== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 06 2015 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 06 2015 ==

PGConf.DE will be held on November 26-27, 2015 in Hamburg, Germany, at
the Lindner Hotel am Michel.
http://2015.pgconf.de/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for September ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2015-09/

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PostgresOpen 2015 will being held in Dallas, Texas September 16-18.
http://2015.postgresopen.org/

PostgreSQL Session #7, will be held September 24th, 2015 in Paris,
France,
http://www.postgresql-sessions.org/7/about

PGDay.IT 2015 will take place in Prato on October 23, 2015.
http://pgday.it

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2015 will be held on October 27-30 in the
Vienna Marriott Hotel, in Vienna, Austria.
http://2015.pgconf.eu/

PGConf Silicon Valley 2015 is November 17-18 at the South San
Francisco Convention Center.
http://www.pgconfsv.com

PgCUBA will take place October 19-23, 2015 in Havana. Spanish
language information below:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/event/1813/

PGBR2015 (The Brazilian PostgreSQL Conference) will take place in Porto
Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, on November 18, 19 and 20. The CfP is open
until August 31.
http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/2015/en/#call-for-papers

== 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:

- Remove long-dead support for platforms without sig_atomic_t. C89
requires <signal.h> to define sig_atomic_t, and there is no evidence
in the buildfarm that any supported platforms don't comply. Remove
the configure test to stop wasting build cycles on a purely
historical issue. (Once upon a time, we cared about supporting
C89-compliant compilers on machines with pre-C89 system headers, but
that use-case has been dead for quite a few years.) I have some
other fixes planned in this area, but let's start with this to see
if the buildfarm produces any surprising results.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0f19d0f12fa235c6951ff431bd60da594356a1a6

- Remove support for Unix systems without the POSIX signal APIs.
Remove configure's checks for HAVE_POSIX_SIGNALS, HAVE_SIGPROCMASK,
and HAVE_SIGSETJMP. These APIs are required by the Single Unix Spec
v2 (POSIX 1997), which we generally consider to define our minimum
required set of Unix APIs. Moreover, no buildfarm member has
reported not having them since 2012 or before, which means that even
if the code is still live somewhere, it's untested --- and we've
made plenty of signal-handling changes of late. So just take these
APIs as given and save the cycles for configure probes for them.
However, we can't remove as much C code as I'd hoped, because the
Windows port evidently still uses the non-POSIX code paths for
signal masking. Since we're largely emulating these BSD-style APIs
for Windows anyway, it might be a good thing to switch over to
POSIX-like notation and thereby remove a few more #ifdefs. But I'm
not in a position to code or test that. In the meantime, we can at
least make things a bit more transparent by testing for WIN32
explicitly in these places.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a65e086453e0dea5cdd7f9fe9dc6c34d8bfc0f2c

- Remove theoretically-unnecessary special case for icc. Intel's icc
is generally able to swallow asm blocks written for gcc. We have a
few places that don't seem to know that, though. Experiment with
removing the special case for icc in ia64_get_bsp(); if the
buildfarm likes this, I'll try more cleanup. This is a good test
case because it involves a "stop" notation that seems like it might
not be very portable.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2c713d6ea29c91cd2cbd92fa801a61e55ea2a3c4

- Actually, it's not that hard to merge the Windows pqsignal code ...
... just need to typedef sigset_t and provide
sigemptyset/sigfillset, which are easy enough.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f333204bbcd32091311b070e8f8ab4717dd8cadf

- Allow icc to use the same atomics infrastructure as gcc. The
atomics headers were written under the impression that icc doesn't
handle gcc-style asm blocks, but this is demonstrably false on
x86_[64], because s_lock.h has done it that way for more than a
decade. (The jury is still out on whether this also works on ia64,
so I'm leaving ia64-related code alone for the moment.) Treat gcc
and icc the same in these headers. This is less code and it should
improve the results for icc, because we hadn't gotten around to
providing icc-specific implementations for most of the atomics.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cf25b2a2f9a4306637a985cee86a9a987c0b6a7c

- Clean up icc + ia64 situation. Some googling turned up multiple
sources saying that older versions of icc do not accept
gcc-compatible asm blocks on IA64, though asm does work on x86[_64].
This is apparently fixed as of icc version 12.0 or so, but that
doesn't help us much; if we have to carry the extra implementation
anyway, we may as well just use it for icc rather than add a
compiler version test. Hence, revert commit
2c713d6ea29c91cd2cbd92fa801a61e55ea2a3c4 (though I separated the icc
code from the gcc code completely, producing what seems cleaner
code). Document the state of affairs more explicitly, both in
s_lock.h and postgres.c, and make some cosmetic adjustments around
the IA64 code in s_lock.h.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/123c9d2fc1fe0a8ee676d8244198b34a5e99ea90

