== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 19 2014 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 19 2014 ==

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgpool-II 3.3.4 beta1
http://pgpool.net/mediawiki/index.php/Downloads

== PostgreSQL Jobs for October ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2014-10/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PGConf.EU 2014 in Madrid, Spain on October 21-24 is now open for
registration.
http://2014.pgconf.eu/registration/

PGDay.IT 2014 will take place in Prato on November the 7th 2014.
http://2014.pgday.it/call-for-papers-en/

The CfP for PGConf US 2015 is open through December 17th, 2014
Notifications will go out on January 10, 2014.  The event takes place
March 25-27, 2015 in NYC.
http://nyc.pgconf.us/2015/

== 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 ==

Kevin Grittner pushed:

- Increase number of hash join buckets for underestimate.  If we
  expect batching at the very beginning, we size nbuckets for "full
  work_mem" (see how many tuples we can get into work_mem, while not
  breaking NTUP_PER_BUCKET threshold).  If we expect to be fine
  without batching, we start with the 'right' nbuckets and track the
  optimal nbuckets as we go (without actually resizing the hash
  table). Once we hit work_mem (considering the optimal nbuckets
  value), we keep the value.  At the end of the first batch, we check
  whether (nbuckets != nbuckets_optimal) and resize the hash table if
  needed. Also, we keep this value for all batches (it's OK because it
  assumes full work_mem, and it makes the batchno evaluation trivial).
  So the resize happens only once.  There could be cases where it
  would improve performance to allow the NTUP_PER_BUCKET threshold to
  be exceeded to keep everything in one batch rather than spilling to
  a second batch, but attempts to generate such a case have so far
  been unsuccessful; that issue may be addressed with a follow-on
  patch after further investigation.  Tomas Vondra with minor format
  and comment cleanup by me Reviewed by Robert Haas, Heikki
  Linnakangas, and Kevin Grittner
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/30d7ae3c76d2de144232ae6ab328ca86b70e72c3

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Add --latency-limit option to pgbench.  This allows transactions
  that take longer than specified limit to be counted separately. With
  --rate, transactions that are already late by the time we get to
  execute them are skipped altogether. Using --latency-limit with
  --rate allows you to "catch up" more quickly, if there's a hickup in
  the server causing a lot of transactions to stall momentarily.
  Fabien COELHO, reviewed by Rukh Meski and heavily refactored by me.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/98aed6c721763f2472ccd23b834baed9f83a944b

- Fix typo in docs.  Shigeru Hanada
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0ff5047d52ab84dad682ad140b6992c294580eb1

- Fix deadlock with LWLockAcquireWithVar and LWLockWaitForVar.
  LWLockRelease should release all backends waiting with
  LWLockWaitForVar, even when another backend has already been woken
  up to acquire the lock, i.e. when releaseOK is false.
  LWLockWaitForVar can return as soon as the protected value changes,
  even if the other backend will acquire the lock.  Fix that by
  resetting releaseOK to true in LWLockWaitForVar, whenever adding
  itself to the wait queue.  This should fix the bug reported by
  MauMau, where the system occasionally hangs when there is a lot of
  concurrent WAL activity and a checkpoint.  Backpatch to 9.4, where
  this code was added.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e0d97d77bf0875e4d5cc7dedfe701d9999bf678c

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- doc: improve USING and NATURAL JOIN descriptions.  Patch by David G
  Johnston
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/032f3b7e166cfa2818b0a9572324e362bf8895df

- doc:  mention TM is ignored for to_date/to_timestamp().  Report by
  Goulven Guillard
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8660b40d0c59e4880f246fa91e2137ddd13655d8

- doc:  mention more changes needed to use huge pages.  Report by
  Laurence Parry
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ebd33f27ab023ef0e72ba162f2974ec49d96e8e3

- C comments: adjust execTuples.c for new structure.  Report by Peter
  Geoghegan
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/fe65280fea7e3c930727ed74328613a4410e487a

- docs: error for adding  _validated_ domains for existing uses.
  Report by David G Johnston
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7ab96d18f94d5e8c2deab8a6126632a194ea32f1

- Consistently use NULL for invalid GUC unit strings.  Patch by Euler
  Taveira
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d6c8e8d7aca9ab175e6aefef9974b65bd589dd80

