== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 07 2014 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 07 2014 ==

Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day (P2D2) 2015 will be in Prague, Czech
Republic February 11-12, 2015.
http://www.p2d2.cz/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

oracle_fdw 1.1.0 released.
https://github.com/laurenz/oracle_fdw

== PostgreSQL Jobs for December ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2014-12/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

FOSDEM PGDay (January 30, 2015) and the FOSDEM PostgreSQL
Dev Room (January 31-February 1, 2015)
http://fosdem2015.pgconf.eu/

pgDaySF 2015 will be held March 10, 2015 in Burlingame, California.
http://sfpostgres.org/pgday-sf-2015-call-for-speakers-and-sponsors/

The CfP is open for Nordic PostgreSQL Day 2015, which will be held
March 11, 2015 in  Copenhagen, Denmark.
http://2015.nordicpgday.org/cfp/

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
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to pwn@arpug.com.ar.

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane pushed:

- Add a #define for the inet overlaps operator.  Extracted from
  pending inet selectivity patch.  The rest of it isn't quite ready to
  commit, but we might as well push this part so the patch doesn't
  have to track the moving target of pg_operator.h.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/866737c923730f0cf8dde787868ab3ae697a278a

- Guard against bad "dscale" values in numeric_recv().  We were not
  checking to see if the supplied dscale was valid for the given digit
  array when receiving binary-format numeric values.  While dscale can
  validly be more than the number of nonzero fractional digits, it
  shouldn't be less; that case causes fractional digits to be hidden
  on display even though they're there and participate in arithmetic.
  Bug #12053 from Tommaso Sala indicates that there's at least one
  broken client library out there that sometimes supplies an incorrect
  dscale value, leading to strange behavior.  This suggests that
  simply throwing an error might not be the best response; it would
  lead to failures in applications that might seem to be working fine
  today.  What seems the least risky fix is to truncate away any
  digits that would be hidden by dscale.  This preserves the existing
  behavior in terms of what will be printed for the transmitted value,
  while preventing subsequent arithmetic from producing results
  inconsistent with that.  In passing, throw a specific error for the
  case of dscale being outside the range that will fit into a
  numeric's header.  Before you got "value overflows numeric format",
  which is a bit misleading.  Back-patch to all supported branches.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0927bf8060eca4e220cde48b1425e7bcf7451b94

- Minor cleanup of function declarations for BRIN.  Get rid of
  PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1() macros, which are quite inappropriate for
  built-in functions (possibly leftovers from testing as a loadable
  module?).  Also, fix gratuitous inconsistency between SQL-level and
  C-level names of the minmax support functions.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1511521a36f99a242f51c3bd0811cfcd53c5e63a

- Fix JSON aggregates to work properly when final function is
  re-executed.  Davide S. reported that json_agg() sometimes produced
  multiple trailing right brackets.  This turns out to be because
  json_agg_finalfn() attaches the final right bracket, and was doing
  so by modifying the aggregate state in-place.  That's verboten,
  though unfortunately it seems there's no way for nodeAgg.c to check
  for such mistakes.  Fix that back to 9.3 where the broken code was
  introduced.  In 9.4 and HEAD, likewise fix json_object_agg(), which
  had copied the erroneous logic.  Make some cosmetic cleanups as
  well.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/75ef435218fe4f6ce29d33e10f6f7a328c93f7e7

- Improve error messages for malformed array input strings.  Make the
  error messages issued by array_in() uniformly follow the style
  ERROR: malformed array literal: "actual input string" DETAIL:
  specific complaint here and rewrite many of the specific complaints
  to be clearer.  The immediate motivation for doing this is a
  complaint from Josh Berkus that json_to_record() produced an
  unintelligible error message when dealing with an array item,
  because it tries to feed the JSON-format array value to array_in().
  Really it ought to be smart enough to perform JSON-to-Postgres array
  conversion, but that's a future feature not a bug fix.  In the
  meantime, this change is something we agreed we could back-patch
  into 9.4, and it should help de-confuse things a bit.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/475aedd1ef0c0f9fc9d675dd2286380d14804975

