== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 25 2011 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 25 2011 ==

Security releases 9.1.1, 9.0.5, 8.4.9, 8.3.16 and 8.2.22 are out.
Update ASAP if you're affected. Details below.
http://www.postgresql.org/about/news.1355

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

MicroOLAP Database Designer 1.8.1 for PostgreSQL released, now with
support for PostgreSQL 9.1.
http://microolap.com/products/database/postgresql-designer/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2011-09/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PostgreSQL Conference West (#PgWest) will be held September 27th-30th,
2011 at the San Jose Convention center in San Jose, California, USA.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2011 will be held on October 18-21 in
Amsterdam.
http://2011.pgconf.eu/

PG-Day Denver 2011 will be held on Friday, October 21st, 2011 at
the Auraria Campus near downtown Denver, Colorado.
http://pgday.consistentstate.com/

pgbr will be in Sao Paulo, Brazil November 3-4, 2011.
http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/

PGConf.DE 2011 is the German-speaking PostgreSQL Conference and will
take place on November 11th in the Rheinisches Industriemuseum in
Oberhausen, Germany. Call for Papers is open.
http://2011.pgconf.de/

The fifth edition of the Italian PostgreSQL Day (PGDay.IT 2011) will
be held on November 25, 2011 in Prato, Italy.
http://2011.pgday.it/

The Call for Papers for is open for FLOSS UK, which will be held in
Edinburgh from the 20th to the 22nd March 2012. The deadline for
proposals is the 18th November 2011 and selected speakers will be
notified by the 25th November 2011. Proposals should be submitted to
postgresql2012 AT flossuk DOT org. More information at:
http://www.flossuk.org/Events/Spring2012

== 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)

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane pushed:

- Improve reporting of newlocale() failures in CREATE COLLATION. The
standardized errno code for "no such locale" failures is ENOENT,
which we were just reporting at face value, viz "No such file or
directory". Per gripe from Thom Brown, this might confuse users, so
add an errdetail message to clarify what it means. Also, report
newlocale() failures as ERRCODE_INVALID_PARAMETER_VALUE rather than
using errcode_for_file_access(), since newlocale()'s errno values
aren't necessarily tied directly to file access failures.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/37d4fd2b9d331076292201ab988fe54f09640850

- Suppress "unused function" warning when not HAVE_LOCALE_T. Forgot
to consider this case ...
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2562dcea811eb642e1c5442e1ede9fe268278157

- Make EXPLAIN ANALYZE report the numbers of rows rejected by filter
steps. This provides information about the numbers of tuples that
were visited but not returned by table scans, as well as the numbers
of join tuples that were considered and discarded within a join plan
node. There is still some discussion going on about the best way to
report counts for outer-join situations, but I think most of what's
in the patch would not change if we revise that, so I'm going to go
ahead and commit it as-is. Documentation changes to follow (they
weren't in the submitted patch either). Marko Tiikkaja, reviewed by
Marc Cousin, somewhat revised by Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f1972723654947f70409716757aa83f3d93c8fab

- Update release notes for 9.1.1, 9.0.5, 8.4.9, 8.3.16, 8.2.22. Man,
we fixed a lotta bugs since April.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7f70f35031b4dea40ab4fa20638befc430e8ebaa

- Stamp 8.2.22, 8.3.16, 8.4.9, 9.0.5, 9.1.1.

- Update win32tzlist.pl for the new location of our Windows timezone
map. I wasn't aware of this script till Magnus Hagander mentioned
it just now ...
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/14a183261a1f9b15dc73ad34295d118ada538b5b

- Fix our mapping of Windows timezones for Central America. We were
mapping "Central America Standard Time" to "CST6CDT", which seems
entirely wrong, because according to the Olson timezone database
noplace in Central America observes daylight savings time on any
regular basis --- and certainly not according to the USA DST rules
that are implied by "CST6CDT". (Mexico is an exception, but they
can be disregarded since they have a separate timezone name in
Windows.) So, map this zone name to plain "CST6", which will
provide a fixed UTC offset. As written, this patch will also result
in mapping "Central America Daylight Time" to CST6. I considered
hacking things so that would still map to CST6CDT, but it seems it
would confuse win32tzlist.pl to put those two names in separate
entries. Since there's little evidence that any such zone name is
used in the wild, much less that CST6CDT would be a good match for
it, I'm not too worried about what we do with it. Per complaint
from Pratik Chirania.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4c5d837e69cf92e906acfa3000d848d4524beee9

- Recognize self-contradictory restriction clauses for non-table
relations. The constraint exclusion feature checks for
contradictions among scan restriction clauses, as well as
contradictions between those clauses and a table's CHECK
constraints. The first aspect of this testing can be useful for
non-table relations (such as subqueries or functions-in-FROM), but
the feature was coded with only the CHECK case in mind so we were
applying it only to plain-table RTEs. Move the
relation_excluded_by_constraints call so that it is applied to all
RTEs not just plain tables. With the default setting of
constraint_exclusion this results in no extra work, but with
constraint_exclusion = ON we will detect optimizations that we
missed before (at the cost of more planner cycles than we expended
before). Per a gripe from Gunnlaugur Þór Briem. Experimentation
with his example also showed we were not being very bright about the
case where constraint exclusion is proven within a subquery within
UNION ALL, so tweak the code to allow set_append_rel_pathlist to
recognize such cases.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7741dd6590073719688891898e85f0cb73453159

