== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 19 2014 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 19 2014 ==

The fourth and final commitfest for PostgreSQL 9.4 has begun.  Start
reviewing and revising those patches!
https://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/commitfest_view?id=21

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PG Partition Manager 1.5.1, an extension to manage time- or
serial-based table partitioning, released.
http://www.keithf4.com/managing-constraint-exclusion-in-table-partitioning/
https://github.com/keithf4/pg_partman

== PostgreSQL Jobs for January ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2014-01/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

FOSDEM PGDay, a one day conference held before FOSDEM in Brussels,
Belgium, will be on Jan 31st, 2014.  Details:
http://fosdem2014.pgconf.eu/
http://fosdem2014.pgconf.eu/registration/

The 7th annual "Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day" (P2D2) conference
organized by CSPUG (Czech and Slovak PostgreSQL Users Group), will be
held on February 6, 2014 at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics,
Charles University (Malostranske namesti 25, Prague).  Czech language
info below.
http://www.p2d2.cz/

Nordic PGDay 2014 will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, at the Hilton
Stockholm Hotel, on March 20, 2014.  The CfP is open until February 2,
2014.
http://2014.nordicpgday.org/

PGConf NYC 2014 will be held April 3-4, 2014 in New York, New York, USA.
http://nyc.pgconf.us/2014/

The Open Data Summit will be held Friday April 11, 2014 in Denver,
Colorado, USA.
http://www.opendatasummit.com

PGCon 2014, the world-wide developer conference for PostgreSQL, will
be in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada May 20-24, 2014.
http://www.pgcon.org/2014/

== 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 ==

Michael Meskes pushed:

- Always use the same way to addres a descriptor in ecpg's regression
  tests.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/976a7d11560e4f932aff1c72fc2062ffaffaa3e9

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Add OVERLAPS to index in the docs.  Per report from Adam Mackler and
  Jonathan Katz
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/04038148b652d11ead706fb14ccecbcd94d81f4d

- Fix calculation of ISMN check digit.  This has always been broken,
  so back-patch to all supported versions.  Fabien COELHO
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/866a1f0923b67373701a578e98b74ab2458f74db

- Suppress Coverity complaints in readfuncs.c.  Coverity is
  complaining that the value returned by pg_strtok in
  READ_LOCATION_FIELD and READ_BITMAPSET_FIELD macros is not used. In
  commit 39bfc94c86f1990e9db8ea3da0e82995cc1b76db, we did this to the
  other macros to placate compilers that complained when the variable
  was completely unused, this extends that to the last remaining
  macros.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8ba288da5dce7bd890dd968ddb9664931099b8c5

- Fix Hot Standby feedback sending when streaming busily.  Commit
  6f60fdd7015b032bf49273c99f80913d57eac284 accidentally removed a call
  to XLogWalRcvSendHSFeedback() after flushing received WAL to disk.
  The consequence is that when walsender is busy streaming WAL, it
  doesn't send HS feedback messages. One is sent if nothing is
  received from the master for 100ms, but if there's a steady stream
  of WAL, it never happens.  Backpatch to 9.3.  Andres Freund and Amit
  Kapila
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a472ae1e4e2bf5fb71ac655d38d1e35df4c1c966

- Prevent integer overflow with --progress >= 2148.  If
  --progress=2148 or higher was given, the calculation of the next
  time to report overflowed, and pgbench would print a progress report
  very frequently.  Kingter Wang
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/277279981fba7646d0f05a664d58b845d2fdf69d

Tom Lane pushed:

- Fix possible buffer overrun in contrib/pg_trgm.  Allow for the
  possibility that folding a string to lower case makes it longer (due
  to replacing a character with a longer multibyte character).  This
  doesn't change the number of trigrams that will be extracted, but it
  does affect the required size of an intermediate buffer in
  generate_trgm().  Per bug #8821 from Ufuk Kayserilioglu.  Also
  install some checks that the input string length is not so large as
  to cause overflow in the calculations of palloc request sizes.
  Back-patch to all supported versions.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c3ccc9ee584b9b015dd9c1931e261e21f3961e5f