- Document that PL/Python now returns floats using repr() not str().
Commit 1ce7a57ca neglected to update the user-facing documentation,
which described the old behavior precisely.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/075ab425bdbb4bb2de41624305f20885cae7ba7e

- Fix subtransaction cleanup after an outer-subtransaction portal
fails. Formerly, we treated only portals created in the current
subtransaction as having failed during subtransaction abort.
However, if the error occurred while running a portal created in an
outer subtransaction (ie, a cursor declared before the last
savepoint), that has to be considered broken too. To allow reliable
detection of which ones those are, add a bookkeeping field to struct
Portal that tracks the innermost subtransaction in which each portal
has actually been executed. (Without this, we'd end up failing
portals containing functions that had called the subtransaction,
thereby breaking plpgsql exception blocks completely.) In addition,
when we fail an outer-subtransaction Portal, transfer its resources
into the subtransaction's resource owner, so that they're released
early in cleanup of the subxact. This fixes a problem reported by
Jim Nasby in which a function executed in an outer-subtransaction
cursor could cause an Assert failure or crash by referencing a
relation created within the inner subtransaction. The proximate
cause of the Assert failure is that AtEOSubXact_RelationCache
assumed it could blow away a relcache entry without first checking
that the entry had zero refcount. That was a bad idea on its own
terms, so add such a check there, and to the similar coding in
AtEOXact_RelationCache. This provides an independent safety measure
in case there are still ways to provoke the situation despite the
Portal-level changes. This has been broken since subtransactions
were invented, so back-patch to all supported branches. Tom Lane
and Michael Paquier
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c5454f99c49fce01ce946b5f52a4929c21d5f229

- Rearrange the handling of error context reports. Remove the code in
plpgsql that suppressed the innermost line of CONTEXT for messages
emitted by RAISE commands. That was never more than a quick
backwards-compatibility hack, and it's pretty silly in cases where
the RAISE is nested in several levels of function. What's more, it
violated our design theory that verbosity of error reports should be
controlled on the client side not the server side. To alleviate the
resulting noise increase, introduce a feature in libpq and psql
whereby the CONTEXT field of messages can be suppressed, either
always or only for non-error messages. Printing CONTEXT for errors
only is now their default behavior. The actual code changes here
are pretty small, but the effects on the regression test outputs are
widespread. I had to edit some of the alternative expected outputs
by hand; hopefully the buildfarm will soon find anything I
fat-fingered. In passing, fix up (again) the output line counts in
psql's various help displays. Add some commentary about how to
verify them. Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Petr Jelínek, Jeevan
Chalke, and others
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0426f349effb6bde2061f3398a71db7180c97dd9

- Fix CreateTableSpace() so it will compile without HAVE_SYMLINK.
This has been broken since 9.3 (commit 82b1b213cad3a69c to be
exact), which suggests that nobody is any longer using a Windows
build system that doesn't provide a symlink emulation. Still, it's
wrong on its own terms, so repair. YUriy Zhuravlev
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9270d8db9a1cd6465e21215e6451b552995fcb08

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Small grammar fix. Josh Kupershmidt
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/93370076c40730ce2a9071c6a4694d6b0e5b2f0c

- Support RADIUS passwords up to 128 characters. Previous limit was
16 characters, due to lack of support for multiple passes of
encryption. Marko Tiikkaja
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/643beffe8f69327147513a0f0d750e8ca035a4f6

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- psql: print longtable as a possible \pset option. For some reason
this message was not updated when the longtable option was added.
Backpatch through 9.3
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8f7d044ba842ab3359a8a3190ff2f3aa1de2a6bb

- docs: remove outdated note about unique indexes. Patch by Josh
Kupershmidt Backpatch through 9.5
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/049a7799dfce096923da27a9b0e4a3c7a0a47104

- pg_upgrade docs: clarify rsync and move verification step. These
are adjustments based on someone using the new standby upgrade
steps. Report by Andy Colson Backpatch through 9.5
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/46bd95e2a873feb4799b77eca7276cf758e36cca

Álvaro Herrera pushed:

- Use <substeps> in pg_upgrade's procedure. For clarity, so that the
substeps are not numbered identically to the outer procedure's
steps. Per report from Andy Colson in
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/55D789B5.7040308@squeakycode.net
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9646d2fd62a444ab4502e49dfe3cbf9d7350c5e2

Robert Haas pushed:

- Allow notifications to bgworkers without database connections.
Previously, if one background worker registered another background
worker and set bgw_notify_pid while for the second background
worker, it would not receive notifications from the postmaster
unless, at the time the "parent" was registered,
BGWORKER_BACKEND_DATABASE_CONNECTION was set. To fix, instead
instead of including only those background workers that requested
database connections in the postmater's BackendList, include them
all. There doesn't seem to be any reason not do this, and indeed it
removes a significant amount of duplicated code. The other option
is to make PostmasterMarkPIDForWorkerNotify look at
BackgroundWorkerList in addition to BackendList, but that adds more
code duplication instead of getting rid of it. Patch by me. Review
and testing by Ashutosh Bapat.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8a02b3d732cf3ec13e089768bf9ce9abbdcc8a3e

