== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 25 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 25 2006 ==

PostgreSQL Weekly News extends a warm welcome to PostreSQL's
Indonesian community.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/postgresql_indo/

Peter Eisentraut committed preliminary support for the XML data type
per SQL:2003's SQL/XML standard, and lots of people have been testing
it.
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/datatype-xml.html

Oleg Bartunov an Teodor Sigaev submitted a patch to tsearch2 which
adds lots of new features, sponsored by EnterpriseDB
http://mira.sai.msu.su/~megera/pgsql/ftsdoc/

Sebastien Lardiere's new book,
PostgreSQL 8.1 Administration et Exploitation d'une Base de Donnees,
is out.
http://www.postgresqlfr.org/?q=node/1031

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

phpPgAdmin is now in Fedora Extras.
http://people.planetpostgresql.org/devrim/index.php?/archives/73-Pushed-phpPgAdmin-into-Fedora-Core-Extras.html

Update Scout is now tracking PostgreSQL
http://www.update-scout.com

SuSE PostgreSQL RPMs released.
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/postgresql/

Grifinor, an open source 3D virtual globe platform, uses PostgreSQL.
http://www.grifinor.net/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for December ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-12/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The Italian PostgreSQL community will be holding a PostgreSQL day this
summer. Bookmark the link below to participate.
http://www.pgday.it

PostgreSQL Weekly News extends a warm welcome to PostreSQL's
Indonesian community.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/postgresql_indo/

Gavin Sherry is running a PostgreSQL miniconf at Linux.Conf.Au in
Sydney on Tuesday the 16th of January 2007.
http://lca2007.linux.org.au/Miniconfs/PostgreSQL If you would like to
attending, email gavin AT alcove . com . au

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter,
Pavel Stehule, Robert Treat

== Applied Patches ==

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- A Tom Lane/Andrew Dunstan patch to interpret a dbName param to
PQsetdbLogin as a conninfo string if it contains an = sign.

- Fix thinko in placement of TimeValStruct typedef in Windows case, as
reported by Magnus Hagander.

- In psql, enable \timing output for \copy commands

Tom Lane committed:

- Make HISTCONTROL=ignoredups work again (broken by misordering of
operations during recent code refactoring). Per bug #2840 from Ned
Crigler.

- Bring some order and sanity to error handling in the xml patch. Use
a TRY block instead of (inadequate) ad-hoc coding to ensure that
libxml is cleaned up after a failure. Report the intended SQLCODE
instead of defaulting to XX000. Avoid risking use of a dangling
pointer by keeping the persistent error buffer in TopMemoryContext.
Be less trusting that error messages don't contain %.

- Fix machine-dependent crash in sqlchar_to_unicode(). Get rid of
bletcherous and unsafe manipulation of global encoding setting.
Clean up libxml reporting mechanism a bit (it still looks like a
dangling-pointer crash waiting to happen, though, not to mention
being far less than sane from a localization standpoint).

- Code review for XML patch. Instill a bit of sanity in the location
of the XmlExpr code in various lists, use a representation that has
some hope of reverse-listing correctly (though it's still a
de-escaping function shy of correctness), generally try to make it
look more like Postgres coding conventions.

- Suppress various compiler warnings in new xml code.

- Restructure operator classes to allow improved handling of
cross-data-type cases. Operator classes now exist within "operator
families". While most families are equivalent to a single class,
related classes can be grouped into one family to represent the fact
that they are semantically compatible. Cross-type operators are now
naturally adjunct parts of a family, without having to wedge them
into a particular opclass as we had done originally. This commit
restructures the catalogs and cleans up enough of the fallout so
that everything still works at least as well as before, but most of
the work needed to actually improve the planner's behavior will come
later. Also, there are not yet CREATE/DROP/ALTER OPERATOR FAMILY
commands; the only way to create a new family right now is to allow
CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to make one by default. I owe some more
documentation work, too. But that can all be done in smaller pieces
once this infrastructure is in place.

- Set pg_am.amstrategies to zero for index AMs that don't have fixed
operator strategy numbers, ie, GiST and GIN. This is almost
cosmetic enough to not need a catversion bump, but since the
opr_sanity regression test has to change in sync with the catalog
entry, I figured I'd better do one.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Remove unnecessary parentheses in if() statements in
pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/float.c

- Change a VACUUM manual page word from 'deleted' to 'expired', so
DELETE and UPDATE are clearly covered by the term.

- Change documentation to state that it is a bad idea to CREATE TYPE
names that begin with an underscore. Doing so is not actually
disallowed.

- For GUC values, check for partial string matches on 'on' and 'off',
but require at least two characters for uniqueness. This now
matches the behavior of other boolean strings we support, per report
from Gurjeet Singh.

- Add a link to the developer's FAQ for my article about how companies
can work effectively with open source communities.

- Slight adjustments to xml documentation to reflect functionality
just added.

- 8.3 release schedule is year 2007, not 2006.

- Add timeline for next release to developer's FAQ.

- Change TODO to reflect done-ness of "Improve xid wraparound
detection by recording per-table rather than per-database.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Initial SQL/XML support: xml data type and initial set of functions,
complete with version bump and expected output fixes.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- In tsearch2, fix conversion for 'PFX flag N num'.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Simon Riggs sent in a patch which implements explain_analyze_timer per
previous discussions.

Tom Dunstan sent in a new version of his enums patch, now current with
CVS HEAD and with docs, bounds checks and error codes.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch for load distributed checkpoint per
his proposal below.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-12/msg00337.php

Glen Parker submitted a patch which adds two C functions which expose
n_live_tuples and n_dead_tuples, SQL functions to expose them to SQL
land, and corresponding fields added to pg_stat_all_tables.

Guillaume LeLarge sent in a patch which changes the capitalization of
DateStyle to datestyle, bringing it into line with other similar
names.

Jeremy Drake sent in a patch which makes psql's \lo_* commands respect
the -q flag (or other methods of setting quiet mode) as well as HTML
output mode.

Bruce Momjian sent in a patch per Roman Kononov's but #2846 to handle
underflow and NaN better.