== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 04 2014 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 04 2014 ==

== PostgreSQL Jobs for May ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2014-05/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

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

The sixth PGDay Cubano be held on 13 and 14 October 2014 in Habana.
https://postgresql.uci.cu/?p=380

Postgres Open 2014 will be in Chicago, IL, USA, September 17-19. The
CfP is open!
http://postgresopen.org/2014/callforpapers/

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2014 will be held on October 21-24 in
Madrid, Spain, at the Hotel Miguel Angel.
http://2014.pgconf.eu/

== 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:

- Minor fixes for ALTER TABLE documentation. Etsuro Fujita
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/728c06f17f68f4f80b61808b491b1c7b065a3d27

- Consistently allow reading of messages from a detached shm_mq. This
was intended to work always, but the previous code only allowed it
if at least one message was successfully read by the receiver before
the sender detached the queue. Report by Petr Jelinek. Patch by
me.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5ec45bb7fa0a1495a360165a12ba5d6b4587bb4a

- Documentation corrections for pg_replication_slots. Thomas Reiss,
with changes to the catalog_xmin language by me.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/65fb5ff13009ef34ff95300d3e03540cf872e494

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Fix two bugs in WAL-logging of GIN pending-list pages. In
writeListPage, never take a full-page image of the page, because we
have all the information required to re-initialize in the WAL record
anyway. Before this fix, a full-page image was always generated,
unless full_page_writes=off, because when the page is initialized
its LSN is always 0. In stable-branches, keep the code to restore
the backup blocks if they exist, in case that the WAL is generated
with an older minor version, but in master Assert that there are no
full-page images. In the redo routine, add missing "off++".
Otherwise the tuples are added to the page in reverse order. That
happens to be harmless because we always scan and remove all the
tuples together, but it was clearly wrong. Also, it was masked by
the first bug unless full_page_writes=off, because the page was
always restored from a full-page image. Backpatch to all supported
versions.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d2722443d993988ff2e529b652c61fec1ca527f7

- Add missing SYSTEMQUOTEs. Some popen() calls were missing
SYSTEMQUOTEs, which caused initdb and pg_upgrade to fail on Windows,
if the installation path contained both spaces and @ signs. Patch
by Nikhil Deshpande. Backpatch to all supported versions.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/503de5462158b0260f6deaf3087cf0945f7327f0

Gregory Stark pushed:

- Add support for wrapping to psql's "extended" mode. This makes it
very feasible to display tables that have both many columns and some
large data in some columns (such as pg_stats). Emre Hasegeli with
review and rewriting from Sergey Muraviov and reviewed by Greg Stark
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6513633b94173fc1d9e2b213c43f9422ddbf5faa

- Remove unnecessary cast causing a warning. Incidentally, I reversed
the two names in the earlier commit. The original author was Sergey
Muraviov and the reviewer was Emre Hasegeli.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/dbe31616c9be7380b8a88cdfbeaa68dbdcdebc36

Tom Lane pushed:

- Improve planner to drop constant-NULL inputs of AND/OR where it's
legal. In general we can't discard constant-NULL inputs, since they
could change the result of the AND/OR to be NULL. But at top level
of WHERE, we do not need to distinguish a NULL result from a FALSE
result, so it's okay to treat NULL as FALSE and then simplify AND/OR
accordingly. This is a very ancient oversight, but in 9.2 and later
it can lead to failure to optimize queries that previous releases
did optimize, as a result of more aggressive parameter substitution
rules making it possible to reduce more subexpressions to NULL
constants. This is the root cause of bug #10171 from Arnold
Scheffler. We could alternatively have fixed that by teaching
orclauses.c to ignore constant-NULL OR arms, but it seems better to
get rid of them globally. I resisted the temptation to back-patch
this change into all active branches, but it seems appropriate to
back-patch as far as 9.2 so that there will not be performance
regressions of the kind shown in this bug.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/95811032d782049642a672e3db0a5382616ab084