- doc:  restrictions on alter database moving default tablespace.
  Mention tablespace must be empty and no one connected to the
  database.  Report by Josh Berkus
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/97d554871c3d186db831b35c0eabe6d496e4f54b

- interval:  tighten precision specification.  interval precision can
  only be specified after the "interval" keyword if no units are
  specified.  Previously we incorrectly checked the units to see if
  the precision was legal, causing confusion.  Report by Alvaro
  Herrera
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/417f92484da8c9a124e7eece8dbfb71f688a0104

- Shorten warning about hash creation.  Also document that PITR is
  also affected.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b87671f1b63a0c9cf264afc209e3acebdb52477f

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- psql: Fix \? output alignment.  This was inadvertently changed in
  commit c64e68fd.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7ce09e614805d2965baaf33e0d6bcbbb04aa9414

- doc: Fix copy-and-paste mistakes
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5dc4b50b028f430f639c74f5d449ac8ec27d3cf5

- doc: Improve ALTER VIEW / SET documentation.  The way the ALTER VIEW
  / SET options were listed in the synopsis was very confusing.  Move
  the list to the main description, similar to how the ALTER TABLE
  reference page does it.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/db75e524856634ce1c41fc1233e85abbb716ef6e

- doc: Clean up pg_recvlogical reference page.  This needed a general
  cleanup of wording, typos, outdated terminology, formatting, and
  hard-to-understand and borderline incorrect information.  Also tweak
  the pg_receivexlog page a bit to make the two more consistent.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/52c1ae22d6a4daf1c1c01fc9244f8ebae5402b1a

- Allow setting effective_io_concurrency even on unsupported systems.
  This matches the behavior of other parameters that are unsupported
  on some systems (e.g., ssl).  Also document the default value.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7feaccc21791d9d745bac013e5e0396bdde2d81c

- psql: Improve \pset without arguments.  Revert the output of the
  individual backslash commands that change print settings back to the
  9.3 way (not showing the command name in parentheses).  Implement
  \pset without arguments separately, showing all settings with values
  in a table form.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6895866510c5f4185f50ae7d6810d9ffd7701a9e

- initdb: Fix compiler error in USE_PREFETCH case.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/49d182e61ebca00762531718b3bafa9107ccee17

Álvaro Herrera pushed:

- pg_dump: Reduce use of global variables.  Most pg_dump.c global
  variables, which were passed down individually to dumping routines,
  are now grouped as members of the new DumpOptions struct, which is
  used as a local variable and passed down into routines that need it.
  This helps future development efforts; in particular it is said to
  enable a mode in which a parallel pg_dump run can output multiple
  streams, and have them restored in parallel.  Also take the
  opportunity to clean up the pg_dump header files somewhat, to avoid
  circularity.  Author: Joachim Wieland, revised by Álvaro Herrera
  Reviewed by Peter Eisentraut
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0eea8047bf0e15b402b951e383e39236bdfe57d5

- Blind attempt at fixing Win32 pg_dump issues.  Per buildfarm
  failures
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/076d29a1eed5fe51fb2b25b98fcde9dd7c506902

Tom Lane pushed:

- Print planning time only in EXPLAIN ANALYZE, not plain EXPLAIN.
  We've gotten enough push-back on that change to make it clear that
  it wasn't an especially good idea to do it like that.  Revert plain
  EXPLAIN to its previous behavior, but keep the extra output in
  EXPLAIN ANALYZE.  Per discussion.  Internally, I set this up as a
  separate flag ExplainState.summary that controls printing of
  planning time and execution time.  For now it's just copied from the
  ANALYZE option, but we could consider exposing it to users.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/90063a7612e2730f7757c2a80ba384bbe7e35c4b

