== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 20 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 20 2006 ==

Fábio Telles Rodriguez, with help from Fernando Ike de Olivera, has
written an article for SQL Magazine, a Portuguese language journal, on
migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL. You can read it in Brazilian
Portuguese at the URL below:
http://www.devmedia.com.br/sqlmagazine/Resumo_edi_atual.asp#txt5

Etsy is proud to say it's using PostgreSQL.
http://www.etsy.com/

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane committed:

- A patch which gets rid of "lookahead" functionality in plpgsql's
yylex() function, and instead makes the grammar production for the
RETURN statement do the heavy lifting. The lookahead idea was
copied from the main parser, but it does not work in plpgsql's
parser because here gram.y looks explicitly at the scanner's yytext
variable, which will be out of sync after a failed lookahead step.

- A patch which sees to it that when executing a list of queries
derived from rule expansion, _SPI_execute_plan's return code should
reflect the type of the query that is marked canSetTag, not
necessarily the last one in the list.

- A patch which removes hash_destroy calls in hash_create's failure
paths. As noted by a Coverity warning, these are risky since the
hashtable isn't necessarily fully set up yet. They're unnecessary
anyway: a deletable hashtable should be in a memory context that will
be cleared following elog(ERROR). Per report from Martijn van
Oosterhout.

- A Jonah Harris and Tom Lane patch which supports
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE RETURNING in plpgsql with rowcount checking as
per proposal on -hackers. It also make things a tad more orthogonal
by adding the recent STRICT addition to EXECUTE INTO.

- A patch which causes '*' and 'foo.*' notations to mark the
referenced range table entr(y|ies) as requiring read permissions.
This fixes behaviors now available through INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE ...
RETURNING.

- A patch which fixes an oversight in initial implementation of
PORTAL_ONE_RETURNING mode: the code cannot assume that there's
exactly one Query in the Portal, as it can for ONE_SELECT mode,
because non-SELECT queries might have extra queries added during
rule rewrites.

- Korry Douglas's PL instrumentation patch with "rendezvous
variables."

- A patch per the buildfarm which changes 'restrict' to 'restricted'
because some compilers consider the former to be a fully reserved
word.

- A patch which lets get_type_io_data() work from bootstrap.c's
internal TypInfo table in bootstrap mode. This allows array_in and
array_out to be used during early bootstrap, which eliminates the
former obstacle to giving OUT parameters to built-in functions.

- Korry Douglas's patch which adds hooks to allow debugging and
performance measurement plugins to instrument PL/pgSQL.

- A Korry Douglas/Tom Lane patch which adds server support for
"plugin" libraries that can be used for add-on tasks such as
debugging and performance measurement. This consists of two
features: a table of "rendezvous variables" that allows
separately-loaded shared libraries to communicate, and a new GUC
setting "local_preload_libraries" that allows libraries to be
loaded into specific sessions without explicit cooperation from the
client application.

- A Simon Riggs/Tom Lane patch which implements the archive_timeout
feature to force xlog file switches to occur no more than N seconds
apart. This allows a simple, if not very high performance, means of
guaranteeing that a PITR archive is no more than N seconds behind
real time.

- A patch which closes a narrow race condition window between VACUUM
and CLUSTER.

- A Jaime Casanova/Tom Lane patch which suppresses subquery
pullup/pushdown when a subquery contains volatile functions in its
targetlist, to avoid introducing multiple evaluations of volatile
functions that appear only once in the text of the query.

- A patch which adds a 'waiting' column to pg_stat_activity to carry
the same information that ps_status provides by appending 'waiting'
to the PS display. This completes the project of making it feasible
to turn off process title updates and instead rely on
pg_stat_activity.

- A patch by Volkan Yazici which adds PQdescribePrepared,
PQdescribePortal, and related functions to libpq to allow obtaining
information about previously prepared statements and open cursors.

- A patch which fixes all known problems with pg_dump's handling of
serial.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- A patch which adds installcheck-parallel target to top level
makefiles.

Tatsuo Ishii committed:

- Itagaki Takahiro's patch which fixes pgbench to handle empty lines
in script files as documented.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Alvaro Herrera's patch which fixes ECPG regression tests for VPATH
builds.

- A fix to a buffer overrun that was masked on Linux systems.
Back-patched to 8.1 and 8.0.

- A change to the lexer so that it no longer uses the default rule.
Also synchronized the parser and keyword list, and fixed parsing of
the CONNECT statement so that it accepts a C string again.

- Lots of new tests from Joachim Wieland.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Fixes for dtrace options when configure doesn't find it.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- His patch which fixes DROP OWNED BY.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Dror Bar-Gil sent in a patch to fix the initdb problem on Windows 2003
by redirecting output to a file instead of the NUL device, which some
users have claimed is unavailable in some cases.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another version of his IDENTITY/GENERATED
patch, this time with more documentation and some bug fixes. Still
missing is the SQL:2003 standard GENERATED ALWAYS feature.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch which adjusts autovacuum naptime
automatically and so removes the autovacuum_naptime GUC variable.

Dhanaraj M sent in a new version of his patch which causes FETCH and
MOVE to use 64-bit integers to count with.

Gregory Stark sent in his change set to psql which allows it to issue
queries asynchronously and allow multiple database connections. It
provides a way to switch connections while a blocked or slow
tranasaction is still running and issue queries in other transactions.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Rascal Systems Pty. has ported its Rascal ERP system to PostgreSQL.
http://rascal.co.za/Newsletter-2006-01.pdf

EnterpriseDB has released its replication software.
http://www.enterprisedb.com/news_events/press_releases/15_08_06b.do

Jitterbit 1.1 Released
http://www.jitterbit.com

pgFouine 0.7 released, now with a VACUUM VERBOSE analyzer and Tsung support.
http://pgfouine.projects.postgresql.org/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for August ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-08/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Everything this week was global.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits presents: Gapless Sequences for Primary Keys.
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

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