== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 20 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 20 2009 ==

Registration for PGCon Brazil 2009 is open.
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-09/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

There will be a conference in Seattle, Washington, USA October 16-18,
2009.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/2009/west

PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in
Campinas, Sao Paulo state. Registration open!
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/2009/

PGDay.EU 2009 will be at Telecom ParisTech in Paris, France on
November 6-7, 2009.
http://www.pgday.eu/

OpenSQL Camp in Portland is looking for sponsors. Make your travel plans now! :)
http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2009/07/29/opensql-camp-comes-to-portland-november-14-15-2009/

JPUG 10th Anniversary Conference is November 20-21, 2009 in Tokyo, Japan.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2009-05/msg00018.php

FOSDEM 2010 will be in Brussels, Belgium on February 6-7, 2010.
http://www.fosdem.org/

Chemnitzer Linuxtage will be in Chemnitz, Germany on March 13-14, 2010.
http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/

== 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(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:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/Makefile, print builds don't actually depend
on html target (anymore).

- Add errcontext support to PL/Perl[U]. Alexey Klyukin.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc-file.l, when reloading
postgresql.conf, log what parameters actually changed

- Improve wording of error message when a postgresql.conf setting is
ignored because it can only be set at server start. In particular,
hiding the main reason in the detail message was suboptimal.

- Easier to translate psql help. Instead of requiring translators to
translate the entire SQL command synopses, change create_help.pl to
only require them to translate the placeholders, and paste those
into the synopsis using a printf mechanism. Make some small updates
to the markup to make it easier to parse. Note: This causes
msgmerge of gettext 0.17 to segfault. You will need the patch from
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?27474 to make it work. msgmerge
usually only runs on babel.postgresql.org, however.

- Make the placeholder naming in the synopses of the SQL help more
consistent.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/libpq/md5.c, fix possible buffer overrun and/or
unportable behavior in pg_md5_encrypt() if salt_len == 0. This
seems to be mostly academic, since nearly all calling code paths
guarantee nonempty salt; the only case that doesn't is
PQencryptPassword where the caller could mistakenly pass an empty
username. So, fix it but don't bother backpatching. Per ljb.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/gin/ginfast.c, fix two distinct errors
in creation of GIN_INSERT_LISTPAGE xlog records. In practice these
mistakes were always masked when full_page_writes was on, because
XLogInsert would always choose to log the full page, and then
ginRedoInsertListPage wouldn't try to do anything. But with
full_page_writes off a WAL replay failure was certain. The
GIN_INSERT_LISTPAGE record type could probably be eliminated
entirely in favor of using XLOG_HEAP_NEWPAGE, but I refrained from
doing that now since it would have required a significantly more
invasive patch. In passing do a little bit of code cleanup,
including making the accounting for free space on GIN list pages
more precise. (This wasn't a bug as the errors were always in the
conservative direction.) Per report from Simon Riggs. Back-patch
to 8.4 which contains the identical code.

- Implement "join removal" for cases where the inner side of a left
join is unique and is not referenced above the join. In this case
the inner side doesn't affect the query result and can be thrown
away entirely. Although perhaps nobody would ever write such a
thing by hand, it's a reasonably common case in machine-generated
SQL. The current implementation only recognizes the case where the
inner side is a simple relation with a unique index matching the
query conditions. This is enough for the use-cases that have been
shown so far, but we might want to try to handle other cases later.
Robert Haas, somewhat rewritten by Tom Lane.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/path/joinpath.c, marginal code
cleanup in joinpath.c: factor out clause variable-membership tests
into a small common subroutine, and eliminate an unnecessary
difference in the order in which conditions are tested. Per a
comment from Robert Haas.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/copy.sgml, a bit more wordsmithing on the
COPY CSV NULL business.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/path/joinpath.c, rename new
subroutine, per discussion with Robert Haas.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/.cvsignore, sql_help.c needs to be
cvsignore'd.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/copy.c, remove a couple hundred lines of ugly
and tedious-to-maintain code by not trying to parse COPY options
exactly in psql's \copy support. Instead, just send the options
as-is and let the backend sort it out. Emmanuel Cecchet.

- Allow plpgsql IN parameters to be assigned to. Since the parameters
are just preinitialized local variables, this does not affect the
function's semantics as seen by callers; allowing assignment simply
avoids the need to create more local variables in some cases. In
any case we were being rather inconsistent since only scalar
parameters were getting marked constant. No documentation change,
since parameters were never documented as being marked constant
anyway. Steve Prentice.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Applied ECPG patch by Zoltan Boszormenyi to add missing ";" to rule
in pgc.l.

- In ECPG, added patch by Bernd Helmle that adds a low level function
that returns the current transaction status.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/copy.sgml, CSV NULL Documentation.
Clarify documentation of CSV's output of NULL values, per suggestion
from Magnus. Backpatch to 8.4.X.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/copy.sgml, CSV NULL Documentation. Update
docs to clearly explain NULL value matching behavior, per Andrew
Dunstan. Backpatch to 8.4.X.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/gist/gistproc.c, fix incorrect arguments
for gist_box_penalty call. The bug could be observed only for
secondary page split (i.e. for non-first columns of index). Patch
by Paul Ramsey.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Solution.pm, fix MSVC build breakage from
psql help changes. Per Josh Williams.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Pavel Stehule sent in two more revisions of the patch for named/mixed
notation in PL/pgsql.

Pierre Frederic Caillaud sent in another revision of the LWlocks
instrumentation patch.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in two more WIP patches for index-only quals.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the per-column trigger
patch.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the ACL refactoring patch.

Fujii Masao sent in another revision of the streaming replication
patch.

Magnus Hagander sent in a WIP patch to refactor the syslogger
infrastructure, which he has been working on with Josh Tolley.

Andrew (RhodiumToad) Gierth sent in two more revisions of the hstore
patch.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the patch to fix encoding
issues vs. eventlog on win32.

Jeff Davis sent in another revision of the generalized index
constraints patch.

Simon Riggs sent in a giant patch to implement Hot Standby.

Robert Haas sent in a patch to fix his earlier join removal patch.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent an updated patch to fix query cancel issues in
dblink.

Abhijit Menon-Sen sent in patches to change logging parameters.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to add a vacuumfull contrib module,
per discussion.

Emmanuel Cecchet sent in five more revisions of a patch to add generic
options to COPY.

Michael Paquier sent in two more updated patches adding shell commands
to pgbench.

Stef Walter sent in another revision of the samehost/samenet patch for
pg_hba.conf.

Robert Fleming sent in two revisions of a patch to allow PostgreSQL to
do an LDAP search to determine the user's DN.

Zdenek Kotala sent in a patch to add an init option to pg_ctl.

Heikki Linnakangas sent a WIP patch to make walreceiver a stand-alone
program. This is for streaming replication.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another patch for SQLDA support in ECPG.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in two revisions of a DESCRIBE patch for ECPG.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in a patch to fix a memory leak in NUMERIC in
ECPG.

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of the patch to fix handling of
MOVE and FETCH in PL/pgsql.

Bernd Helmle sent in a revision of the patch to allow more complex
user and database default GUCs.

Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek sent in another revision of the default ACLs
patch.

Pierre Frederic Caillaud sent in another revision of the LWLock
instrumentation patch.