- Fix multiple bugs in index page locking during hot-standby WAL
  replay.  In ordinary operation, VACUUM must be careful to take a
  cleanup lock on each leaf page of a btree index; this ensures that
  no indexscans could still be "in flight" to heap tuples due to be
  deleted.  (Because of possible index-tuple motion due to concurrent
  page splits, it's not enough to lock only the pages we're deleting
  index tuples from.)  In Hot Standby, the WAL replay process must
  likewise lock every leaf page.  There were several bugs in the code
  for that: * The replay scan might come across unused, all-zero pages
  in the * index.  While btree_xlog_vacuum itself did the right thing
  (ie, nothing) with such pages, xlogutils.c supposed that such pages
  must be corrupt and would throw an error.  This accounts for various
  reports of replication failures with "PANIC: WAL contains references
  to invalid pages".  To fix, add a ReadBufferMode value that
  instructs XLogReadBufferExtended not to complain when we're doing
  this.  * btree_xlog_vacuum performed the extra locking if
  standbyState == STANDBY_SNAPSHOT_READY, but that's not the correct
  test: we won't open up for hot standby queries until the database
  has reached consistency, and we don't want to do the extra locking
  till then either, for fear of reading corrupted pages (which
  bufmgr.c would complain about).  Fix by exporting a new function
  from xlog.c that will report whether we're actually in hot standby
  replay mode.  * To ensure full coverage of the index in the replay
  scan, * btvacuumscan would emit a dummy WAL record for the last page
  of the index, if no vacuuming work had been done on that page.
  However, if the last page of the index is all-zero, that would
  result in corruption of said page, since the functions called on it
  weren't prepared to handle that case.  There's no need to lock any
  such pages, so change the logic to target the last normal leaf page
  instead.  The first two of these bugs were diagnosed by Andres
  Freund, the other one by me.  Fixes based on ideas from Heikki
  Linnakangas and myself.  This has been wrong since Hot Standby was
  introduced, so back-patch to 9.0.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/061b079f89800929a863a692b952207cadf15886

- Improve FILES section of psql reference page.  Primarily, explain
  where to find the system-wide psqlrc file, per recent gripe from
  John Sutton.  Do some general wordsmithing and improve the markup,
  too.  Also adjust psqlrc.sample so its comments about file location
  are somewhat trustworthy.  (Not sure why we bother with this file
  when it's empty, but whatever.) Back-patch to 9.2 where the startup
  file naming scheme was last changed.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5df99f6481b1eadbcbc8547d2e387f4dcf192c6f

- Add display of oprcode (the underlying function's name) to psql's
  \do+.  The + modifier of \do didn't use to do anything, but now it
  adds an oprcode column.  This is useful both as an additional form
  of documentation of what the operator does, and to save a step when
  finding out properties of the underlying function.  Marko Tiikkaja,
  reviewed by Rushabh Lathia, adjusted a bit by me
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/515d2c596c1b6b95d020d14edaab0d233d5d9ea9

- Add gen_random_uuid() to contrib/pgcrypto.  This function provides a
  way of generating version 4 (pseudorandom) UUIDs based on pgcrypto's
  PRNG.  The main reason for doing this is that the OSSP UUID library
  depended on by contrib/uuid-ossp is becoming more and more of a
  porting headache, so we need an alternative for people who can't
  install that.  A nice side benefit though is that this
  implementation is noticeably faster than uuid-ossp's
  uuid_generate_v4() function.  Oskari Saarenmaa, reviewed by Emre
  Hasegeli
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e6170126fc201052b0ec5fc92177eb181d602d26

- Minor code beautification in contrib/sslinfo.  Static-ify some
  functions that didn't need to be exported, and improve a couple of
  comments.  Gurjeet Singh
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/af9e3d652358664f2e749be2398428732121e317

