== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 13 2013 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 13 2013 ==

The first edition of the Australian PostgreSQL Day (PGDay.AU 2013)
will be held in Melbourne on February 4, 2013. Registration is free of
charge. Schedule and info:
http://2013.pgday.org.au/
Registration:
http://www.meetup.com/melpug

== PostgreSQL Jobs for January ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2013-01/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The FOSDEM PGDay conference that will be held before FOSDEM in
Brussels, Belgium, on Feb 1st, 2013. The CfP for both this event and
for the PG track of FOSDEM are open.
http://fosdem2013.pgconf.eu/callforpapers/

PyPgDay will be held on March 13th at the Santa Clara Convention
Center, the first day of PyCon. Info here:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PyPgDay2013
Submit your proposal here by January 20, 2013:
http://tinyurl.com/PyPgDayCfP

PGDay NYC 2013 will be held on March 22, 2013 in New York City. The
CfP submission deadline is January 7th, 2013 at noon eastern time.
papers AT nycpug DOT org.
http://pgday.nycpug.org/speakers

PostgreSQL Session will be held on March 28th, 2013 in Paris,
France. The Call for Papers is open.
http://www.postgresql-sessions.org/en/5/

PGCon 2013 will be held May 23-24 2013, in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa. The Call for Papers is open.
http://www.pgcon.org/2013/

== 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 ==

Robert Haas pushed:

- Fix incorrect error message when schema-CREATE permission is absent.
Report by me. Fix by KaiGai Kohei.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a0dc23f2058b3b2a3ab8c131914aba40f96db19f

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Fix a logic bug in pgindent.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/74570db99c5fc1071762c12e220de2e65593368f

- Detect Windows perl linkage parameters in configure script. This
means we can now construct a configure test for the library
presence. Previously these parameters were only figured out at build
time in plperl's GnuMakefile.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7fb97ecd137a879831ec6e3dce14c9f2e2a3d6b5

- Extend and improve use of EXTRA_REGRESS_OPTS. This is now used by
ecpg tests, and not clobbered by pg_upgrade tests. This change won't
affect anything that doesn't set this environment variable, but will
enable the buildfarm to control exactly what port regression test
installs will be running on, and thus to detect possible rogue
postmasters more easily. Backpatch to release 9.2 where
EXTRA_REGRESS_OPTS was first used.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4ae5ee6c9b4dd7cd7e4471a44d371b228a9621c3

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Fix typo
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f31d5baff6cda85554731926bd63268a3c0afa1c

- Make spelling more uniform
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9d2cd99a60cfb62951c9ec21f9d12c36c8cfa607

Tom Lane pushed:

- Fix potential corruption of lock table in CREATE/DROP INDEX
CONCURRENTLY. If VirtualXactLock() has to wait for a transaction
that holds its VXID lock as a fast-path lock, it must first convert
the fast-path lock to a regular lock. It failed to take the
required "partition" lock on the main shared-memory lock table while
doing so. This is the direct cause of the assert failure in
GetLockStatusData() recently observed in the buildfarm, but more
worryingly it could result in arbitrary corruption of the shared
lock table if some other process were concurrently engaged in
modifying the same partition of the lock table. Fortunately,
VirtualXactLock() is only used by CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY and DROP
INDEX CONCURRENTLY, so the opportunities for failure are fewer than
they might have been. In passing, improve some comments and be a
bit more consistent about order of operations.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c00dc337b8752ec959e27bfdc58e13f3d305154a

- Add explicit configure-time checks for perl.h and libperl.so.
Although most platforms seem to package Perl in such a way that
these files are present even in basic Perl installations, Debian
does not. Hence, make an effort to fail during configure rather
than build if --with-perl was given and these files are lacking.
Per gripe from Josh Berkus.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1f3ed51f8e197e9bbf18737a1aa1148ed730f7d8

- Test linking libperl.so using only Perl's required libraries. It
appears that perl_embed_ldflags should already mention all the
libraries that are required by libperl.so itself. So let's try the
test link with just those and not the other LIBS we've found up to
now. This should more nearly reproduce what will happen when plperl
is linked, and perhaps will fix buildfarm member okapi's problem.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9d5a160ca3af8f9488d2556fb28b9941d4926ff7

