== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 17 2007 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 17 2007 ==

postgresql_autodoc, postgresql-pgpoolAdmin and postgresql-table_log
are now in Fedora. You can install them with yum.

If you want to see an RPM of PostgreSQL related software, please send
email to devrim at commandprompt dot com.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgpool-II 1.1.1 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool

pycopg2 2.0.6 released.
http://www.initd.org/tracker/psycopg/wiki/PsycopgTwo

DB_Linq Linq Provider for Postgres released.
http://code2code.net/DB_Linq/index.html

Federico Campoli has published two Lulu books in Italian:
PostgreSQL DBA Base http://www.lulu.com/content/935235
PostgreSQL DBA Advanced http://www.lulu.com/content/939666

== PostgreSQL Jobs for June ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-06/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Registration for pgday.it in Prato, Tuscany, Italy on July 6 and 7 is
open.

Some Important URLs:

Registration: http://www.pgday.it/en/generale/registrazione
PGDay's web site: http://www.pgday.it/en/
Sponsorship campaign: http://www.pgday.it/en/sponsorizzazioni/come
How to get to Prato: http://www.pgday.it/en/logistica/raggiungere_prato
Accommodations in Prato: http://www.pgday.it/en/logistica/dove_dormire
PostgreSQL official T-shirts http://www.prato.linux.it/node/30
Sign up to tour Tuscany: http://www.pgday.it/it/node/158

== 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
and Devrim GUNDUZ.

To get your submission into the upcoming issue, make sure it arrives
at david(at)fetter(dot)org or in German at pwn(at)pgug(dot)de by Sunday at 3:00pm
Pacific Time.

== Applied Patches ==

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- Implement a chunking protocol for writes to the syslogger pipe, with
messages reassembled in the syslogger before writing to the log
file. This prevents partial messages from being written, which mucks
up log rotation, and messages from different backends being
interleaved, which causes garbled logs. Backport as far as 8.0,
where the syslogger was introduced. Tom Lane and Andrew Dunstan

Neil Conway committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/tab-complete.c, schema-qualify several
references to the builtin function length(), to avoid mistakenly
calling a function of the same name that might happen to appear
earlier in the schema search path.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Update TODO item to read: "Allow EXPLAIN output to be more easily
processed by scripts, perhaps XML."

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- Avoid having autovacuum run multiple ANALYZE commands in a single
transaction, to prevent possible deadlock problems. Per request
from Tom Lane.

- Avoid integer overflow issues in autovacuum.

- VPATH fixes for ECPG tests.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Add resultmap entries for mingw - same as for MSVC.

- Properly identify mingw as a win32 platform needing different diff
options to deal with strange line endings.

- ECPG requires a local include directory to override the project-wide
ones. Add ability to add "prefix include directories", and use
it... With this, ecpg regression tests now pass on MSVC builds.

- Update documentation of resultmap file format.

- Specifying a dbname should override the default database, not add to
it. Fixes buildfarm failures on contribcheck.

- Fix missing variable initialization in
pgsql/src/test/regress/pg_regress.c.

- Fix search/replace error in makefile for ecpg tests.

- Rewrite ECPG regression test driver in C, by splitting the standard
regression driver into two parts and reusing half of it. Required to
run ECPG tests without a shell on MSVC builds. Fix ECPG thread
tests for MSVC build (incl output files). Joachim Wieland and
Magnus Hagander.

Tom Lane committed:

- Revert an ill-considered portion of my patch of 12-Mar, which tried
to save a few lines in sql_exec_error_callback() by using the
function source string field that the patch added to SQL function
cache entries. This doesn't work because the fn_extra field isn't
filled in yet during init_sql_fcache(). Probably it could be made
to work, but it doesn't seem appropriate to contort the main code
paths to make an error-reporting path a tad faster. Per report from
Pavel Stehule.

- Tweak the API for per-datatype typmodin functions so that they are
passed an array of strings rather than an array of integers, and
allow any simple constant or identifier to be used in typmods; for
example create table foo (f1 widget(42,'23skidoo',point)); Of course
the typmodin function has still got to pack this info into a
non-negative int32 for storage, but it's still a useful improvement
in flexibility, especially considering that you can do nearly
anything if you are willing to keep the info in a side table. We
can get away with this change since we have not yet released a
version providing user-definable typmods. Per discussion.

- Add some simple defenses against null fields in pg_largeobject, and
add comments noting that there's an alignment assumption now that
the data field could be in 1-byte-header format. Per discussion
with Greg Stark.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/init/flatfiles.c, add some comments about
the safety of accessing rolpassword without using the normal
heap_getattr() machinery. Per Greg Stark.

- Minor comment fixes in pgsql/src/include/utils/datetime.h.

- Fix DecodeDateTime to allow timezone to appear before year. This
had historically worked in some but not all cases, but as of 8.2 it
failed for all timezone formats. Fix, and add regression test cases
to catch future regressions in this area. Per gripe from Adam
Witney.

- Improve UPDATE/DELETE WHERE CURRENT OF so that they can be used from
plpgsql with a plpgsql-defined cursor. The underlying mechanism for
this is that the main SQL engine will now take "WHERE CURRENT OF $n"
where $n is a refcursor parameter. Not sure if we should document
that fact or consider it an implementation detail. Per discussion
with Pavel Stehule.

- Minor wording improvement in PL/PgSQL docs.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Applied patch by Joachim Wieland to enable checktcp again.

- Fixed reduce/recuce problem due to CURRENT_P.

- Synced parser and keyword list.

- Should not try to unlink stdout.

- Fixed one memory leak in descriptor code. Made sure ecpg deletes
output file in case of an error.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Satoshi Nagayasu sent in a brand new patch to log checkpointing load
information which will help tune the bgwriter parameters.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch which fixes two aesthetic bugs in the
1-byte packed varlena code.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a new patch or split-sleep of
autovacuum_naptime.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch which allows people to use updatable
cursors in plpgsql.

Zdenek Kotala sent in a patch for 8.4 to rename the script binaries.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch to pgbench's random number generator.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of his Load Distributed
Checkpoints patch.

Simon Riggs sent in an update version of his Transaction Guarantee
patch.

Tom Lane sent in a WIP patch that rewrites numeric division for more
correctness.