- Make various variables const (read-only).  These changes should
  generally improve correctness/maintainability.  A nice side benefit
  is that several kilobytes move from initialized data to text
  segment, allowing them to be shared across processes and probably
  reducing copy-on-write overhead while forking a new backend.
  Unfortunately this doesn't seem to help libpq in the same way (at
  least not when it's compiled with -fpic on x86_64), but we can hope
  the linker at least collects all nominally-const data together even
  if it's not actually part of the text segment.  Also, make
  pg_encname_tbl[] static in encnames.c, since there seems no very
  good reason for any other code to use it; per a suggestion from Wim
  Lewis, who independently submitted a patch that was mostly a subset
  of this one.  Oskari Saarenmaa, with some editorialization by me
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0d79c0a8cc20dbaa39112d78a9abb821c4ca3554

- Fix VACUUM's reporting of dead-tuple counts to the stats collector.
  Historically, VACUUM has just reported its new_rel_tuples estimate
  (the same thing it puts into pg_class.reltuples) to the stats
  collector.  That number counts both live and
  dead-but-not-yet-reclaimable tuples.  This behavior may once have
  been right, but modern versions of the pgstats code track live and
  dead tuple counts separately, so putting the total into
  n_live_tuples and zero into n_dead_tuples is surely pretty bogus.
  Fix it to report live and dead tuple counts separately.  This
  doesn't really do much for situations where updating transactions
  commit concurrently with a VACUUM scan (possibly causing
  double-counting or omission of the tuples they add or delete); but
  it's clearly an improvement over what we were doing before.  Hari
  Babu, reviewed by Amit Kapila
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/115f414124e71749d2d8f512e469ca63bc2166e5

Robert Haas pushed:

- Make bitmap heap scans show exact/lossy block info in EXPLAIN
  ANALYZE.  Etsuro Fujita
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2bb1f14b89deacd1142b4a06bcb1a52a76270449

- Code improvements for ALTER SYSTEM .. SET.  Move
  FreeConfigVariables() later to make sure ErrorConfFile is valid when
  we use it, and get rid of an unnecessary string copy operation.
  Amit Kapila, kibitzed by me.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/05ff5062da5fb4b0c950260ed12af0ae5d8932a4

- Simple table of contents for a shared memory segment.  This
  interface is intended to make it simple to divide a dynamic shared
  memory segment into different regions with distinct purposes.  It
  therefore serves much the same purpose that ShmemIndex accomplishes
  for the main shared memory segment, but it is intended to be more
  lightweight.  Patch by me.  Review by Andres Freund.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6ddd5137b26c64360b86ea4174f21362df4f167a

- Single-reader, single-writer, lightweight shared message queue.
  This code provides infrastructure for user backends to communicate
  relatively easily with background workers.  The message queue is
  structured as a ring buffer and allows messages of arbitary length
  to be sent and received.  Patch by me.  Review by KaiGai Kohei and
  Andres Freund.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ec9037df2634ddcd6a3b036463722c8ee009b132

- Test code for shared memory message queue facility.  This code is
  intended as a demonstration of how the dynamic shared memory and
  dynamic background worker facilities can be used to establish a
  group of coooperating processes which can coordinate their
  activities using the shared memory message queue facility.  By
  itself, the code does nothing particularly interesting: it simply
  allows messages to be passed through a loop of workers and back to
  the original process.  But it's a useful unit test, in addition to
  its demonstration value.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4db3744f1f43554b03d8193da4645a0a5326eb18

- Fix typo in comment.  Etsuro Fujita
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/246a9a8d0c43d29d307f40461eaa59004d0340f9

- Mention that VACUUM FREEZE also effectively zeroes the table freeze
  age.  Maciek Sakrejda, reviewed by Amit Kapila
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b682709451b17333b038af9f2907c523754dacce

- Documentation for test_shm_mq.  Commit
  4db3744f1f43554b03d8193da4645a0a5326eb18 added this contrib module
  but neglected to document it.  Oops.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/16cad3e8674777d3e0bedbc1e1c408b0448d0545

- Fix compiler warning: Size isn't 64 bits on 32 bit platforms.
  Report by Peter Eisentraut.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/be361ef2a0b58ce1f3faff7ccabe174e20d50497