- Last-gasp attempt to save libperl.so configure probe. I notice that
plperl's makefile adds the -I for $perl_archlibexp/CORE at the end
of CPPFLAGS not the beginning. It seems somewhat unlikely that the
include search order has anything to do with why buildfarm member
okapi is failing, but I'm about out of other ideas.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e1b735ae35f225927c95746babafaa84e39c3325

- Redesign the planner's handling of index-descent cost estimation.
Historically we've used a couple of very ad-hoc fudge factors to try
to get the right results when indexes of different sizes would
satisfy a query with the same number of index leaf tuples being
visited. In commit 21a39de5809cd3050a37d2554323cc1d0cbeed9d I
tweaked one of these fudge factors, with results that proved
disastrous for larger indexes. Commit
bf01e34b556ff37982ba2d882db424aa484c0d07 fudged it some more, but
still with not a lot of principle behind it. What seems like a
better way to address these issues is to explicitly model
index-descent costs, since that's what's really at stake when
considering diferent indexes with similar leaf-page-level costs. We
tried that once long ago, and found that charging random_page_cost
per page descended through was way too much, because upper btree
levels tend to stay in cache in real-world workloads. However,
there's still CPU costs to think about, and the previous fudge
factors can be seen as a crude attempt to account for those costs.
So this patch replaces those fudge factors with explicit charges for
the number of tuple comparisons needed to descend the index tree,
plus a small charge per page touched in the descent. The cost
multipliers are chosen so that the resulting charges are in the
vicinity of the historical (pre-9.2) fudge factors for indexes of up
to about a million tuples, while not ballooning unreasonably beyond
that, as the old fudge factor did (even more so in 9.2). To make
this work accurately for btree indexes, add some code that allows
extraction of the known root-page height from a btree. There's no
equivalent number readily available for other index types, but we
can use the log of the number of index pages as an approximate
substitute. This seems like too much of a behavioral change to risk
back-patching, but it should improve matters going forward. In 9.2
I'll just revert the fudge-factor change.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/31f38f28b00cbe2b9267205359e3cf7bafa1cb97

- Improve handling of ereport(ERROR) and elog(ERROR). In commit
71450d7fd6c7cf7b3e38ac56e363bff6a681973c, we added code to inform
suitably-intelligent compilers that ereport() doesn't return if the
elevel is ERROR or higher. This patch extends that to elog(), and
also fixes a double-evaluation hazard that the previous commit
created in ereport(), as well as reducing the emitted code size.
The elog() improvement requires the compiler to support __VA_ARGS__,
which should be available in just about anything nowadays since it's
required by C99. But our minimum language baseline is still C89, so
add a configure test for that. The previous commit assumed that
ereport's elevel could be evaluated twice, which isn't terribly safe
--- there are already counterexamples in xlog.c. On compilers that
have __builtin_constant_p, we can use that to protect the second
test, since there's no possible optimization gain if the compiler
doesn't know the value of elevel. Otherwise, use a local variable
inside the macros to prevent double evaluation. The local-variable
solution is inferior because (a) it leads to useless code being
emitted when elevel isn't constant, and (b) it increases the
optimization level needed for the compiler to recognize that
subsequent code is unreachable. But it seems better than not
teaching non-gcc compilers about unreachability at all. Lastly, if
the compiler has __builtin_unreachable(), we can use that instead of
abort(), resulting in a noticeable code savings since no function
call is actually emitted. However, it seems wise to do this only in
non-assert builds. In an assert build, continue to use abort(), so
that the behavior will be predictable and debuggable if the
"impossible" happens. These changes involve making the ereport and
elog macros emit do-while statement blocks not just expressions,
which forces small changes in a few call sites. Andres Freund, Tom
Lane, Heikki Linnakangas
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b853eb97182079dcd30b4f52576bd5d6c275ee71

- Update comments for elog_start(). Forgot I was going to do this as
part of the previous patch ...
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/24dd0502a106102d81782de4966c476fd0ab2efa

