== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 02 2014 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 02 2014 ==

PostgreSQL 9.3.3, 9.2.7, 9.1.12, 9.0.16, and 8.4.20 bug fix releases
are out. Upgrade ASAP.
http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1506/

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Npgsql2 2.1.0-rc1, a .NET connector for PostgreSQL, released.
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Npgsql/2.1.0-rc1

The next version of pgXplorer, a GUI for postgres 8.4+, released.
The code is open sourced under the ISC license and can be found on github at:
https://github.com/davyjones/pgXplorer

pitrery 1.6, a set of bash scripts to manage PITR backups for
PostgreSQL, released.
http://dalibo.github.io/pitrery/

psqlODBC 09.03.0200 released.
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/odbc/versions/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for March ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2014-03/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Nordic PGDay 2014 will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, at the Hilton
Stockholm Hotel, on March 20, 2014.
http://2014.nordicpgday.org/

PGConf NYC 2014 will be held April 3-4, 2014 in New York, New York, USA.
http://nyc.pgconf.us/2014/

The Open Data Summit will be held Friday April 11, 2014 in Denver,
Colorado, USA.
http://www.opendatasummit.com

PGCon 2014, the world-wide developer conference for PostgreSQL, will
be in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada May 20-24, 2014.
http://www.pgcon.org/2014/

== 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.
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== Applied Patches ==

Robert Haas pushed:

- Remove a couple of comments from the pg_lsn regression test.
Previously, one of these was a negative test case, but that got
changed along the way and the comments didn't get the memo. Michael
Paquier
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bb818b53d47c77eb58bfce57516fab93d0e6965d

- Use pg_lsn data type in pg_stat_replication, too. Michael Paquier,
per a suggestion from Andres Freund
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6615e77439a3c8c26c0091a616f00eefdea22604

- pg_basebackup: Skip only the *contents* of pg_replslot. Include the
directory itself. Fujii Masao
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/278c94209b90b8e241f64ea4ce2d955b63b1f5d7

- Show xid and xmin in pg_stat_activity and pg_stat_replication.
Christian Kruse, reviewed by Andres Freund and myself, with further
minor adjustments by me.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/dd1a3bccca241a998b4ebf39d67202698e5fa599

- Update a few comments to mention materialized views. Etsuro Fujita
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cf6aa68bbd78e3119d5156616b474fea47e10a33

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- docs: document behavior of CHAR() comparisons with chars < space.
Space trimming rather than space-padding causes unusual behavior,
which might not be standards-compliant. Also remove recently-added
now-redundant C comment.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8457d0beca731bf062bb0d126870d9a291ab47a5

- Allow single-point polygons to be converted to circles. This allows
finding the center of a single-point polygon and converting it to a
point. Per report from Josef Grahn
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/423f69ab64a6e51fbdd97a83c1dc55d68ca6190d

- Fix markup for CHAR() doc patch
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3f05bedaf23a50979125159ac881094175edf9eb

- pg_dump: fix subtle memory leak in func and arg signature
processing
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d613861b9523c143db427d1bf26b9769319ca102

- psql: add separate \d display for disabled system triggers
Previously if you disabled all triggers, only user triggers would
show as disabled Per report from Andres Freund
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4bad548d981636ceb79492a1b7f607f22f0867de

- docs: remove unnecessary references to old PG versions
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6f14a6f703a26ec12f4da6f53f107dd260fbb9db

- Increase work_mem and maintenance_work_mem defaults by 4x. New
defaults are 4MB and 64MB.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/848ae330a497b4d430d93bd813f93c40d2bb0157

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Update and clarify ssl_ciphers default. Write HIGH:MEDIUM instead
of DEFAULT:!LOW:!EXP for clarity. Order 3DES last to work around
inappropriate OpenSSL default. Remove !MD5 and @STRENGTH, because
they are irrelevant. Add clarifying documentation. Effectively,
the new default is almost the same as the old one, but it is
arguably easier to understand and modify. Author: Marko Kreen
<markokr(at)gmail(dot)com>
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/32001ab0b7b4ee143e195f100543f531757a555b

- pgbench: Fix help message. Add NUM placeholder to -t option in help
message. It got lost in 79cddb18419778be3202c971b3f21cdd90f7b719.
Author: Fabien COELHO <coelho(at)cri(dot)ensmp(dot)fr>
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/192d8e04bd3112965d47bb4dc6747ee984abaf07

Tom Lane pushed:

- Use SnapshotDirty rather than an active snapshot to probe index
endpoints. If there are lots of uncommitted tuples at the end of
the index range, get_actual_variable_range() ends up fetching each
one and doing an MVCC visibility check on it, until it finally hits
a visible tuple. This is bad enough in isolation, considering that
we don't need an exact answer only an approximate one. But because
the tuples are not yet committed, each visibility check does a
TransactionIdIsInProgress() test, which involves scanning the
ProcArray. When multiple sessions do this concurrently, the ensuing
contention results in horrid performance loss. 20X overall
throughput loss on not-too-complicated queries is easy to
demonstrate in the back branches (though someone's made it
noticeably less bad in HEAD). We can dodge the problem fairly
effectively by using SnapshotDirty rather than a normal MVCC
snapshot. This will cause the index probe to take uncommitted
tuples as good, so that we incur only one tuple fetch and test even
if there are many such tuples. The extent to which this degrades
the estimate is debatable: it's possible the result is actually a
more accurate prediction than before, if the endmost tuple has
become committed by the time we actually execute the query being
planned. In any case, it's not very likely that it makes the
estimate a lot worse. SnapshotDirty will still reject tuples that
are known committed dead, so we won't give bogus answers if an
invalid outlier has been deleted but not yet vacuumed from the
index. (Because btrees know how to mark such tuples dead in the
index, we shouldn't have a big performance problem in the case that
there are many of them at the end of the range.) This consideration
motivates not using SnapshotAny, which was also considered as a fix.
Note: the back branches were using SnapshotNow instead of an MVCC
snapshot, but the problem and solution are the same. Per
performance complaints from Bartlomiej Romanski, Josh Berkus, and
others. Back-patch to 9.0, where the issue was introduced (by
commit 40608e7f949fb7e4025c0ddd5be01939adc79eec).
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/fccebe421d0c410e6378fb281419442c84759213

- Remove dependency on database encoding in citext regression test.
Testing convert_to(..., 'ISO-8859-1') fails if there isn't a
conversion function available from the database encoding to
ISO-8859-1. This has been broken since day one, but the breakage
was hidden by pg_do_encoding_conversion's failure to complain, up
till commit 49c817eab78c6f0ce8c3bf46766b73d6cf3190b7. Since the
data being converted in this test is plain ASCII, no actual
conversion need happen (and if it did, it would prove little about
citext anyway). So that we still have some code coverage of the
convert() family of functions, let's switch to using convert_from,
with SQL_ASCII as the specified source encoding. Per buildfarm.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1161d895d826950cbb736e5872935f3f53cc2e27

- Allow regex operations to be terminated early by query cancel
requests. The regex code didn't have any provision for query
cancel; which is unsurprising given its non-Postgres origin, but
still problematic since some operations can take a long time.
Introduce a callback function to check for a pending query cancel or
session termination request, and call it in a couple of strategic
spots where we can make the regex code exit with an error indicator.
If we ever actually split out the regex code as a standalone
library, some additional work will be needed to let the cancel
callback function be specified externally to the library. But
that's straightforward (certainly so by comparison to putting the
locale-dependent character classification logic on a similar
arms-length basis), and there seems no need to do it right now. A
bigger issue is that there may be more places than these two where
we need to check for cancels. We can always add more checks later,
now that the infrastructure is in place. Since there are known
examples of not-terribly-long regexes that can lock up a backend for
a long time, back-patch to all supported branches. I have hopes of
fixing the known performance problems later, but adding query cancel
ability seems like a good idea even if they were all fixed.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9662143f0c35d64d7042fbeaf879df8f0b54be32

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- btbuild no longer calls _bt_doinsert(), update comment. Peter
Geoghegan
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/00976f202ce13daf15ec6e8de37f87fc9904b5e2

- Remove bogus while-loop. Commit
abf5c5c9a4f142b3343614746bb9e99a794f8e7b added a bogus while-
statement after the for(;;)-loop. It went unnoticed in testing,
because it was dead code. Report by KONDO Mitsumasa. Backpatch to
9.3. The commit that introduced this was also applied to 9.2, but
not the bogus while-loop part, because the code in 9.2 looks quite
different.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d8a42b150fa83de0a058843a4d9d61af3d98e333

Jeff Davis pushed:

- Fix crash in json_to_record(). json_to_record() depends on
get_call_result_type() for the tuple descriptor of the record that
should be returned, but in some cases that cannot be determined. Add
a guard to check if the tuple descriptor has been properly resolved,
similar to other callers of get_call_result_type(). Also add guard
for two other callers of get_call_result_type() in jsonfuncs.c.
Although json_to_record() is the only actual bug, it's a good idea
to follow convention.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/486ea0b19e08c10ff53e36e46209a928df048281

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- Fix WAL replay of locking an updated tuple We were resetting the
tuple's HEAP_HOT_UPDATED flag as well as t_ctid on WAL replay of a
tuple-lock operation, which is incorrect when the tuple is already
updated. Back-patch to 9.3. The clearing of both header elements
was there previously, but since no update could be present on a
tuple that was being locked, it was harmless. Bug reported by Peter
Geoghegan and Greg Stark in
CAM3SWZTMQiCi5PV5OWHb+bYkUcnCk=O67w0cSswPvV7XfUcU5g(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com
and
CAM-w4HPTOeMT4KP0OJK+mGgzgcTOtLRTvFZyvD0O4aH-7dxo3Q(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com
respectively; diagnosis by Andres Freund.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6bfa88acd3df830a5f7e8677c13512b1b50ae813