- Support timezone abbreviations that sometimes change.  Up to now, PG
  has assumed that any given timezone abbreviation (such as "EDT")
  represents a constant GMT offset in the usage of any particular
  region; we had a way to configure what that offset was, but not for
  it to be changeable over time.  But, as with most things
  horological, this view of the world is too simplistic: there are
  numerous regions that have at one time or another switched to a
  different GMT offset but kept using the same timezone abbreviation.
  Almost the entire Russian Federation did that a few years ago, and
  later this month they're going to do it again.  And there are
  similar examples all over the world.  To cope with this, invent the
  notion of a "dynamic timezone abbreviation", which is one that is
  referenced to a particular underlying timezone (as defined in the
  IANA timezone database) and means whatever it currently means in
  that zone.  For zones that use or have used daylight-savings time,
  the standard and DST abbreviations continue to have the property
  that you can specify standard or DST time and get that time offset
  whether or not DST was theoretically in effect at the time.
  However, the abbreviations mean what they meant at the time in
  question (or most recently before that time) rather than being
  absolutely fixed.  The standard abbreviation-list files have been
  changed to use this behavior for abbreviations that have actually
  varied in meaning since 1970.  The old simple-numeric definitions
  are kept for abbreviations that have not changed, since they are a
  bit faster to resolve.  While this is clearly a new feature, it
  seems necessary to back-patch it into all active branches, because
  otherwise use of Russian zone abbreviations is going to become even
  more problematic than it already was.  This change supersedes the
  changes in commit 513d06ded et al to modify the fixed meanings of
  the Russian abbreviations; since we've not shipped that yet, this
  will avoid an undesirably incompatible (not to mention incorrect)
  change in behavior for timestamps between 2011 and 2014.  This patch
  makes some cosmetic changes in ecpglib to keep its usage of datetime
  lookup tables as similar as possible to the backend code, but
  doesn't do anything about the increasingly obsolete set of timezone
  abbreviation definitions that are hard-wired into ecpglib.  Whatever
  we do about that will likely not be appropriate material for
  back-patching.  Also, a potential free() of a garbage pointer after
  an out-of-memory failure in ecpglib has been fixed.  This patch also
  fixes pre-existing bugs in DetermineTimeZoneOffset() that caused it
  to produce unexpected results near a timezone transition, if both
  the "before" and "after" states are marked as standard time.  We'd
  only ever thought about or tested transitions between standard and
  DST time, but that's not what's happening when a zone simply
  redefines their base GMT offset.  In passing, update the SGML
  documentation to refer to the Olson/zoneinfo/ zic timezone database
  as the "IANA" database, since it's now being maintained under the
  auspices of IANA.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b2cbced9eef20692b51a84d68d469627f4fc43ac

- Re-pgindent src/bin/pg_dump/*.  Seems to have gotten rather messy
  lately, as a consequence of a couple of large recent commits.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7584649a1c58029a83a7a57d74cedcf1af434c97

- Fix core dump in pg_dump --binary-upgrade on zero-column composite
  type.  This reverts nearly all of commit
  28f6cab61ab8958b1a7dfb019724687d92722538 in favor of just using the
  typrelid we already have in pg_dump's TypeInfo struct for the
  composite type.  As coded, it'd crash if the composite type had no
  attributes, since then the query would return no rows.  Back-patch
  to all supported versions.  It seems to not really be a problem in
  9.0 because that version rejects the syntax "create type t as ()",
  but we might as well keep the logic similar in all affected
  branches.  Report and fix by Rushabh Lathia.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5c38a1d4ecce849b1e105f59ccca5a926181e4f0

- Avoid core dump in _outPathInfo() for Path without a parent
  RelOptInfo.  Nearly all Paths have parents, but a ResultPath
  representing an empty FROM clause does not.  Avoid a core dump in
  such cases.  I believe this is only a hazard for debugging usage,
  not for production, else we'd have heard about it before.
  Nonetheless, back-patch to 9.1 where the troublesome code was
  introduced.  Noted while poking at bug #11703.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5ba062ee44c35b4dc49ccf869fe48f3c6f5f926f

- Declare mkdtemp() only if we're providing it.  Follow our usual
  style of providing an "extern" for a standard library function only
  when we're also providing the implementation.  This avoids issues
  when the system headers declare the function slightly differently
  than we do, as noted by Caleb Welton.  We might have to go to the
  extent of probing to see if the system headers declare the function,
  but let's not do that until it's demonstrated to be necessary.
  Oversight in commit 9e6b1bf258170e62dac555fc82ff0536dfe01d29.
  Back-patch to all supported branches, as that was.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/60f8133dc95d8d55ac52186eb9988559816cac49

Stephen Frost pushed:

- Fix pg_dump for UPDATE policies.  pg_dump had the wrong character
  for update and so was failing when attempts were made to pg_dump
  databases with UPDATE policies.  Pointed out by Fujii Masao
  (thanks!)
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/389573fd19edd255736c50dfd0fd779da7535a7b