- Un-break compression of plain-text output format in pg_dump.
pg_dump has historically understood -Z with no -F switch to mean
that it should emit a gzip-compressed version of its plain text
output. This got broken through a misunderstanding in the 9.1 patch
that added directory output format. Restore the former behavior.
Per complaint from Roger Niederland and diagnosis by Adrian Klaver.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/23fe7a74777eba01835389263418cbe8a546e772

- Avoid unnecessary snapshot-acquisitions in BuildCachedPlan. I had
copied-and-pasted a claim that we couldn't reach this point when
dealing with utility statements, but that was a leftover from when
the caller was required to supply a plan to start with. We now will
go through here at least once when handling a utility statement, so
it seems worth a check to see whether a snapshot is actually needed.
(Note that analyze_requires_snapshot is quite a cheap test.) Per
suggestion from Yamamoto Takashi. I don't think I believe that this
resolves his reported assertion failure; but it's worth changing
anyway, just to save a cycle or two.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d5aa7a9fe68b2017362421bd853faeb8199a472c

- Fully const-ify PQconnectdbParams, PQconnectStartParams, and
PQpingParams. The keywords and values arguments of these functions
are more properly declared "const char * const *" than just "const
char **". Lionel Elie Mamane, reviewed by Craig Ringer
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2a571bc233821023afdf8729a3ae5071b2343f65

Robert Haas pushed:

- Fix another bit of unlogged-table-induced breakage. Per bug #6205,
reported by Abel Abraham Camarillo Ojeda. This isn't a particularly
elegant fix, but I'm trying to minimize the chances of causing yet
another round of breakage. Adjust regression tests to exercise this
case.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4893552e21b93149bb60f6204673cce855881a05

- Add --{no-,}replication flags to createuser. Fujii Masao, reviewed
by Cédric Villemain, with some doc changes by me.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b056b716e28562f5c53dfb143725294d44f14d38

- Add missing brackets to chkselinuxenv.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e50b052a3bc5611dbf1a521ac7bc3611695a5f22

- Document some more apparently-harmless error messages.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a5e94ea52b002a049ffa52849f2958c096cc0f92

- Teach sepgsql about database labels. This is still a bit of a hack,
but it's better than the old way, for sure. KaiGai Kohei, with one
change by me to make it compile
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/291873c1554ceecc71a81c25aef4f1260c15c222

- Memory barrier support for PostgreSQL. This is not actually used
anywhere yet, but it gets the basic infrastructure in place. It is
fairly likely that there are bugs, and support for some important
platforms may be missing, so we'll need to refine this as we go
along.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0c8eda6258805223fa412ab55a1f130fbc51afa0

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Translation updates
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f992679318ceea10f785e8653932f04b4003eef0

Simon Riggs pushed:

- synchronous_commit is an enum not a boolean. Jaime Casanova
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e5e2f7b0546c0409323af262bdd17a8e19ca3836

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Note that sslmode=require verifies the CA if root cert is present
This mode still exists for backwards compatibility, making
sslmode=require the same as sslmode=verify-ca when the file is
present, but not causing an error when it isn't. Per bug 6189,
reported by Srinivas Aji
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/33e81fdfaf6a8d92451cd780e5619ac5be0b44c9

- Fix typo
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0126db2a469c7dbe540354f4ac6691a6c1e3b94e

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Expand pgrminclude to exclude use of macros CppAsString and
CppConcat.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/337c0b03614c45516f2c3ec956405713bb264d54

- Document pgrminclude limitations.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/84bbe57dc128df224614c61f88c350ee9ed92123

- In pgrminclude, document requirement to use pgcompinclude, and sort
files so include removal is more predictable.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2594ad74360c647edfd0645c4097d78ff83b4c3b

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Jeff Davis sent in another revision of the patch to create range
types.

Peter Geoghegan sent in three revisions of a patch to speed up
comparators by inlining them.

Muhammad Asif sent in two revisions of a patch to fix an issue with
BSD sockets on HP-UX.

Alexander Korotkov sent in two more revisions of the double sorting
split patch.

Fujii Masao sent in another revision of the patch to allow doing a
backup from a hot standby.

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of the patch to remove
unnecessary ccache search when an array variable is updated in
PL/pgsql.

Yeb Havinga sent in a patch to refine dependency checking in
EXTENSIONs.

Magnus Hagander sent in two revisions of a patch to make the TABLE
command tab-complete both tables and views in psql. Before, it only
tab-completed tables.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to add a call to posix_fadvise with
POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED on all the files being read when doing a base
backup, to help the kernel not to trash the filesystem cache.

Oleg Bartunov sent in another revision of the patch to enable
space-partitioned GiST indexes.

Marti Raudsepp sent in another revision of the patch to cache stable
expressions with constant arguments.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch to allow COPY to support UTF8 files
with a byte order mark (BOM).