- Fix compiler warning.  Kevin Gritter reports that his compiler
  complains about inq and outq being possibly-uninitialized at the
  point where they are passed to shm_mq_attach().  They are
  initialized by the call to setup_dynamic_shared_memory, but
  apparently his compiler is inlining that function and then having
  doubts about whether the for loop will always execute at least once.
  Fix by initializing them to NULL.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d89746c7c534ef5b061fee0b8f587042f55bd92d

- test_shm_mq: Fix checks for negative queue size.  Noted while
  addressing compiler warnings pointed out on pgsql-hackers.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b5763cedde2541a6629f64cccf77e37b21348714

- Fix missing parentheses resulting in wrong order of dereference.
  This could result in referencing uninitialized memory.  Michael
  Paquier, in response to a complaint from Andres Freund
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d02c0ddb152978980ea17f9214c7ac734e4d6d8f

- Logging running transactions every 15 seconds.  Previously, we did
  this just once per checkpoint, but that could make Hot Standby take
  a long time to initialize.  To avoid busying an otherwise-idle
  system, we don't do this if no WAL has been written since we did it
  last.  Andres Freund
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ed46758381ff63a422fcb0b1f2763eb13273640f

- test_shm_mq: Try again to fix compiler warning.  Per complaints from
  Andres Freund and Tom Lane.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b1365ff7a811760c56ae88a1e819b2529fb5452b

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Fix whitespace
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a687ec7d5bf11fd16a68ffba6185aabe9100f98f

- Fix client-only installation.  The psql Makefile was not creating
  $(datadir) before installing psqlrc.sample there.  In most cases,
  the directory would be created in some other way, but for the
  documented from-source client-only installation procedure, it could
  fail.  Reported-by: Mike Blackwell <mike.blackwell@rrd.com>
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ad6bf0291a9fed503af3d5e777315a8997571647

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- Split ECPGdo() in constituent parts.  This splits ECPGdo() into
  ecpg_prologue(), ecpg_do() and ecpg_epilogue(), and renames
  free_params() into ecpg_free_params() and exports it.  This makes it
  possible for future code to use these routines for their own
  purposes.  There is no user-visible functionality change here, only
  code reorganization.  Zoltán Böszörményi Reviewed by Antonin Houska.
  Larger, older versions of this patch were reviewed by Noah Misch and
  Michael Meskes.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3291301385ee5e9ca38d70a68b93ce31cc2674ac

- Split ecpg_execute() in constituent parts.  Split the rather long
  ecpg_execute() function into ecpg_build_params(),
  ecpg_autostart_transaction(), a smaller ecpg_execute() and
  ecpg_process_output().  There is no user-visible change here, only
  code reorganization to support future patches.  Author: Zoltán
  Böszörményi Reviewed by Antonin Houska.  Larger, older versions of
  this patch were reviewed by Noah Misch and Michael Meskes.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/61bee9f756ce875f3b678099a6bb9654bd2fa21a

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- doc: fix := description typo.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/93c4bbc9998e7f326a9733fc187a7f2b97ef7b95

- docs:  update PL/pgSQL docs about the use of := and =
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7e1955b861a1be9ef2dfd6acdd50d0c6b5a75794

- doc:  rename "Equals" to "Equal"
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d8a0b96c50b76992d63287ef9affbcf847f725ad

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Define WIN32 when _WIN32 is set.  _WIN32 is set by the compiler,
  whereas our code uses WIN32 that is normally set through our build
  system. To make it possible to build extensions out of tree we
  cannot rely on that, so set the WIN32 symbol explicitly whenever the
  compiler has set _WIN32.  Not setting this symbol causes double
  inclusion of pg_config_os.h, and possibly other errors as well.
  Craig Ringer
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9c14dd22e144a5bef9b114a7a94df97cb23c6b9b

- Show SSL encryption information when logging connections.  Expand
  the messages when log_connections is enabled to include the fact
  that SSL is used and the SSL cipher information.  Dr. Andreas
  Kunert, review by Marko Kreen
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4cba1f6bbf7c8f956c95e72c43e517a56b97665b

- Adjust the SSL connection notification message.  Suggested by Tom
  Lane.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4b8f2859ccc4fe1e9b66fbdb332b830b69a9d6cf

