== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 17 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 17 2006 ==

Tom Lane et al. have been putting together a design for families of
operators. Look for greatly eased cross-type comparisons, among other
things, as a result.

The Center for Internet Security (http://www.cisecurity.org/) will be
preparing a set of recommendations for securing PostgreSQL which will
then be distributed to the US Government, as well as being available
to our community. For the initial draft, Josh Berkus needs some
volunteer hackers who are available to answer direct questions from
their team over the next 3-4 weeks. Please mail him at josh AT
agliondbs . com if you'd like to participate.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Orafce 2.0.0 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/orafce/

pgFouine 0.7.2 released
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgfouine/

PgPool 3.1.2 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/

Slony-I 1.2.2 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/frs/?group_id=1000122

PostgreSQL 8.2 is now in fink unstable.
http://fink.sourceforge.net/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for December ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-12/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Gavin Sherry is running a PostgreSQL miniconf at Linux.Conf.Au in
Sydney on Tuesday the 16th of January 2007.
http://lca2007.linux.org.au/Miniconfs/PostgreSQL If you would like to
attending, email gavin AT alcove . com . au

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
Devrim GUNDUZ and Dave Page.

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane committed:

- Add a paramtypmod field to Param nodes. This is dead weight for
Params representing externally-supplied values, since the APIs that
carry such values only specify type not typmod. However, for
PARAM_SUBLINK Params it is handy to carry the typmod of the
sublink's output column. This is a much cleaner solution for the
recently reported 'could not find pathkey item to sort' and 'failed
to find unique expression in subplan tlist' bugs than my original
8.2-compatible patch. Besides, someday we might want to support
typmods for external parameters ...

- Fix planner to do the right thing when a degenerate outer join (one
whose joinclause doesn't use any outer-side vars) requires a "bushy"
plan to be created. The normal heuristic to avoid joins with no
joinclause has to be overridden in that case. Problem is new in
8.2; before that we forced the outer join order anyway. Per example
from Teodor.

- Put back yet another improperly-removed #include, per Mark Kirkwood.

- Make --with-ldap build on Unixware, per Olivier Prenant.

- Put JST back into the default set of timezone abbreviations; was
removed in an unexplainable moment of brain fade.

- Fix some planner bugs exposed by reports from Arjen van der Meijden.
These are all in new-in-8.2 logic associated with indexability of
ScalarArrayOpExpr (IN-clauses) or amortization of indexscan costs
across repeated indexscans on the inside of a nestloop. In
particular: Fix some logic errors in the estimation for multiple
scans induced by a ScalarArrayOpExpr indexqual.

- Include a small cost component in bitmap index scans to reflect the
costs of manipulating the bitmap itself; this is mainly to prevent a
bitmap scan from appearing to have the same cost as a plain
indexscan for fetching a single tuple.

- Also add a per-index-scan-startup CPU cost component; while prior
releases were clearly too pessimistic about the cost of repeated
indexscans, the original 8.2 coding allowed the cost of an indexscan
to effectively go to zero if repeated often enough, which is overly
optimistic.

- Pay some attention to index correlation when estimating costs for a
nestloop inner indexscan: this is significant when the plan fetches
multiple heap tuples per iteration, since high correlation means
those tuples are probably on the same or adjacent heap pages.

Bruce Momjian committed patches to:

- Add FAQ entry to mention using COALESCE() for concatenation of
possible NULLs.

- Remove blank lines in HTML FAQ.

- Document that log_line_prefix %t does not print timezone on Win32.

- Change TODO from "Have EXPLAIN ANALYZE highlight poor optimizer
estimates" to "EXPLAIN ANALYZE issue NOTICE messages when the
estimated and actual row counts differ by a specified percentage"

- add to TODO:
Document issues for SGML and XML:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-docs/2006-12/msg00033.php

Peter Eisentraut committed the following patches:

- Make separate targets for building printable documentation in A4 and
US letter paper formats.

- Allow augmenting CPPFLAGS from the configure command line. This
generally works, but some platform templates overwrote it without
asking.

- Activate WIN32_STACK_RLIMIT override only on platforms where this is
necessary.

- Remove Windows port^W^Wobsolete template file.

Andrew Dunstan committed the following patches:

- enable \timing oputput for \copy commands

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)