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Fix missing space in documentation.  Ian Barwick
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6d6cade05bcb68ca8677aa5502ca73274d6e4539

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Put SSL_pending() call behind the new internal SSL API.  It seems
  likely that any SSL implementation will need a similar call, not
  just OpenSSL.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4e86f1b16da85ba0a99c592dc7b977b3be80a483

- Fix pg_xlogdump's calculation of full-page image data.  The old
  formula was completely bogus with the new WAL record format.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ebc2b681b8ffa597137aa7a19619e6a21176e928

- Print wal_log_hints in the rm_desc routing of a parameter-change
  record.  It was an oversight in the original commit.  Also note in
  the sample config file that changing wal_log_hints requires a
  restart.  Michael Paquier. Backpatch to 9.4, where wal_log_hints was
  added.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c846e67c46d5e72e6a0855282720bc44c6f95cb9

- Print new track_commit_timestamp in rm_desc of a parameter-change
  record.  Michael Paquier
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/326b6f009f9f76afbbcd39d751e07822fe453730

- Remove erroneous EXTRA_CLEAN line from Makefile.  After commit
  da34731, these files are not generated files anymore.  Adam
  Brightwell
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b27b6e75af556b7a07a156eef670e1086c063685

- Don't include file type bits in tar archive's mode field.  The "file
  mode" bits in the tar file header is not supposed to include the
  file type bits, e.g. S_IFREG or S_IFDIR. The file type is stored in
  a separate field. This isn't a problem in practice, all tar programs
  ignore the extra bits, but let's be tidy.  This came up in a
  discussion around bug #11949, reported by Hendrik Grewe, although
  this doesn't fix the issue with tar --append. That turned out to be
  a bug in GNU tar. Schilly's tartest program revealed this defect in
  the tar created by pg_basebackup.  This problem goes as far as we
  we've had pg_basebackup, but since this hasn't caused any problems
  in practice, let's be conservative and fix in master only.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c0f279c469c87a010fda19647c5453baa5ba97ee

- Give a proper error message if initdb password file is empty.  Used
  to say just "could not read password from file "...": Success",
  which isn't very informative.  Mats Erik Andersson. Backpatch to all
  supported versions.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/198cbe0a0c4b539c9f9f3f2e9169d774d1d39a8e

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Fix hstore_to_json_loose's detection of valid JSON number values.
  We expose a function IsValidJsonNumber that internally calls the
  lexer for json numbers. That allows us to use the same test
  everywhere, instead of inventing a broken test for hstore
  conversions. The new function is also used in datum_to_json,
  replacing the code that is now moved to the new function.  Backpatch
  to 9.3 where hstore_to_json_loose was introduced.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e09996ff8dee3f70b0a027cffebccef4388ed5b7

Álvaro Herrera pushed:

- dummy_seclabel: add sql/, expected/, and .gitignores.  Michael
  Paquier
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/332562437724845635f0e11685d11fdfe8719eb2

- pageinspect/BRIN: minor tweaks.  Michael Paquier.  Double-dash
  additions suggested by Peter Geoghegan
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b52cb4690e0752efea440173c4923d76d2126679

- Install kludges to fix check-world for src/test/modules.
  check-world failed in a completely clean tree, because
  src/test/modules fail to build unless errcodes.h is generated first.
  To fix this, install a dependency in src/test/modules' Makefile so
  that the necessary file is generated.  Even with this, running "make
  check" within individual module subdirs will still fail because the
  dependency is not considered there, but this case is less
  interesting and would be messier to fix.  check-world still failed
  with the above fix in place, this time because dummy_seclabel used
  LOAD to load the dynamic library, which doesn't work because the
  @libdir@ (expanded by the makefile) is expanded to the final install
  path, not the temporary installation directory used by make check.
  To fix, tweak things so that CREATE EXTENSION can be used instead,
  which solves the problem because the library path is expanded by the
  backend, which is aware of the true libdir.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/da34731bd3c805ab77d6e5914d02b1f011e9479d

- Fix typos
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6597ec9be6a9ed50390f73235d6654ec32a0b944