- Fix uninitialized-variable warnings induced by recent commit.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5358bfdc98a47d26649ae094dab88842a0603968

- Fix indentation of JOIN clauses in rule/view dumps. The code
attempted to outdent JOIN clauses further left than the parent FROM
keyword, which was odd in any case, and led to inconsistent
formatting since in simple cases the clauses couldn't be moved any
further left than that. And it left a permanent decrement of the
indentation level, causing subsequent lines to be much further left
than they should be (again, this couldn't be seen in simple cases
for lack of indentation to give up). After a little experimentation
I chose to make it indent JOIN keywords two spaces from the parent
FROM, which is one space more than the join's lefthand input in
cases where that appears on a different line from FROM. Back-patch
to 9.3. This is a purely cosmetic change, and the bug is quite old,
so that may seem arbitrary; but we are going to be making some other
changes to the indentation behavior in both HEAD and 9.3, so it
seems reasonable to include this in 9.3 too. I committed this one
first because its effects are more visible in the regression test
results as they currently stand than they will be later.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d166eed302400a71eed1aaa301d30be3af7b5715

- Limit overall indentation in rule/view dumps. Continuing to indent
no matter how deeply nested we get doesn't really do anything for
readability; what's worse, it results in O(N^2) total whitespace,
which can become a performance and memory-consumption issue. To
address this, once we get past 40 characters of indentation, reduce
the indentation step distance 4x, and also limit the maximum
indentation by reducing it modulo 40. This latter choice is a bit
weird at first glance, but it seems to preserve readability better
than a simple cap would do. Back-patch to 9.3, because since commit
62e666400d the performance issue is a hazard for pg_dump. Greg
Stark and Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0601cb54dac14d979d726ab2ebeda251ae36e857

- Reduce indentation/parenthesization of set operations in rule/view
dumps. A query such as "SELECT x UNION SELECT y UNION SELECT z
UNION ..." produces a left-deep nested parse tree, which we formerly
showed in its full nested glory and with all the possible
parentheses. This does little for readability, though, and long
UNION lists resulting in excessive indentation are common. Instead,
let's omit parentheses and indent all the subqueries at the same
level in such cases. This patch skips indentation/parenthesization
whenever the lefthand input of a SetOperationStmt is another
SetOperationStmt of the same kind and ALL/DISTINCT property. We
could teach the code the exact syntactic precedence of set
operations and thereby avoid parenthesization in some more cases,
but it's not clear that that'd be a readability win: it seems better
to parenthesize if the set operation changes. (As an example, if
there's one UNION in a long list of UNION ALL, it now stands out
like a sore thumb, which seems like a good thing.) Back-patch to
9.3. This completes our response to a complaint from Greg Stark
that since commit 62e666400d there's a performance problem in
pg_dump for views containing long UNION sequences (or other types of
deeply nested constructs). The previous commit
0601cb54dac14d979d726ab2ebeda251ae36e857 handles the general
problem, but this one makes the specific case of UNION lists look a
lot nicer.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/41de93c53aa941167d445ecb7d91d58829adcc92

- Check for interrupts and stack overflow during rule/view dumps.
Since ruleutils.c recurses, it could be driven to stack overflow by
deeply nested constructs. Very large queries might also take long
enough to deparse that a check for interrupts seems like a good
idea. Stick appropriate tests into a couple of key places. Noted
by Greg Stark. Back-patch to all supported branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0bff398761b5e6119b40550bbe3751f4194dc7a7