- Update the SSL test suite for recent changes to TAP testing
framework. listen_addresses needs to be handled differently now,
and so does logging. Michael Paquier
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a09009e4278439f99d03adfefe2eec72ca35dcc3

- Assorted code review for recent ProcArrayLock patch. Post-commit
review by Andres Freund discovered a couple of concurrency bugs in
the original patch: specifically, if the leader cleared a follower's
XID before it reached PGSemaphoreLock, the semaphore would be left
in the wrong state; and if another process did PGSemaphoreUnlock for
some unrelated reason, we might resume execution before the fact
that our XID was cleared was globally visible. Also, improve the
wording of some comments, rename nextClearXidElem to
firstClearXidElem in PROC_HDR for clarity, and drop some volatile
qualifiers that aren't necessary. Amit Kapila, reviewed and
slightly revised by me.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4aec49899e5782247e134f94ce1c6ee926f88e1c

Kevin Grittner pushed:

- Flush to show results of TestLib.pm (TAP) test as we go. It appears
that some attempt was made to do this using autocommit, but it
wasn't effective (at least on Ubuntu 14.04).
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/adb495049f575563930f3c1fbef2843bda3ae46d

Teodor Sigaev pushed:

- Allow usage of huge maintenance_work_mem for GIN build. Currently,
in-memory posting list during GIN build process is limited 1GB
because of using repalloc. The patch replaces call of repalloc to
repalloc_huge. It increases limit of posting list from 180 millions
(1GB / sizeof(ItemPointerData)) to 4 billions limited by
maxcount/count fields in GinEntryAccumulator and subsequent calls.
Check added. Also, fix accounting of allocatedMemory during build
to prevent integer overflow with maintenance_work_mem > 4GB. Robert
Abraham <robert(dot)abraham86(at)googlemail(dot)com> with additions by me
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/30bb26b5e04cff911db960801e32e5f57045eb61

- Make unaccent handle all diacritics known to Unicode, and expand
ligatures correctly. Add Python script for buiding unaccent.rules
from Unicode data. Don't backpatch because unaccent changes may
require tsvector/index rebuild. Thomas Munro
<thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1bbd52cb9a4aa61a7dd751f5d1f7b44650d6122a

Noah Misch pushed:

- Disable fsync throughout TAP test suites. Most suites already did
so via start_test_server(), but the pg_rewind, pg_ctl and
pg_controldata suites ran a postmaster or initdb with fsync enabled.
This halves the pg_rewind suite's runtime on buildfarm member tern.
It makes tern and that machine's other buildfarm members less
vulnerable to noise failures from postmaster startup overrunning the
60s pg_ctl timeout. Back-patch to 9.5, where pg_rewind was
introduced.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7d7a103f41fbdc54e608c431ead866061289307d

Fujii Masao pushed:

- Document that max_worker_processes must be high enough in standby.
The setting values of some parameters including max_worker_processes
must be equal to or higher than the values on the master. However,
previously max_worker_processes was not listed as such parameter in
the document. So this commit adds it to that list. Back-patch to
9.4 where max_worker_processes was added.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1ea5ce5c5f204918b8a9fa6eaa8f3f1374aa8aec

Tatsuo Ishii pushed:

- Fix brin index summarizing while vacuuming. If the number of heap
blocks is not multiples of pages per range, the summarizing produces
wrong summary information for the last brin index tuple while
vacuuming. Problem reported by Tatsuo Ishii and fixed by Amit
Langote. Discussion at "[HACKERS] BRIN INDEX value (message id
:20150903(dot)174935(dot)1946402199422994347(dot)t-ishii(at)sraoss(dot)co(dot)jp)
Backpatched to 9.5 in which brin index was added.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c39f5674dfc77802b4245dd92cb4b1e35499a5a5

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Fix misc typos. Oskari Saarenmaa. Backpatch to stable branches
where applicable.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c80b5f66c6faff085e312492be0aa50754e99eb9

Gregory Stark pushed:

- Move DTK_ISODOW DTK_DOW and DTK_DOY to be type UNITS rather than
RESERV. RESERV is meant for tokens like "now" and having them in that
category throws errors like these when used as an input date:
stark=# SELECT 'doy'::timestamptz;
ERROR: unexpected dtype 33 while parsing timestamptz "doy"
LINE 1: SELECT 'doy'::timestamptz;
stark=# SELECT 'dow'::timestamptz;
ERROR: unexpected dtype 32 while parsing timestamptz "dow"
LINE 1: SELECT 'dow'::timestamptz;
Found by LLVM's Libfuzzer
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/258ee1b635e43a37e901fd5f62bdd5f1087d65a5

