== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 11 2013 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 11 2013 ==

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

openBarter 0.8.2, a postgres extension implementing primitives of a
barter market place model, released.
http://olivierch.github.com/openBarter/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for August ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2013-08/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PostgreSQL Brazil will be held August 15-17, 2013 in Porto Velho, RO,
Brazil.
http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/2013/chamada.en.php

Postgres Open 2013 will be in Chicago, IL, USA, September 16-18.
The list of talks has been posted on the site.
http://postgresopen.org/

The Italian PGDay (PGDay.IT) will be held on October the 25th in
Prato, Tuscany, Italy, at Monash University Center.
The International Call For Papers is open:
http://2013.pgday.it/index.php/programma/call-for-papers-english/

pgconf.EU 2013 will be held on Oct 29-Nov 1, 2013 at the Conrad Hotel
in downtown Dublin, Ireland. The CfP is open.
http://2013.pgconf.eu/

PGConf.DE 2013 will be held November 8th, 2013, at the Rhineland
Industrial Museum in Oberhausen. The CfP is open through September
15, 2013.
http://2013.pgconf.de/

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://planet.postgresql.org/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter

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== Applied Patches ==

Kevin Grittner pushed:

- Various cleanups for REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW CONCURRENTLY. Open
and lock each index before checking definition in RMVC. The
ExclusiveLock on the related table is not viewed as sufficient to
ensure that no changes are made to the index definition, and
invalidation messages from other backends might have been missed.
Additionally, use RelationGetIndexExpressions() and check for NIL
rather than doing our own loop. Protect against redefinition of tid
and rowvar operators in RMVC. While working on this, noticed that
the fixes for bugs found during the CF made the UPDATE statement
useless, since no rows could qualify for that treatment any more.
Ripping out code to support the UPDATE statement simplified the
operator cleanups. Change slightly confusing local field name. Use
meaningful alias names on queries in refresh_by_match_merge(). Per
concerns of raised by Andres Freund and comments and suggestions
from Noah Misch. Some additional issues remain, which will be
addressed separately.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/841c29c8b3be98ee30486ee245ebee782d4dedd4

Tom Lane pushed:

- Simplify query_planner's API by having it return the top-level
RelOptInfo. Formerly, query_planner returned one or possibly two
Paths for the topmost join relation, so that grouping_planner didn't
see the join RelOptInfo (at least not directly; it didn't have any
hesitation about examining cheapest_path->parent, though). However,
correct selection of the Paths involved a significant amount of
coupling between query_planner and grouping_planner, a problem which
has gotten worse over time. It seems best to give up on this API
choice and instead return the topmost RelOptInfo explicitly. Then
grouping_planner can pull out the Paths it wants from the rel's path
list. In this way we can remove all knowledge of grouping behaviors
from query_planner. The only real benefit of the old way is that in
the case of an empty FROM clause, we never made any RelOptInfos at
all, just a Path. Now we have to gin up a dummy RelOptInfo to
represent the empty FROM clause. That's not a very big deal though.
While at it, simplify query_planner's API a bit more by having the
caller set up root->tuple_fraction and root->limit_tuples, rather
than passing those values as separate parameters. Since
query_planner no longer does anything with either value, requiring
it to fill the PlannerInfo fields seemed pretty arbitrary. This
patch just rearranges code; it doesn't (intentionally) change any
behaviors. Followup patches will do more interesting things.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3ced8837db2cd602422bb36102cec73289691d40

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- pgtest: allow passing parameters, e.g. -s/--silent. Previously only
-n was recognized.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f347f26807862522309a2b15e332518df3e5e6f0

- Docs: Document to_*() Julian values are integers. Backpatch to
9.3. Per request from Marc Dahn
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/72039b1d8d476184b47d8023d059dda2ff307a93

- docs: mention Julian is midnight _UTC_. (Yes, there was no UTC
back then, but we compute it that way.) Backpatch to 9.3.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f738156f516518b89d7ed20e357fc03b25184420

Fujii Masao pushed:

- Fix assertion failure by an immediate shutdown. In PM_WAIT_DEAD_END
state, checkpointer process must be dead already. But an immediate
shutdown could make postmaster's state machine transition to
PM_WAIT_DEAD_END state even if checkpointer process is still
running, and which caused assertion failure. This bug was
introduced in commit 457d6cf049c57cabe9b46ea13f26138040a214ec. This
patch ensures that postmaster's state machine doesn't transition to
PM_WAIT_DEAD_END state in an immediate shutdown while checkpointer
process is running.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/91c3613d3748d881706c3e60d8221ea92833ac1a

- Document how auto_explain.log_timing can be changed.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0e65755c08110c4f4d7f08914d4511028e13517d

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Message style improvements
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9d775d8894665ef0bb254a85005f9351545fac13

- Message punctuation and pluralization fixes
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/072457b360ad550236d99a6ab1264e447248aba9

- PL/Python: Adjust the regression tests for Python 3.3. Similar to
2cfb1c6f77734db81b6e74bcae630f93b94f69be, the order in which
dictionary elements are printed is not reliable. This reappeared in
the tests of the string representation of result objects. Reduce
the test case to one result set column so that there is no question
of order.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/527ea66849c5cb02a3ebaef6c6c25d1b312a9521

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Michael Paquier sent in a patch to fix the documentation of FOR
UPDATE/FOR SHARE in the cases of GROUP BY, DISTINCT, HAVING and window
functions.

Michael Paquier sent in another revision of a patch to refactor
the way background workers are implemented.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to move unused buffers
to the freelist.

Merlin Moncure sent in two more revisions of a patch to optimize
StrategyGetBuffer.

Fujii Masao sent in a patch to remove the non-fast promotion path for
replica to master.

Fabien COELHO sent in a patch to improve the pgbench measurements and
progress report.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix an issue which manifested as a bug in
row_to_json() where the planner incorrectly optimizes away
ExecProject() if a scan plan node is not doing any useful projection.

Karl O. Pinc sent in a patch to document the fact that subqueries
can't modify data.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a patch to factor duplicate code out of
heap_deform_tuple and slot_deform_tuple, both because there's no point
in duplicating it, and because there could potentially have been a
third copy in the upcoming minmax patch.

Vik Fearing sent in a patch to enable collecting statistics when the
CLUSTER command is run.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to emit a hint message when logging goes to
or from stderr.

Vik Fearing sent in a patch to allow pg_sleep() to take an interval
as a parameter.

Bruce Momjian sent in a patch to change the schema name control in
pg_dump for ALTER OWNER via setting search_path rather than naming it
explicitly in the object.

Andrew Tipton sent in a PoC patch to fix an issue with background
workers.