- Rationalize common/relpath.[hc]. Commit
a73018392636ce832b09b5c31f6ad1f18a4643ea created rather a mess by
putting dependencies on backend-only include files into
include/common. We really shouldn't do that. To clean it up: *
Move TABLESPACE_VERSION_DIRECTORY back to its longtime home in
catalog/catalog.h. We won't consider this symbol part of the FE/BE
API. * Push enum ForkNumber from relfilenode.h into relpath.h.
We'll consider relpath.h as the source of truth for fork numbers,
since relpath.c was already partially serving that function, and
anyway relfilenode.h was kind of a random place for that enum. *
So, relfilenode.h now includes relpath.h rather than vice-versa.
This direction of dependency is fine. (That allows most, but not
quite all, of the existing explicit #includes of relpath.h to go
away again.) * Push forkname_to_number from catalog.c to relpath.c,
just to centralize fork number stuff a bit better. * Push
GetDatabasePath from catalog.c to relpath.c; it was rather odd that
the previous commit didn't keep this together with relpath(). * To
avoid needing relfilenode.h in common/, redefine the underlying
function (now called GetRelationPath) as taking separate OID
arguments, and make the APIs using RelFileNode or RelFileNodeBackend
into macro wrappers. (The macros have a potential multiple-eval
risk, but none of the existing call sites have an issue with that;
one of them had such a risk already anyway.) * Fix failure to follow
the directions when "init" fork type was added; specifically, the
errhint in forkname_to_number wasn't updated, and neither was the
SGML documentation for pg_relation_size(). * Fix
tablespace-path-too-long check in CreateTableSpace() to account for
fork-name component of maximum-length pathnames. This requires
putting FORKNAMECHARS into a header file, but it was rather useless
(and actually unreferenced) where it was. The last couple of items
are potentially back-patchable bug fixes, if anyone is sufficiently
excited about them; but personally I'm not. Per a gripe from
Christoph Berg about how include/common wasn't self-contained.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2d00190495b22e0d0ba351b2cda9c95fb2e3d083

- Improve error messages in reorderbuffer.c. Be more clear about
failure cases in relfilenode->relation lookup, and fix some other
places that were inconsistent or not per our message style
guidelines. Andres Freund and Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/203b0d132fe9038061b5bab70f1362440ae94aa8

- Fix failure to detoast fields in composite elements of structured
types. If we have an array of records stored on disk, the
individual record fields cannot contain out-of-line TOAST pointers:
the tuptoaster.c mechanisms are only prepared to deal with TOAST
pointers appearing in top-level fields of a stored row. The same
applies for ranges over composite types, nested composites, etc.
However, the existing code only took care of expanding sub-field
TOAST pointers for the case of nested composites, not for other
structured types containing composites. For example, given a
command such as UPDATE tab SET arraycol =
ARRAY[(ROW(x,42)::mycompositetype] ... where x is a direct
reference to a field of an on-disk tuple, if that field is long
enough to be toasted out-of-line then the TOAST pointer would be
inserted as-is into the array column. If the source record for x is
later deleted, the array field value would become a dangling
pointer, leading to errors along the line of "missing chunk number 0
for toast value ..." when the value is referenced. A reproducible
test case for this was provided by Jan Pecek, but it seems likely
that some of the "missing chunk number" reports we've heard in the
past were caused by similar issues. Code-wise, the problem is that
PG_DETOAST_DATUM() is not adequate to produce a self-contained Datum
value if the Datum is of composite type. Seen in this light, the
problem is not just confined to arrays and ranges, but could also
affect some other places where detoasting is done in that way, for
example form_index_tuple(). I tried teaching the array code to
apply toast_flatten_tuple_attribute() along with PG_DETOAST_DATUM()
when the array element type is composite, but this was messy and
imposed extra cache lookup costs whether or not any TOAST pointers
were present, indeed sometimes when the array element type isn't
even composite (since sometimes it takes a typcache lookup to find
that out). The idea of extending that approach to all the places
that currently use PG_DETOAST_DATUM() wasn't attractive at all.
This patch instead solves the problem by decreeing that composite
Datum values must not contain any out-of-line TOAST pointers in the
first place; that is, we expand out-of-line fields at the point of
constructing a composite Datum, not at the point where we're about
to insert it into a larger tuple. This rule is applied only to true
composite Datums, not to tuples that are being passed around the
system as tuples, so it's not as invasive as it might sound at
first. With this approach, the amount of code that has to be
touched for a full solution is greatly reduced, and added cache
lookup costs are avoided except when there actually is a TOAST
pointer that needs to be inlined. The main drawback of this
approach is that we might sometimes dereference a TOAST pointer that
will never actually be used by the query, imposing a rather large
cost that wasn't there before. On the other side of the coin, if
the field value is used multiple times then we'll come out ahead by
avoiding repeat detoastings. Experimentation suggests that common
SQL coding patterns are unaffected either way, though. Applications
that are very negatively affected could be advised to modify their
code to not fetch columns they won't be using. In future, we might
consider reverting this solution in favor of detoasting only at the
point where data is about to be stored to disk, using some method
that can drill down into multiple levels of nested structured types.
That will require defining new APIs for structured types, though, so
it doesn't seem feasible as a back-patchable fix. Note that this
patch changes HeapTupleGetDatum() from a macro to a function call;
this means that any third-party code using that macro will not get
protection against creating TOAST-pointer-containing Datums until
it's recompiled. The same applies to any uses of
PG_RETURN_HEAPTUPLEHEADER(). It seems likely that this is not a big
problem in practice: most of the tuple-returning functions in core
and contrib produce outputs that could not possibly be toasted
anyway, and the same probably holds for third-party extensions.
This bug has existed since TOAST was invented, so back-patch to all
supported branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3f8c8e3c61cef5729980ee4372ec159862a979f1