- doc: Fix markup.  In the spirit of
  d34b48a021b181e30c53280d336820740f67570b Per buildfarm member
  guaibasaurus, via Stefan Kaltenbrunner.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/182362b669f484c1f92e058c710b025d25ddc5dd

- Keep track of transaction commit timestamps.  Transactions can now
  set their commit timestamp directly as they commit, or an external
  transaction commit timestamp can be fed from an outside system using
  the new function TransactionTreeSetCommitTsData().  This data is
  crash-safe, and truncated at Xid freeze point, same as pg_clog.
  This module is disabled by default because it causes a performance
  hit, but can be enabled in postgresql.conf requiring only a server
  restart.  A new test in src/test/modules is included.  Catalog
  version bumped due to the new subdirectory within PGDATA and a
  couple of new SQL functions.  Authors: Álvaro Herrera and Petr
  Jelínek Reviewed to varying degrees by Michael Paquier, Andres
  Freund, Robert Haas, Amit Kapila, Fujii Masao, Jaime Casanova, Simon
  Riggs, Steven Singer, Peter Eisentraut
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/73c986adde5d73a5e2555da9b5c8facedb146dcd

- Move security_label test.  Rather than have the core security_label
  regression test depend on the dummy_seclabel module, have that part
  of the test be executed by dummy_seclabel itself directly.  This
  simplifies the testing rig a bit; in particular it should silence
  the problems from the MSVC buildfarm phylum, which haven't yet
  gotten taught how to install src/test/modules.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/df761e3cf79db09d602610ee61e51cb378288382

Andres Freund pushed:

- Don't skip SQL backends in logical decoding for visibility
  computation.  The logical decoding patchset introduced
  PROC_IN_LOGICAL_DECODING flag PGXACT flag, that allows such backends
  to be skipped when computing the xmin horizon/snapshots. That's fine
  and sensible for walsenders streaming out logical changes, but not
  at all fine for SQL backends doing logical decoding. If the latter
  set that flag any change they have performed outside of logical
  decoding will not be regarded as visible - which e.g. can lead to
  that change being vacuumed away.  Note that not setting the flag for
  SQL backends isn't particularly bothersome - the SQL backend doesn't
  do streaming, so it only runs for a limited amount of time.  Per
  buildfarm member 'tick' and Alvaro.  Backpatch to 9.4, where logical
  decoding was introduced.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0fd38e13706e6bd4b2a4ce4e0570d0aa4ad65345

- Document that pg_stat_*_tables.n_tup_upd includes n_tup_hot_upd.
  Author: Peter Geoghegan
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5ede3a31171d83b94a773d997fe05b563f8ebb3d

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Fix whitespace
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bc2f43eaa4cef83798692e57e9d0364f0bcce021

- Move PG_AUTOCONF_FILENAME definition.  Since this is not something
  that a user should change, pg_config_manual.h was an inappropriate
  place for it.  In initdb.c, remove the use of the macro, because
  utils/guc.h can't be included by non-backend code.  But we hardcode
  all the other configuration file names there, so this isn't a
  disaster.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e86507d7708591804c38de67f8ba5fdb67863810

- Remove USE_VPATH make variable from PGXS.  The user can just set
  VPATH directly.  There is no need to invent another variable.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/eb1c3f478645cbbd39877c2a8432f2f8c722eed2

- Revert haphazard pgxs makefile changes.  These changes were
  originally submitted as "adds support for VPATH with USE_PGXS", but
  they are not necessary for VPATH support, so they just add more
  lines of code for no reason.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e4b5a070b4d25da2c2f80af306fa1d19044370ae

- Fix SHLIB_PREREQS use in contrib, allowing PGXS builds.  dblink and
  postgres_fdw use SHLIB_PREREQS = submake-libpq to build libpq first.
  This doesn't work in a PGXS build, because there is no libpq to
  build.  So just omit setting SHLIB_PREREQS in this case.  Note that
  PGXS users can still use SHLIB_PREREQS (although it is not
  documented).  The problem here is only that contrib modules can be
  built in-tree or using PGXS, and the prerequisite is only applicable
  in the former case.  Commit 6697aa2bc25c83b88d6165340348a31328c35de6
  previously attempted to address this by creating a somewhat fake
  submake-libpq target in Makefile.global.  That was not the right
  fix, and it was also done in a nonportable way, so revert that.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1e95bbc870ccb4dc4ac8d43b0a4ed3661415f148

