== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 26 2010 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 26 2010 ==

Happy Boxing Day from the PostgreSQL Weekly News!

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

psycopg2 2.3.2 a Python connector for PostgreSQL, released.
http://initd.org/psycopg/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for December ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2010-12/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

FOSDEM is one of the biggest Free and Open Source event held annually
in Brussels, Belgium, on February 5-6, 2011, and attended by around
4000 people. Send in your proposal to fosdem AT postgresql DOT eu.
http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/749-PostgreSQLFOSDEM-2011-Call-for-talks.html

The Call for Papers for the fourth annual Prague PostgreSQL
Developers' Day is open. It will be held February 10, 2011 at Charles
University in Prague.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2010-12/msg00009.php

The PostgreSQLFr Call for Projects has begun. Projects must target
PostgreSQL and the French-speaking community. Mail appel-projets-2010
AT postgresql DOT fr.
http://www.postgresql.fr/appel_a_projets_2010:call_for_projects

PGDay is scheduled at this year's Southern California Linux Exposition
(SCALE) held in the LAX Hilton Hotel in the city of Los Angeles,
California, on Friday February 25th, 2011. Post your talk submission
to pgday-submissions AT googlegroups DOT com.

PostgreSQL Conference East 2011: NYC March 22nd - 25th
http://www.postgresqlconference.org

PGCon will be May 19-20, 2011 at the University of Ottawa, preceded by
two days of tutorials on May 17-18. The Call for Papers is open!
http://www.pgcon.org/2011/

== 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) Spanish language
to pwn(at)arpug(dot)com(dot)ar(dot)

== Reviews ==

== Applied Patches ==

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- Fix typo. Jaime Casanova.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=f9e9763b62df5415a60f30b441a73b381599e760

Robert Haas pushed:

- Allow transactions that don't write WAL to commit asynchronously.
This case can arise if a transaction has written data, but only to
temporary tables. Loss of the commit record in case of a crash
won't matter, because the temporary tables will be lost anyway.
Reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas and Simon Riggs.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=f6a0863e3cb72763490ceca2c558d5ef2dddd5f2

- Work around unfortunate getppid() behavior on BSD-ish systems. On
MacOS X, and apparently also on other BSD-derived systems, attaching
a debugger causes getppid() to return the pid of the debugging
process rather than the actual parent PID. As a result, debugging
the autovacuum launcher, startup process, or WAL sender on such
systems causes it to exit, because the previous coding of
PostmasterIsAlive() detects postmaster death by testing whether
getppid() == PostmasterPid. Work around that behavior by checking
the return value of getppid() more carefully. If it's
PostmasterPid, the postmaster must be alive; if it's 1, assume the
postmaster is dead. If it's any other value, assume we've been
debugged and fall through to the less-reliable kill() test. Review
by Tom Lane.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=24ecde7742cd4d7c781e6890b07571fff42b25dc

- Fix typos. Andreas Karlsson.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=c5160b7eecf97a357375960b02a30317474334a3

- Use memcmp() rather than strncmp() when shorter string length is
known. It appears that this will be faster for all but the shortest
strings; at least one some platforms, memcmp() can use
word-at-a-time comparisons. Noah Misch, somewhat pared down.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=32ba2b516066688ff56e6d62a7ff4a01c88f5700

- Typo fix. Noted by Thom Brown.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=2a0f13a765befefc2658d3729f3e174b7c252125

- Document pg_dump(all) --no-security-label instead of --security-label.
The former is the option actually supported by these commands.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=a1b0035949da09bb0f19d2d9c2d54ca54ca55752

- Correct spelling: longjump() -> longjmp().
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=4ec92b05e640b0991ba67d41cbb097200200fe70

- Add foreign data wrapper error code values for SQL/MED. Extracted
from a much larger patch by Shigeru Hanada.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=85cff3ce7f360d139d87aee836d75a6202fee066

- Corrections to patch adding SQL/MED error codes. My previous
commit, 85cff3ce7f360d139d87aee836d75a6202fee066 on 2010-12-25,
failed to update errcodes.sgml or plerrcodes.h. This patch corrects
that oversight, per a gripe from Tom Lane, and also corrects a
typographical error.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=63676ebff402050f6b0b347188f5e857474da9e1

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Add PQlibVersion() function to libpq. This function is like the
PQserverVersion() function except it returns the version of libpq,
making it possible for a client program or driver to determine which
version of libpq is in use at runtime, and not just at link time.
Suggested by Harald Armin Massa and several others.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=de9a4c27fefcc0d104bc9c97f4a93a49a25bf66d

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Wording improvements for pg_ctl manual page.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=28d5c565ced893366d010e6754a9fad6d0a40364

- Document that BBU's do not allow partial page writes to be safely
turned off unless they guarantee that all writes to the BBU arrive
in 8kB chunks. Per discussion with Greg Smith
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=7a1ca8977fd109a86b540444f71f24bd2f38ea43

- Improve "pg_ctl -w start" server detection by writing the postmaster
port and socket directory into postmaster.pid, and have pg_ctl read
from that file, for use by PQping().
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=075354ad1bc0496c30dbd4dafb0f88a4d3e54cbc

- Backpatch to 9.0 a doc mention that a BBU does not prevent partial
page writes.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=c47458529533bc88e34778818a4ce7d5c309d7a8

- Remove quotes from boolean recovery.conf.sample parameters, now that
the quotes are not required. This now matches postgresql.conf's
specification of booleans.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=5000472112da91023bf468e57bb8ce9217426ed7