- Rename msvc build option krb5 to gss.  In the MSVC build system
  we've never separated krb5 from gss, and always built them both.
  Since the removal of native krb5 support, this parameter only
  controls GSSAPI, so rename it accordingly.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/74a72ec208671f3ff301b4f6ef703f4957deccea

- Remove support for native krb5 authentication.  krb5 has been
  deprecated since 8.3, and the recommended way to do Kerberos
  authentication is using the GSSAPI authentication method (which is
  still fully supported).  libpq retains the ability to identify krb5
  authentication, but only gives an error message about it being
  unsupported. Since all authentication is initiated from the backend,
  there is no need to keep it at all in the backend.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/98de86e4221a418d670db86bf28ff15e880beadc

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Prevent double macro definition of WIN32.  David Rowley.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b64d956d583a64c9638bdcdc9cd2969a529dbcdc

- Export set_latch_on_sigusr1 symbol for Windows.  Per buildfarm
  currawong and grip from David Rowley.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/708c529c7fdeba9387825d746752fc6f439d781e

- Export a few more symbols required for test_shm_mq module.  Patch
  from Amit Kapila.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7d7eee8bb702d7796a0d7c5886c1f4685f2e2806

Stephen Frost pushed:

- Allow SET TABLESPACE to database default.  We've always allowed
  CREATE TABLE to create tables in the database's default tablespace
  without checking for CREATE permissions on that tablespace.
  Unfortunately, the original implementation of ALTER TABLE ... SET
  TABLESPACE didn't pick up on that exception.  This changes ALTER
  TABLE ... SET TABLESPACE to allow the database's default tablespace
  without checking for CREATE rights on that tablespace, just as
  CREATE TABLE works today.  Users could always do this through a
  series of commands (CREATE TABLE ... Alexander Shulgin SELECT * FROM
  ...; DROP TABLE ...; etc), so let's fix the oversight in SET
  TABLESPACE's original implementation.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6f25c62d788ea6312fe718ed57a3d169d8efc066

- Add ALTER TABLESPACE ... MOVE command.  This adds a 'MOVE'
  sub-command to ALTER TABLESPACE which allows moving sets of objects
  from one tablespace to another.  This can be extremely handy and
  avoids a lot of error-prone scripting.  ALTER TABLESPACE ... MOVE
  will only move objects the user owns, will notify the user if no
  objects were found, and can be used to move ALL objects or specific
  types of objects (TABLES, INDEXES, or MATERIALIZED VIEWS).
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/76e91b38ba64e1da70ea21744b342cb105ea3400

- Add CREATE TABLESPACE ... WITH ... Options.  Tablespaces have a few
  options which can be set on them to give PG hints as to how the
  tablespace behaves (perhaps it's faster for sequential scans, or
  better able to handle random access, etc).  These options were only
  available through the ALTER TABLESPACE command.  This adds the
  ability to set these options at CREATE TABLESPACE time, removing the
  need to do both a CREATE TABLESPACE and ALTER TABLESPACE to get the
  correct options set on the tablespace.  Vik Fearing, reviewed by
  Michael Paquier.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5254958e924cd54f33d37026d85483fef986060d

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to create a contrib
module to demonstrate dynamic shared memory.

Steeve Lennmark sent in three more revisions of a patch to enable
pg_basebackup to relocate tablespaces.

Alexander Korotkov sent in another revision of a patch to use partial
sorting in KNN-GiST to speed up queries.

Mitsumasa KONDO sent in another revision of a patch to allow setting a
Gaussian distribution in pgbench.

Yugo Nagata sent in a patch to implement to_regclass, to_regproc,
to_regoper, and to_regtype for the new regclass type.

Dilip Kumar sent in a patch to create a case-sensitive mode in the
Windows build.

Erik Rijkers and Andrew Dunstan traded patches to implement and
document nested hstore/jsonb.

Alexander Korotkov sent in two more revisions of a patch to improve
GIN indexing by storing additional information.

Alexander Korotkov and Marti Raudsepp traded patches around partial
sorting.

