Rijkers
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8800d8061dd151d6556f5f8d58f8211fd830169f

- Expose the estimation of number of changed tuples since last
  analyze.  This value, now pg_stat_all_tables.n_mod_since_analyze,
  was already tracked and used by autovacuum, but not exposed to the
  user.  Mark Kirkwood, review by Laurenz Albe
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c87ff71f374652936a6089215a30998492b14d52

- Fix include-guard.  Looks like a cut/paste error in the original
  addition of the file.  Andres Freund
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5a348fe077916048cfba3eab3f8210583a6bcb14

Jeff Davis pushed:

- Use posix_fallocate() for new WAL files, where available.  This
  function is more efficient than actually writing out zeroes to the
  new file, per microbenchmarks by Jon Nelson. Also, it may reduce the
  likelihood of WAL file fragmentation.  Jon Nelson, with review by
  Andres Freund, Greg Smith and me.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/269e780822abb2e44189afaccd6b0ee7aefa7ddd

- Handle posix_fallocate() errors.  On some platforms,
  posix_fallocate() is available but may still return EINVAL if the
  underlying filesystem does not support it.  So, in case of an error,
  fall through to the alternate implementation that just writes zeros.
  Per buildfarm failure and analysis by Tom Lane.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5b571bb8c8d2bea610e01ae1ee7bc05adcfff528

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Fabien COELHO sent in another revision of a patch to add a --progress
option to pgbench.

Robins Tharakan sent in another revision of a patch to add more
regression tests for CREATE OPERATOR.

Fabrízio de Royes Mello sent in a patch to add /converage/, produced
by "make coverage", to .gitignore.

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of a patch to check in the
parser that the argument to a variadic function is an array.

James Sewell sent in a patch to add an ldapoption to disable chasing
LDAP referrals.

Fabien COELHO sent in two more revisions of a patch to add a "big"
target for make, intended to exercise more of the code than developers
(as opposed to, for example, CI systems) would ordinarily do manually.

Nicholas White sent in another revision of a patch to enable
RESPECT/IGNORE NULLS in window functions.

Robins Tharakan sent in two more revisions of a patch to add
regression tests for DISCARD.

Hari Babu sent in another revision of a patch to improvement
performance by reducing WAL for update operations.

Peter Eisentraut sent in another revision of a patch to update the
recommended .emacs file.

Etsuro Fujita sent in another revision of a patch to remove unused
targets.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix an issue with LATERAL quals.

Michael Paquier and Fujii Masao traded patches implementing REINDEX
CONCURRENTLY.

Pavel Stehule sent in two revisions of a patch to fix  BUG #7873:
pg_restore --clean tries to drop tables that don't exist.

Andres Freund sent in another revision of a patch to remove
PD_ALL_VISIBLE.

Maciej Gajewski sent in another revision of a patch to enable querying
result history in psql.

Ian Lawrence Barwick sent in a patch to remove superfluous semicolons
from pg_dump.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to create a simple date constructor from
numeric values.

Fujii Masao sent in another revision of a patch to fix
pgstattuple/pgstatindex to use regclass-type as the argument.

KONDO Mitsumasa sent in another revision of a patch to improve
checkpoint IO scheduler for stable transaction responses.

David Fetter sent in another revision of a patch to add WITH
ORDINALITY to UNNEST and other set-returning functions.

Dean Rasheed and Pavel Stehule traded patches to add WITH CHECK OPTION
to auto-updateable views.

Robert Haas sent in another revision of a patch to add regression
tests for ROLE (USER).

Michael Paquier sent in another revision of a patch to add
Damerau-Levenshtein distance to contrib/fuzzystrmatch.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to add an ALTER SYSTEM
command, which allows users to set GUCs from SQL and have those
changes persist across server restarts.

Hari Babu sent in two more revisions of a patch to compute the max LSN
of pages.

Karol Trzcionka sent in two revisions of a patch to implement UPDATE
... RETURNING {BEFORE, AFTER}.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in another revision of a patch to implement
EXTENSION templates.

Ivan Babrou sent in a patch to refine the precision of libpq's
connect_timeout to millisecond precision.

Satoshi Nagayasu sent in another revision of a patch to update
pg_filedump for page checksums, etc.

Noah Misch sent in a patch to have REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW run as
the MATERIALIZED VIEW owner.

David Fetter and Dean Rasheed traded patches to implement FILTER for
aggregates per the SQL spec.

Kevin Grittner sent in another revision of a patch to implement
REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW CONCURRENTLY.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to change a boolean with three states
to an enum in path_encode().

Andres Freund sent in a patch to remove a wrongly copy/pasted include
guard in attoptcache.h.

Sawada Masahiko sent in another revision of a patch to allow for a
fail-back without a fresh backup.

Robins Tharakan sent in another revision of a patch to add more tests
for SCHEMA.

Robins Tharakan sent in another revision of a patch to add more tests
for SEQUENCE.

Simon Riggs sent in another revision of a patch to reduce lock levels
for certain DDL operations.

Josh Kupershmidt sent in another revision of a patch to make vacuumlo
use a cursor.

Robins Tharakan sent in another revision of a patch to add more tests
for DB-changing commands.

Robins Tharakan sent in another revision of a patch to add more tests
for LOCK TABLE.

Robins Tharakan sent in another revision of a patch to add more tests
for SET xxx.

Andres Freund sent in another revision of a patch set to implement
parts of logical changeset generation.

Hadi Moshayedi sent in another revision of a patch to add an optional
parameter to an aggregate function which gives the expected size in
bytes of the memory it uses for state.