Wöchentlicher PostgreSQL Newsletter - 08. Juli 2007

Der Originalartikel befindet sich unter:
http://people.planetpostgresql.org/dfetter/index.php?/archives/126-PostgreSQL-Weekly-News-July-08-2007.html

== Wöchentlicher PostgreSQL Newsletter - 08. Juli 2007 ==

Spec jAppserver Resultate sind verfügar und PostgreSQL sieht
sehr gut aus.
http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q3/

PgDay was ein großer Erfolg, es fand ebenfalls ein Kick-off Meeting für
die Europäische PostgreSQL User Group statt. Auf
http://www.planetpostgresql.org/ finden sich viele Postings dazu.

== PostgreSQL Jobs für July ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-07/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Der PDXPUG Tag auf der OSCON sucht nun dringend Sprecher. Dank
der Hilfe von O'Reilly haben wir einen ganzen Tag für PostgreSQL
Sessions am Tag vor der OSCON (Sonntag, den 22. Juli). Ändert eure
Flugtickets und reicht einen Talk ein!
http://developer.postgresql.org/index.php/OSCON07PGDay

== PostgreSQL in den News ==

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

General Bits, Archive und gelegentliche News Artikel:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

Dieser wöchentliche PostgreSQL Newsletter wurde erstellt von David
Fetter und Andreas (ads) Scherbaum.

Um deine Beiträge für die nächste Ausgabe zu übermitteln, sende diese
an david(at)fetter(dot)org oder in Deutsch an pwn(at)pgug(dot)de bis Sonntag, 15:00
Uhr Pazifischer Zeit.

== Angewandte Patches ==

Joe Conway committed:

- Restrict non-superusers to password authenticated connections to
prevent possible escalation of privilege. Provide new SECURITY
DEFINER functions with old behavior, but initially REVOKE ALL from
public for these functions. Per list discussion and design proposed
by Tom Lane. A different approach will be used for back-branches,
committed separately.

- Arrange for the authentication request type to be preserved in
PGconn. Invent a new libpq connection-status function,
PQconnectionUsedPassword() that returns true if the server demanded
a password during authentication, false otherwise. This may be
useful to clients in general, but is immediately useful to help plug
a privilege escalation path in dblink. Per list discussion and
design proposed by Tom Lane.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Per Magnus Hagander, remove from TODO: "Check
WSACancelBlockingCall() for interrupts [win32intr]"

Jan Wieck committed:

- Changed new \usleep command into \sleep with an optional time unit
argument to specify us, ms or s per suggestion by Peter Eisentraut.

- Added a new scripting meta command \usleep [milliseconds|:variable]
which can be used in -f scripts to insert a thinking time between
other commands.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Yoshiyuki Asaba's patch which moves parse.h into src/backend on
msvc, which is where it is on Unix. Fixes builds from tarballs
where the file is pre-generated.

- Dave Page's patch which fixes the -w (wait) option to work in
Windows service mode, per bug #3382, prevents the -w option being
passed to the postmaster, and reads the postmaster options file when
starting as a Windows service.

Tom Lane committed:

- Get rid of client-code dependencies on the exact text of the
no-password error message, by using PQconnectionUsedPassword()
instead. Someday we might be able to localize that error message,
but not until this coding technique has disappeared everywhere.

- Closer code review for PQconnectionUsedPassword() patch: in
particular, not OK to include postgres_fe.h into libpq-fe.h, hence
declare it as returning int not bool.

- Fix broken markup.

- Fix a couple of planner bugs introduced by the new ability to
discard ORDER BY <constant> as redundant. One is that this means
query_planner() has to canonicalize pathkeys even when the query
jointree is empty; the canonicalization was always a no-op in such
cases before, but no more. Also, we have to guard against thinking
that a set-returning function is "constant" for this purpose. Add a
couple of regression tests for these evidently under-tested cases.
Per report from Greg Stark and subsequent experimentation.

- Fix up hash functions for datetime datatypes so that they don't take
unwarranted liberties with int8 vs float8 values for these types.
Specifically, be sure to apply either hashint8 or hashfloat8
depending on HAVE_INT64_TIMESTAMP. Per my gripe of even date.

- Improve description of SPI_scroll_cursor_move's return values, per a
gripe by Pavel Stehule awhile ago.

- Fix incorrect comment about the timing of AbsorbFsyncRequests()
during checkpoint. The comment claimed that we could do this
anytime after setting the checkpoint REDO point, but actually
BufferSync is relying on the assumption that buffers dumped by other
backends will be fsync'd too. So we really could not do it any
sooner than we are doing it.

- Fix failure to restart Postgres when Linux kernel returns EIDRM for
shmctl(). This is a Linux kernel bug that apparently exists in
every extant kernel version: sometimes shmctl() will fail with EIDRM
when EINVAL is correct. We were assuming that EIDRM indicates a
possible conflict with pre-existing backends, and refusing to start
the postmaster when this happens. Fortunately, there does not seem
to be any case where Linux can legitimately return EIDRM (it doesn't
track shmem segments in a way that would allow that), so we can get
away with just assuming that EIDRM means EINVAL on this platform.
Per reports from Michael Fuhr and Jon Lapham --- it's a bit
surprising we have not seen more reports, actually.

== Abgelehnte Patches (bis jetzt) ==

ITAGAKI Takahiro's patch intended to fix the pgstat_drop_relation bug
on the grounds that it introduces relation OIDs into a level of the
system that should only be dealing in relfilenodes.

== Eingesandte Patches ==

Zdenek Kotala submitted a patch which renames createdb createlang
createuser dropdb droplang dropuser clusterdb vacuumdb and reindexdb
to pg_createdb pg_createlang pg_createuser pg_dropdb pg_droplang
pg_dropuser pg_clusterdb pg_vacuumdb and pg_reindexdb respectively.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch to track buffer allocation statistics
using new LRU method base code.

--
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
Deutsche PostgreSQL User Group: http://www.pgug.de
DPWN: http://ads.wars-nicht.de/blog/categories/18-PWN