- Fix yet another corner case in dumping rules/views with USING
clauses. ruleutils.c tries to cope with
additions/deletions/renamings of columns in tables referenced by
views, by means of adding machine-generated aliases to the printed
form of a view when needed to preserve the original semantics. A
recent blog post by Marko Tiikkaja pointed out a case I'd missed
though: if one input of a join with USING is itself a join, there is
nothing to stop the user from adding a column of the same name as
the USING column to whichever side of the sub-join didn't provide
the USING column. And then there'll be an error when the view is
re-parsed, since now the sub-join exposes two columns matching the
USING specification. We were catching a lot of related cases, but
not this one, so add some logic to cope with it. Back-patch to 9.3,
which is the first release that makes any serious attempt to cope
with such cases (cf commit 2ffa740be and follow-ons).
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/91e16b980612d80de1017e97e9f206239afb9026

- Fix "quiet inline" configure test for newer clang compilers. This
test used to just define an unused static inline function and check
whether that causes a warning. But newer clang versions warn about
unused static inline functions when defined inside a .c file, but
not when defined in an included header, which is the case we care
about. Change the test to cope. Andres Freund
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4c8aa8b5aea1e032f569222d4b6c1019e84622dc

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Fix whitespace
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/322173eb0a6c2f43394645f8ae33eedd70bab432

- PL/Python: Adjust the regression tests for Python 3.4. The error
test case in the plpython_do test resulted in a slightly different
error message with Python 3.4. So pick a different way to test it
that avoids that and is perhaps also a bit clearer.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d0765d50f429472d00554701ac6531c84d324811

- doc: Update pg_basebackup version compatibility claim for 9.4
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0717748c904719af8689c04dc610a937de6d9a0e

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Add missing 9.4 release file.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d69ffd6f035fe24483247bf9b2335d7474eaf31a

- Initial version of Postgres 9.4 release notes
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/21223c24c2c4694efea3d9b4b29dfe45fda71f2a

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Ashutosh Bapat sent in a patch to fix an issue in ECPG where using an
array of char pointers gives wrong results.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to fix an issue Coverity pointed out
where it wasn't Assert()ed that pre/post-fix updated tuples are on the
same page during replay.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to remove what appeared to be obsolete code
in fork_process.c.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to require xmllint so buildfarm
animal borka would have it.

Dilip Kumar sent in another revision of a patch to allow merge joins
on some criteria other than equality.

Hadi Moshayedi sent in a patch to make array_length() faster by
detoasting only the overhead part of the datum.

Jeff Janes sent in a patch to add tab completion for setting
search_path.

Andres Freund sent in a patch to add a pg_shmem_allocations view.

Jeff Davis sent in a patch to fix the in-line documentation for
index-only scans.