Fujii Masao pushed:

- Fix bug in handling of connections that pg_receivexlog creates.
  Previously pg_receivexlog created new connection for WAL streaming
  even though another connection which had been established to create
  or delete the replication slot was being left. This caused the
  unused connection to be left uselessly until pg_receivexlog exited.
  This bug was introduced by the commit d9f38c7.  This patch changes
  pg_receivexlog so that the connection for the replication slot is
  reused for WAL streaming.  Andres Freund, slightly modified by me,
  reviewed by Michael Paquier
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/504c717599b20cdaf09e9d7b6ecd152cc7a3a71a

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek sent in another revision of a patch to track
commit timestamps.

Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek sent in a patch to add an access method for
sequences.

Andrew Dunstan and Pavel Stehule traded patches to add some missing
functionality to JSON[B].

Michael Paquier sent in another revision of a patch to add
generate_series(numeric, numeric).

Michael Paquier sent in another revision of a patch to split
builtins.h to quote.h.

SAWADA Masahiko sent in a patch to drop any statistics of a table
after it's truncated.

Fabrízio de Royes Mello sent in another revision of a patch to add
CINE for materialized views.

Marco Nenciarini sent in another WIP revision of a patch to implement
incremental backup.

Marti Raudsepp sent in a patch to unify checks for catalog
modification.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to scale shared buffer
eviction.

Etsuro Fujita sent in two more revisions of a patch to allow foreign
tables to be in a table inheritance hierarchy.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in two revisions of a patch to add a new type of
event trigger: table_rewrite.

Robert Haas sent in a patch to implement group locking, a support for
parallelism.

Stephen Frost sent in a patch to add a few additional role attributes
(all requested by users or clients in various forums) for common
operations which currently require superuser privileges.

Robert Haas sent in a WIP patch to create a dynahash replacement for
buffer table.

Abhijit Menon-Sen sent in another revision of a patch to implement
pg_audit, an extension.

David Rowley sent in another revision of a patch to enable inner join
removals under certain conditions.

Alexander Korotkov sent in a WIP patch to re-add access method
extensibility, and an extension using this machinery.

Álvaro Herrera sent in another revision of a patch to enable
replicating DROP commands across servers.

Lucas Lersch sent in a patch to log buffer request trace data.

Atri Sharma sent in a patch to implement UPDATE table SET(*)= and
similar constructs.

Adam Brightwell sent in a patch to implement a directory permission
system that allows for providing a directory read/write capability to
directories for COPY TO/FROM and Generic File Access Functions to
non-superusers.

Jeff Davis sent in another revision of a patch to allow better memory
accounting for use in an eventual memory-bounded hash aggregate.

SAWADA Masahiko and Fabrízio de Royes Mello traded patches to
implement REINDEX SCHEMA.

Michael Banck sent in a patch to log a notice that checkpoint is to be
written on shutdown.

Michael Paquier sent in another revision of a patch to give better
support of exported snapshots to pg_dump.

Rahila Syed sent in another revision of a patch to compress full-page
writes.

Craig Ringer sent in a patch to detect custom-format dumps in psql and
emit a useful error.

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of a patch to add an Assert
statement to PL/pgsql.

Craig Ringer sent in a patch to add an errhint_log, akin to
errdetail_log.  This allows a different HINT to be sent to the server
error log and to the client, which will be useful where there's
security sensitive information that's more appropriate for a HINT than
a DETAIL message.

Furuya Osamu sent in another revision of a patch to pg_receivexlog
--status-interval to add fsync feedback.

Fujii Masao sent in a patch to fix an infelicity between RETURNING and
POLICY.

Fujii Masao sent in a patch to fix a bug in recovery mode.

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum sent in another revision of a patch to better
describe PostgreSQL's rounding behavior.

Dag-Erling Smørgrav sent in a patch to add ssl_protocols configuration
option.

Adam Brightwell sent in another revision of a patch to add a
has_privs_of_role() function.

Ali Akbar sent in another revision of a patch to add array_agg()
functionality for array types.

Emre Hasegeli sent in a patch to add a BRIN range operator class.

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in a patch to fix a bug where a comment in
the pg_crypto extension refers to the wrong file.