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Rewrite the GiST insertion logic so that we don't need the
post-recovery cleanup stage to finish incomplete inserts or splits
anymore. There was two reasons for the cleanup step: 1. When a new
tuple was inserted to a leaf page, the downlink in the parent needed
to be updated to contain (i.e. to be consistent with) the new key.
Updating the parent in turn might require recursively updating the
parent of the parent. We now handle that by updating the parent
while traversing down the tree, so that when we insert the leaf
tuple, all the parents are already consistent with the new key, and
the tree is consistent at every step. 2. When a page is split, we
need to insert the downlink for the new right page(s), and update
the downlink for the original page to not include keys that moved to
the right page(s). We now handle that by setting a new flag,
F_FOLLOW_RIGHT, on the non-rightmost pages in the split. When that
flag is set, scans always follow the rightlink, regardless of the
NSN mechanism used to detect concurrent page splits. That way the
tree is consistent right after split, even though the downlink is
still missing. This is very similar to the way B-tree splits are
handled. When the downlink is inserted in the parent, the flag is
cleared. To keep the insertion algorithm simple, when an insertion
sees an incomplete split, indicated by the F_FOLLOW_RIGHT flag, it
finishes the split before doing anything else. These changes allow
removing the whole "invalid tuple" mechanism, but I retained the
scan code to still follow invalid tuples correctly. While we don't
create any such tuples anymore, we want to handle them gracefully in
case you pg_upgrade a GiST index that has them. If we encounter any
on an insert, though, we just throw an error saying that you need to
REINDEX. The issue that got me into doing this is that if you did a
checkpoint while an insert or split was in progress, and the
checkpoint finishes quickly so that there is no WAL record related
to the insert between RedoRecPtr and the checkpoint record, recovery
from that checkpoint would not know to finish the incomplete insert.
IOW, we have the same issue we solved with the rm_safe_restartpoint
mechanism during normal operation too. It's highly unlikely to
happen in practice, and this fix is far too large to backpatch, so
we're just going to live with in previous versions, but this
refactoring fixes it going forward. With this patch, you don't get
the annoying 'index "FOO" needs VACUUM or REINDEX to finish crash
recovery' notices anymore if you crash at an unfortunate moment.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=9de3aa65f01fb51cbc725e8508ea233e4e92c46c

Michael Meskes pushed:

- Added rule to ecpg lexer to accept "Unicode surrogate pair in
extended quoted string". This is not really needed because the
string gets copied to the output untranslated anyway, but by adding
this rule the lexer stays in sync with the backend lexer.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=727a5a1620dd9f84036f8094f99a6ea494143bef

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Move the documentation of --no-security-label to a more sensible
place. The order on the pg_dump/pg_dumpall man pages is not very
strict, but surely putting it under connection options was wrong.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=4b1742a192a60b9c063fd7e93f5aed7a697bece1

- Release notes for 9.1alpha3.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=b2fd345ab9ef5857ff42e6d81d57a0f15247b430

- Fix grammar.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=79a9decdd33c9662c0722ef1d49d8aa951739da4

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Allow vpath builds and regression tests to succeed on Mingw.
Backpatch to release 8.4 - earlier releases would require more
changes and it's not worth the trouble.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=04ee0db6b287a1ff41b55cc440769a1dddc318a7

- Only build in crashdump support on Windows if there's a working
dbghelp.h.
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=a534728afb7341e1ddf2df16196ed501eaa378c2

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Magnus Hagander sent in another revision of the patch to allow
querying the version of libpq.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the patch to export some
of the functions COPY uses. This will help, among other things, the
SQL/MED file-based operations.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in two more revisions of the patch to add
extensions.

Andrew Dunstan sent in a patch to allow a vpath build to be used on
MingW.

Noah Misch sent in a patch to change strncmp to memcmp when we know
the shorter length. In the tests he ran, this resulted in a 13% speed
boost.

Noah Misch sent in a patch based on the above patch to check lengths
texteq, textne, byteaeq and byteane before detoasting, as unequal
lengths imply inequality without further elaboration.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a patch atop Dimitri Fontaine's extension
patch.

Sushant Sinha sent in a patch to fix an off-by-one error in
ts_rank_cd.

Shigeru HANADA sent in another revision of the file_fdw patch for
SQL/MED.

Merlin Moncure sent in a patch which makes the existence of hint bits
a compile time option.

Alex Hunsaker sent in another revision of the patch to fix an issue
with PL/PerlU's handling of utf8.

Fujii Masao sent in two more revisions of a patch to fix a bug in
SignalSomeChildren.

Bruce Momjian sent in a patch to add the port number and optionally
socket directory location to postmaster.pid, and modify pg_ctl to use
that information.

Jan Urbanski sent in a flock of patches to refactor PL/PythonU.

Tomas Vondra sent in another revisions of the patch to allow people to
see the timestamp at which stats were reset by database if any table,
index or function's statistics have been reset.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to change walsender to require a
special privilege for replication.

KaiGai Kohei sent in SE-PostgreSQL as a contrib module.

Shigeru HANADA sent in another revision of the patch to make file_fdw
work.

Robert Haas sent in another revision of the patch to add unlogged
tables.

Kevin Grittner sent in a patch to address issues with long-running
transactions in SERIALIZABLE isolation mode.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the patch to add SQL
standard MULTISETs.