- Prevent very-low-probability PANIC during PREPARE TRANSACTION. The
code in PostPrepare_Locks supposed that it could reassign locks to
the prepared transaction's dummy PGPROC by deleting the PROCLOCK
table entries and immediately creating new ones. This was safe when
that code was written, but since we invented partitioning of the
shared lock table, it's not safe --- another process could steal
away the PROCLOCK entry in the short interval when it's on the
freelist. Then, if we were otherwise out of shared memory,
PostPrepare_Locks would have to PANIC, since it's too late to back
out of the PREPARE at that point. Fix by inventing a dynahash.c
function to atomically update a hashtable entry's key. (This might
possibly have other uses in future.) This is an ancient bug that in
principle we ought to back-patch, but the odds of someone hitting it
in the field seem really tiny, because (a) the risk window is small,
and (b) nobody runs servers with maxed-out lock tables for long,
because they'll be getting non-PANIC out-of-memory errors anyway.
So fixing it in HEAD seems sufficient, at least until the new code
has gotten some testing.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2065dd2834e832eb820f1fbcd16746d6af1f6037

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Allow parallel copy/link in pg_upgrade. This patch implements
parallel copying/linking of files by tablespace using the --jobs
option in pg_upgrade.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a89c46f9bc314ed549245d888da09b8c5cace104

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Don't attempt to write recovery.conf when -R is not specified.
Fixes segmentation fault during regular use. Fujii Masao
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b5ed1376c61b341939ef3f54996a5c5af3408a06

- Properly install ecpg_compat and pgtypes libraries on msvc.
JiangGuiqing
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6e650a55cda9291bbeebd6b1aa6aedbd3d15e622

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Takeshi Yamamuro sent in a patch to speed up compression in
pg_lzcompress.c.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to add a str handler to PL/Python.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another revision of a patch to make
pg_basebackup recvlog nonblocking.

Tomas Vondra sent in two more revisions of a patch to optimize
dropping multiple tables in a transaction.

Alvaro Herrera and KaiGai Kohei traded patches reworking the ALTER
commands.

Noah Misch sent in two revisions of a patch to improve heap cleanup.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in a patch implementing TEMPLATEs for
EXTENSIONs, a capability intended to help allow adding all-text
installs of templates.

Andrew Dunstan sent in two more revisions of a patch to add a JSON API
along with a stand-alone JSON parser patch.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to allow psql's \l to accept
patterns.

KaiGai Kohei sent in a patch to fix some infelicities in ALTER SCHEMA.

Josh Kupershmidt sent in a patch to fix some poor examples in the
pg_dump README.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to centralize the Assert* macros into
c.h so it's common between backend/frontend.

Andres Freund sent in another revision of a patch to add an xlogreader
functionality.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to remove an extra space in
running_xact's _desc function.

Andres Freund sent in another revision of a patch to add a pg_xlogdump
contrib module.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to make relpathbackend return a
statically result instead of palloc()'ing it.

Peter Eisentraut implemented parameter_default for the information
schema.

Fujii Masao sent in a patch to fix a segfault in pg_basebackup.

Alvaro Herrera sent in another revision of a patch to add information
to event triggers.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to reduce WAL traffic
on updates to improve performance.

Greg Smith sent in a patch to fix an issue where a buffer assertion
was tripping under repeat pgbench load.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to enable changing
postgresql.conf via SQL.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to use pg_malloc instead of an unchecked
malloc in pg_resetxlog.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to provide common malloc wrappers and
palloc et al. emulation for frontend'ish environs

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to avoid doing extra
WAL during checkpoints.

Alvaro Herrera sent in another revision of a patch to implement
foreign key locks.

Hitoshi Harada sent in a patch to ensure that TO_DATE() receives
dates in its valid range.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to support the missing ECHO_HIDDEN
behavior in the \sf functionality of psql.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to allow privileges on untrusted
languages.

Andrew Dunstan sent in a patch to enhance JSON generation.

Simon Riggs sent in a WIP patch to allow logging the plans of
cancelled queries.

Jan Urbanski sent in a patch to fix the SQL syntax of a comment in
src/backend/executor/execProcnode.c

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to ensure that
src/backend/storage/lmgr/lock.c hashes once to match the comment in it
and save cycles.

Aaron W. Swenson sent in a patch to ensure that pg_ctl promote returns
3 per Linux Standard Base Core Specification 3.1.

Bruce Momjian sent in a patch to add the long-requested LaTeX
longtable format to psql.

Andrew Dunstan sent in a patch to enable psql to produce binary
output.

Marko Kreen sent in a patch to fix pgcrypto seeding when SSL is on.

Stephen Frost sent in a patch to add COPY ... COMPRESSED.