- Allow BASE_BACKUP to be throttled. A new MAX_RATE option allows
imposing a limit to the network transfer rate from the server side.
This is useful to limit the stress that taking a base backup has on
the server. pg_basebackup is now able to specify a value to the
server, too. Author: Antonin Houska Patch reviewed by Stefan
Radomski, Andres Freund, Zoltán Böszörményi, Fujii Masao, and Álvaro
Herrera.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ef5856fd9b77ef9d0d0c31fb314bb61bbfb1d704

Stephen Frost pushed:

- Various Coverity-spotted fixes A number of issues were identified by
the Coverity scanner and are addressed in this patch. None of these
appear to be security issues and many are mostly cosmetic changes.
Short comments for each of the changes follows. Correct the
semi-colon placement in be-secure.c regarding SSL retries. Remove a
useless comparison-to-NULL in proc.c (value is dereferenced prior to
this check and therefore can't be NULL). Add checking of chmod()
return values to initdb. Fix a couple minor memory leaks in initdb.
Fix memory leak in pg_ctl- involves free'ing the config file
contents. Use an int to capture fgetc() return instead of an enum
in pg_dump. Fix minor memory leaks in pg_dump. (note minor change
to convertOperatorReference()'s API) Check fclose()/remove() return
codes in psql. Check fstat(), find_my_exec() return codes in psql.
Various ECPG memory leak fixes. Check find_my_exec() return in
ECPG. Explicitly ignore pqFlush return in libpq error-path. Change
PQfnumber() to avoid doing an strdup() when no changes required.
Remove a few useless check-against-NULL's (value deref'd
beforehand). Check rmtree(), malloc() results in pg_regress. Also
check get_alternative_expectfile() return in pg_regress.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b1aebbb6a86e96d7b8f3035ac730dfc24652496c

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Josh Berkus sent in a patch to clarify documentation for the upcoming
jsonb type.

Christian Kruse sent in another revision of a patch to show xid and
xmin in pg_stat_activity and pg_stat_replication.

Michael Paquier sent in two more revisions of a patch to change the
pageinspect extension use the new LSN type.

Andres Freund sent in another flock of patches aimed at changeset
extraction.

Christian Kruse sent in two more revisions of a patch to show
relationinfo and tupleinfo of a lock to acquire.

Shigeru HANADA sent in a patch to fix an infelicity in the custom scan
patches.

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of a patch to change selfuncs
to use a cached SnapshotDirty instead of repeated calls to
GetActiveSnapshot().

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to correct the way Windows libraries
get installed.

Yugo Nagata sent in another revision of a patch to implement
to_regclass, etc.

Sergey Burladyan and Alex Hunsaker traded patches to fix a memory leak
in PL/PerlU.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to avoid having deeply nested AND/OR trees in
the parser.

Andrew Dunstan and Erik Rijkers sent in patches re: nested hstore and
jsonb, built on same.

Alexander Korotkov sent in another revision of a patch to add a fast
GIN scan.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a patch to fix an data corruption bug.

Noah Misch sent in another revision of a patch to fix the fact that
UNION ALL on partitioned tables won't use indexes.

Christian Kruse sent in three more revisions of a patch to use
MAP_HUGETLB where supported.

Michael Paquier sent in a patch to create a define macro for the LSN
type's oid in pg_type.h for use by extension developers.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to fix an issue where VACUUM
FULL/CLUSTER doesn't update pg_class's pg_class.relfrozenxid.

Jing Wang sent in a patch to report versions of the server of pg_dump
as comments in the output.

Peter Eisentraut sent in another revision of a patch to add tests for
client programs.

Fabien COELHO sent in a patch to fix an omission in pgbench's help
output.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in two more revisions of a patch to add an
extension control path.

Simon Riggs and Vik Fearing traded patches to reduce the lock levels
needed for ALTER TABLE.

Alvaro Herrera and Pavel Stehule traded patches for the upcoming
make_timestamp function.

Fabrízio de Royes Mello sent in another revision of a patch to allow
storing custom reloptions.

Alvaro Herrera and Pavel Stehule traded patches to add --if-exists as
an option for pg_dump.

Noah Misch sent in a patch to make "make check" harder to use as a
vulnerability.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI and Heikki Linnakangas traded patches to fix an
issue where a hot standby doesn't come up in some situations.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to allow showing only failed queries in
psql.

Alexander Korotkov sent in another revision of a patch to optimize the
regex case for trigram indexes.

Sean Chittenden sent in a patch to fix an omission where pg_dump -Fd
doesn't return write(2)'s return status, which was causing it to
return success when it had in fact failed.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to add a --help-variables option to
psql.

Andrew Dunstan and Ian Lawrence Barwick traded patches to add a
FORCE_NULL option for copy COPY in CSV mode.