Christian Kruse sent in another revision of a patch to show xid and
xmin in pg_stat_activity and pg_stat_replication.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI sent in another revision of a patch to ensure that
UNION ALL on partitioned tables will use indexes appropriately.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI sent in another revision of a patch to get more from
indexes.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI sent in another revision of a patch to ensure that
UNION on partitioned tables can take advantage of appropriate indexes.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI sent in another revision of a patch to make it
possible for auto_explain to show trigger statistics.

Rajeev Rastogi sent in another revision of a patch to fix an issue
where the PostgreSQL service on Windows does not start if the data
directory given is relative path.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another flock of patches implementing and
demonstrating the custom scan API.

Mitsumasa KONDO sent in another revision of a patch to optimize kernel
readahead using buffer access strategy.

KaiGai Kohei sent in a patch to implement an alternative way to scan a
table using in-memory cache instead of the usual heap access method.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to patch to expose a function
GetCurrentTransactionWALVolume() that gives the total number of bytes
written to WAL by current transaction.

Shigeru HANADA sent in another revision of a patch to allow foreign
tables to be children of tables in the sense of table inheritance.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in a patch to implement a new GUC that allows
users to set up a list of path where PostgreSQL will search for the
extension control files at CREATE EXTENSION time.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to integrate pg_upgrade's
analyze_new_cluster.sh into vacuumdb.

Alvaro Herrera sent in another revision of a patch to enable CREATE
support for event triggers.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to create a function prototype as
part of PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1.

Alexander Korotkov sent in another revision of a patch to improve GIN
by creating a fast scan option.

Simon Riggs sent in two more revisions of a patch to fix an issue
where the reduction in lock strength for ALTER TABLE was unsafe.

Jaime Casanova sent in another revision of a patch to turn
recovery.conf into GUCs.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to add tests for client programs
(psql, etc.).

Mitsumasa KONDO sent in a patch to drop duplicate buffers in OS using
a usage_count algorithm.

Simon Riggs sent in two more revisions of a patch to allow
rate-limiting on WAL.

Oskari Saarenmaa sent in another revision of a patch to allow
filtering error log statements by SQLSTATE.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to control how aggressively HOT/Cleanup
operates for SELECT statements.

Heikki Linnakangas and Peter Geoghegan traded patches for INSERT...ON
DUPLICATE KEY LOCK FOR UPDATE.

Andres Freund sent in another revision of a patch to implement
changeset extraction.

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in a patch to implement
plpgsql.warn_shadow, which allows people to get warnings when a
variable shadows a previously defined variable.

David Rowley and Florian Pflug traded patches implementing inverse
transition functions for aggregates.

Simon Riggs sent in another revision of a patch to tune COPY vs.
volatile default expressions including nextval(), which is used for
surrogate keys.

Alexander Korotkov sent in a patch to fix a trigram regex index
peculiarity.

Peter Eisentraut sent in another revision of a patch to implement
TRANSFORMS.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to improve performance
by reducing the volume of WAL during update operations.

Alvaro Herrera sent in another revision of a patch to allow throttling
of backups.

Salah Jubeh sent in another revision of a patch to add a 'force'
option to dropdb.

Amit Kapila sent in a patch to fix a memory leak in parse_config.

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of a patch to add --if-exists,
which inserts IF EXISTS in appropriate spots in pg_dump's output.

Andrew Dunstan sent in two more revisions of a patch to implement a
flock of new JSON functions.

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in three revisions of a patch to implement
CARDINALITY for arrays.

Jov sent a patch to clarify psql's -F command line option.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI sent in a patch to fix some odd ways a query can be
stored in pg_stat_statements.

Marti Raudsepp sent in a patch to fix a potential relcache leak in
get_object_address_attribute.

Michael Paquier sent in a patch to fix some ALTER SYSTEM SET typos and
add a fix for temporary file name management.

Maor Lipchuk and Tom Lane traded patches to add the value to the error
message when a column's data is too large for the size of the column.

Craig Ringer sent in another revision of a patch to implement
row-level access control.

Jeevan Chalke sent in a patch to fix some surprising to_timestamp
behavior.