== Postgres Weekly News - January 06 2008 ==

== Postgres Weekly News - January 06 2008 ==

Watch this week for an important security announcement.

== Postgres Product News ==

GNUmed 0.2.8.1 released.
http://wiki.gnumed.de

pgAdmin III 1.8.1 released.
http://www.pgadmin.org/

PostgreSQL backend for Phorum 5 now in BETA:
http://www.phorum.org/phorum5/read.php?14,126510

== Postgres Jobs for January ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-01/threads.php

== Postgres Local ==

The CfP for OSCON July 21-25 2008 is open. Please submit a talk if
you can be in Portland.

PGCon 2008 will be May 20-23 in Ottawa - now accepting proposals.
http://www.pgcon.org/2008/papers.php

The BSD and PostgreSQL teams share a developer room at FOSDEM 2008 in
Brussels February 23-34, 2008. If you want to give a talk or help
managing the dev room, contact fosdem(at)pgug(dot)eu(dot) For more information,
see:
http://fosdem.org/2008/schedule/devroom/bsdpostgresql

PostgreSQL Conference East '08 talks are March 29 and 30 at the
University of Maryland, College Park. The Call for Papers is open.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

FISL 9.0 will be happening April 17-19, 2008 at PUCRS in Porto Alegre,
Brazil. Talk proposals are due by January 11, 2008.
https://fisl.softwarelivre.org/9.0/

== Postgres in the News ==

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

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

Postgres 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(at)fetter(dot)org, German language
to pwn(at)pgug(dot)de, Italian language to pwn(at)itpug(dot)org(dot)

== Applied Patches ==

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Put spaces after "RFC".

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/datatype.sgml, fix invalid ipv6 address in
example. Per doc comment 7211. Back-patch to 7.4.

Tom Lane committed:

- Fix some missed copyright updates.

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2007k.

- Fix plpython's overoptimistic caching of information about the
rowtype of a trigger's target table. The rowtype could change from
one call to the next, so cope in such cases, while avoiding doing
repetitive catalog lookups. Per bug #3847 from Mark Reid.
Backpatch to 8.2.x. Likely this fix should go further back, but I
can't test it because I no longer have a machine with a pre-2.5
Python installation. (Maybe we should rethink that idea about not
supporting Python 2.5 in the older branches.)

- Insert ARST into the list of known timezone abbreviations.
Back-patch to 7.4.

- Forbid ALTER TABLE and CLUSTER when there are pending AFTER-trigger
events in the current backend for the target table. These
operations move tuples around and would thus invalidate the TIDs
stored in the trigger event records. (We need not worry about
events in other backends, since acquiring exclusive lock should be
enough to ensure there aren't any.) It might be sufficient to
forbid only the table-rewriting variants of ALTER TABLE, but in the
absence of any compelling use-case, let's just be safe and simple.
Per follow-on investigation of bug #3847, though this is not
actually the same problem reported therein. Possibly this should be
back-patched, but since the case has never been reported from the
field, I didn't bother.

- Stamp release 8.3RC1.

- A long time ago, Peter pointed out that ruleutils.c didn't dump
simple constant ORDER/GROUP BY entries properly:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2001-04/msg00457.php
The original solution to that was in fact no good, as demonstrated
by today's report from Martin Pitt:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2008-01/msg00027.php We
can't use the column-number-reference format for a constant that is
a resjunk targetlist entry, a case that was unfortunately not
thought of in the original discussion. What we can do instead
(which did not work at the time, but does work in 7.3 and up) is to
emit the constant with explicit ::typename decoration, even if it
otherwise wouldn't need it. This is sufficient to keep the parser
from thinking it's a column number reference, and indeed is probably
what the user must have done to get such a thing into the querytree
in the first place.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/configure.in, provide a more helpful error message when
there is an autoconf version mismatch. Back-patch to 7.3.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, 8.3 is possible release on
2008-01-??, not 2007.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, update release notes to match
CVS HEAD.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, move a few release note items
from "Utility Commands" to "Object Manipulation".

- In pgsql/src/tools/copyright, modify copyright script to handle
cases where there is only one year in the copyright.

- Correct two more copyrights found by updated script.

- Add to TODO: "Allow multiple identical NOTIFY events to always be
communicated to the client, rather than sent as a single
notification to the listener."

- Add URL to TODO: 'Allow AS in "SELECT col AS label" to be optional
(not wanted)'

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Simon Riggs sent in a patch which changes the behavior of the archiver
on shutdown.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix some OUTER JOIN misbehavior.