Andres Freund pushed:

- Add ability to reserve WAL upon slot creation via replication
protocol. Since 6fcd885 it is possible to immediately reserve WAL
when creating a slot via pg_create_physical_replication_slot().
Extend the replication protocol to allow that as well. Although, in
contrast to the SQL interface, it is possible to update the reserved
location via the replication interface, it is still useful being
able to reserve upon creation there. Otherwise the logic in
ReplicationSlotReserveWal() has to be repeated in slot employing
clients. Author: Michael Paquier Discussion:
CAB7nPqT0Wc1W5mdYGeJ_wbutbwNN+3qgrFR64avXaQCiJMGaYA(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c314ead5be0c627a6f654a74f18099466c566c47

Joe Conway pushed:

- Adjust sepgsql regression output for recent error context change
Recent commit 0426f349e changed handling of error context reports in
such a way to have a minor effect on the sepgsql regression output.
Adapt the expected output file to suit. Since that commit was HEAD
only, so is this one.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/03543afe1529b437e2f6861eab15f9d71debdba7

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Daniel Verite sent in another revision of a patch to add \rotate to
psql.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to reduce
ClogControlLock contention.

Kevin Grittner sent in another revision of a patch to implement
"snapshot too old," this time, configured by time.

YUriy Zhuravlev sent in another revision of a patch intended to help
scale the buffer manager to large numbers of cores.

Álvaro Herrera sent in PoC a patch to add columnar stores.

Alexander Korotkov sent in two more revisions of a patch to add access
method extensibility.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to remove wal_level "archive", fold
into "hot_standby".

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to clean up the Unicode mapping
script business in src/backend/utils/mb/Unicode/.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to make the perl programs in the
source tree perlcritic-compliant.

Amit Kapila sent in a patch to increase the number of CLOG buffers.

Jeff Janes sent in a patch to fix a potential GIN vacuum bug.

Alexander Shulgin sent in two more revisions of a patch to show
running query plans on demand using auto_explain and signals.

Dinesh Kumar and Pavel Stěhule traded patches to add an SQL-callable
function to add a pg_report_log() function.

Marko Tiikkaja sent in a patch to add a more useful HINT when erroring
out on UPDATE foo SET foo.bar.

Haribabu Kommi sent in another revision of a patch to implement
multi-tenancy via RLS.

Thomas Munro sent in a patch to make it possible to set
synchronous_commit to mean apply.

Pavel Stěhule sent in another revision of a patch to add tab
completion for SET ROLE TO in psql.

Tomas Vondra sent in a patch to ensure that a hash table is set
correctly.

Satoshi Nagayasu sent in another revision of a patch to fix an
infelicity in pg_stat_statements.

David Rowley sent in another revision of a patch to speed up
timestamptz_out.

Nikolay Shaplov sent in two revisions of a patch to modify pageinspect
to show tuple data.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to assess parallel
safety.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to implement parallel
sequential scan.

Fabien COELHO sent in another revision of a patch to make some
additions and improvements to pgbench.

Jan Wieck sent in a patch to fix an O(N^2) problem in foreign keys.

Bruce Momjian sent in a patch to ensure that non-default tablespaces
work with pg_upgrade.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI sent in another revision of a patch to allow
backslash-continuations in custom scripts in pgbench.

Anastasia Lubennikova sent in another revision of a patch to add
microvacuum for GiST.

SAWADA Masahiko sent in another revision of a patch to add a "frozen"
bit to the visibility map.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix some infelicities in pg_ctl's startup.

Etsuro Fujita sent in another revision of a patch to fix an infelicity
between foreign join pushdown vs EvalPlanQual.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to mark speculative insertions in
replay.

Antonin Houska sent in a patch to ensure that only volatile variables
are used in spinlock manipulation.

Oskari Saarenmaa sent in a patch to make sure always to return a
non-scalar value from jsonb_concat.

Thomas Munro sent in two revisions of a patch to make tab-complete.c
easier to maintain.

Petr Jelinek sent in a patch to fix an infelicity between
track_commit_timestamp and COMMIT PREPARED.

Julien Rouhaud sent in a patch to bring the documention for
PageHeaderData up to date.

Peter Geoghegan sent in another revision of a patch to use quicksort
for every external sort run.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to separate Buffer LWLocks from the main
LW locks, allowing them to have different padding.

Julien Rouhaud sent in another revision of a patch to allow a
per-tablespace effective_io_concurrency setting.

Fabien COELHO sent in two more revisions of a patch to allow
checkpointer continuous flushing.

Ildus Kurbangaliev sent in two revisions of a patch to refactor LWLock
tranches.