- Fix PGXS vpath build when PostgreSQL is built with vpath.  PGXS
  computes srcdir from VPATH, PostgreSQL proper computes VPATH from
  srcdir, and doing both results in an error from make.
  Conditionalize so only one of these takes effect.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b58233c71b93a32fcab7219585cafc25a27eb769

Robert Haas pushed:

- Don't dump core if pq_comm_reset() is called before pq_init().  This
  can happen if an error occurs in a standalone backend.  This bug was
  introduced by commit 2bd9e412f92bc6a68f3e8bcb18e04955cc35001d.
  Reported by Álvaro Herrera.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9a946298338e4783fcc98e0896712fdf2b2bfd56

Simon Riggs pushed:

- Tweaks for recovery_target_action.  Rename parameter
  action_at_recovery_target to recovery_target_action suggested by
  Christoph Berg.  Place into recovery.conf suggested by Fujii Masao,
  replacing (deprecating) earlier parameters, per Michael Paquier.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b8e33a85d4e86a8391118c3d5cdb249b560dec4f

- Event Trigger for table_rewrite.  Generate a table_rewrite event
  when ALTER TABLE attempts to rewrite a table. Provide helper
  functions to identify table and reason.  Intended use case is to
  help assess or to react to schema changes that might hold exclusive
  locks for long periods.  Dimitri Fontaine, triggering an edit by
  Simon Riggs Reviewed in detail by Michael Paquier
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/618c9430a82860c84a3be2711eec2c3b43573b2a

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Jim Nasby sent in a patch to log cleanup lock acquisition failures in
vacuum.

Tom Lane and Emre Hasegeli traded patches to add selectivity
estimation for inet operators.

Dilip Kumar sent in another revision of a patch to allow vacuumdb to
work in parallel.

Jeff Janes sent in a patch to attempt to fix startup/recovery problems
with unlogged tables by adding an unconditional and unchecked unlink
before the copy.

Jeff Davis sent in another revision of a patch to do better memory
accounting.

SAWADA Masahiko and Michael Paquier traded patches to implement
REINDEX SCHEMA.

Alexander Shulgin sent in another revision of a patch to turn
recovery.conf into GUCs.

Craig Ringer and David Rowley traded patches to use the faster, higher
precision timer API on Windows when available.

Teodor Sigaev sent in another revision of a patch to implement a
compression method for SP-GiST.

Kaigai Kouhei sent in another revision of a patch to implement some
interfaces in the custom scan API.

Peter Geoghegan sent in patches to: 1. add new abbreviation
infrastructure to sortsupport, and add a single client of this new
infrastructure, the text sortsupport routine. 2. Estimate total number
of rows to be sorted, and 3. Alter comments to reflect current naming.

Matt Newell sent in two revisions of a patch to support pipelining in
libpq.

Peter Geoghegan sent in another revision of a patch to create a
Levenshtein distance column HINT for nonexistent columns.

Amit Kapila and David Rowley traded patches to do sequential scans in
parallel.

Peter Geoghegan sent in a patch to clarify the documentation of
pg_stat_all_tables to mention that pg_stat_*_tables.n_tup_upd includes
HOT updates.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of a patch to implement an
SSL regression test suite.

Michael Paquier sent in a patch to add missing descriptions for two
parameters in XLOG_PARAMETER_CHANGE.

Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek sent in a patch to rename
action_at_recovery_target to recovery_target_action everywhere.

Michael Paquier sent in two more revisions of a patch to implement
compression of full-pages writes.

Stephen Frost sent in a patch to change usage of GetUserId() to
has_privs_of_role().

Stephen Frost sent in a patch to change the default for include_realm
to zero.

Adam Brightwell sent in two more revisions of a patch to add a role
attribute bitmask catalog representation.

Tomas Vondra sent in another revision of a patch to implement an
adaptive ndistinct estimator.

Tomas Vondra sent in a patch to gracefully increasing NTUP_PER_BUCKET
instead of batching.