== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 04 2007 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 04 2007 ==

A Europe-wide PostgreSQL group is forming. Watch for blue stuffed
plush elephants. :)

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PGCluster 1.5.0rc16 & 1.7.0rc5 released.

Orafce 2.1.1 released, now compatible with 8.1.8, 8.2.3 and CVS HEAD.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/orafce/

pgmemcache 1.2beta1 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgmemcache/

Mysql2pgsql 1.2 released, now with bug fixes.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/mysql2pgsql/

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The PostgreSQL Usergroup Germany was at Linuxtag in Chemnitz with a
booth. The presentation was very successful, with had lots of
interesting talks and got feedback from many users who are already
using PG. We will try to attend the next Linuxday.

The Italian PostgreSQL community is looking for sponsors for its
PostgreSQL day in Prato, Italy this summer. Check the link below
to participate.
http://www.pgday.it

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

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

Lorenzo Alberton has put up a table auditing tutorial.
http://www.alberton.info/postgresql_table_audit.html

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

To get your submission into the upcoming issue, make sure it arrives
at david(at)fetter(dot)org or in German at pwn(at)pgug(dot)de by Sunday at 3:00pm
Pacific Time.

== Applied Patches ==

Neil Conway committed

- A patch which adds a resetStringInfo() method to the StringInfo API
and fixes various parts of the tree that were clearing a StringInfo
by hand. Making this function a part of the API simplifies client
code slightly, and avoids needlessly peeking inside the StringInfo
interface.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Pavel Stehule' patch which fixes date/time formats for XML Schema
output.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Jeremy Drake's patch which changes the large object regression test
to look more like the C it talks to by using hex representations
directly instead of baroque expressions with arithmetic on powers of
16.

- Heikki Linnakangas's patch which splits _bt_insertonpg to two
functions.

- Simon Riggs's fix for COPY-after-truncate feature.

- Florian G. Pflug's patch which removes the undo information from
pg_controldata --- never used.

- Kris Jurka's patch which adds lo_truncate() to backend and libpq for
large object truncation.

- Darcy Buskermolen's patch which adds logging to /contrib/pg_standby
if -k couldn't clean up the log file.

- Simon Riggs' patch which add GUC log_lock_waits to log long wait
times.

- In TODO, mark as done, "Allow psql \pset boolean variables to set to
fixed values, rather than toggle."

- Chad Wagner's patch to psql which allows \pset, \x and \t to use
boolean constants on/off, rather than just toggle.

- Update license wording in FAQ_DEV.

- Add TODO URLs for "Add REPLACE or UPSERT command that does UPDATE,
or on failure, INSERT [merge]."

- In FAQ_DEV, fix HTML markup.

- In FAQ_DEV, mention we don't want non-BSD-compatible licensed
patches.

- Add language about rights given by posting a patch to FAQ_DEV.

- In FAQ_DEV, update release timeline to use unnumber lists HTML.

- Robert Treat's update to DEV FAQ for CVS/SVN issue.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Remove temporary Windows-specific debugging code from
pgsql/src/backend/storage/file/fd.c.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/build.bat, make build.bat return a proper
errorcode if the build fails.

Michael Meskes committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/execute.c, back-port fix of bug
2956, where ECPG mis-handled multi-byte characters.

Tom Lane committed:

- Make log_min_error_statement put LOG level at the same priority as
log_min_messages does; and arrange to suppress the duplicative
output that would otherwise result from log_statement and
log_duration messages. Bruce Momjian and Tom Lane.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/array.sgml, fix broken markup, improve
wording.

- Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane's patch which suppresses useless
searches for unused line pointers in PageAddItem. To do this, add a
16-bit "flags" field to page headers by stealing some bits from
pd_tli. We use one flag bit as a hint to indicate whether there are
any unused line pointers; the remaining 15 are available for future
use. This is a cut-down form of an idea proposed by Hiroki Kataoka
in July 2005. At the time it was rejected because the original
patch increased the size of page headers and it wasn't clear that
the benefit outweighed the distributed cost. The flag-bit approach
gets most of the benefit without requiring an increase in the page
header size.

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/pgstat.c, fix miscalculation of
stats collector's write delay, introduced in revision 1.117.

- Fix markQueryForLocking() to work correctly in the presence of
nested views. It has been wrong for this case since it was first
written for 7.1 :-( Per report from Pavel Hanak.

- Fix up several contrib modules that were using varlena datatypes in
not-so-obvious ways. I'm not totally sure that I caught everything,
but at least now they pass their regression tests with
VARSIZE/SET_VARSIZE defined to reverse byte order.

- Gregory Stark and Tom Lane's patch which replaces direct assignments
to VARATT_SIZEP(x) with SET_VARSIZE(x, len). Get rid of VARATT_SIZE
and VARATT_DATA, which were simply redundant with VARSIZE and
VARDATA, and as a consequence almost no code was using the longer
names. Rename the length fields of struct varlena and various
derived structures to catch anyplace that was accessing them
directly; and clean up various places so caught. In itself this
patch doesn't change any behavior at all, but it is necessary
infrastructure if we hope to play any games with the representation
of varlena headers.

- Get rid of the separate EState for subplans, and just let them share
the parent query's EState. Now that there's a single flat
rangetable for both the main plan and subplans, there's no need
anymore for a separate EState, and removing it allows cleaning up
some crufty code in nodeSubplan.c and nodeSubqueryscan.c. Should be
a tad faster too, although any difference will probably be hard to
measure. This is the last bit of subsidiary mop-up work from
changing to a flat rangetable.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Gregory Stark sent in an update patch which fixes a rather critical
oversight which caused the earlier compacting-varlena patches all to
appear to work but not actually to save any space.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch which adds a special case representation
for NUMERICs that can be represented in less than 8 bytes to do so
when possible. Numbers with a decimal point in them are still stored
as two numbers.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another version of his "load distributed
checkpoint" patch.

John Bartlett sent in a work-in-progress patch for updateable cursors.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in two more revisions of his
GENERATED/IDENTITY patch.

Chris Marcellino sent in two more versions of his POSIX shared memory
patch.

Gregory Stark sent in another revision of his packed varlena patch
which updates it for the SET_VARZSIZE changes.

Kris Jurka updated his lo_truncate patch to work with the new packed
varlenas.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of his work-in-progress
patch for dead space map.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch intended to speed up COPY.

Pavan Deolasee sent in version 4.0 of his work-in-progress HOT
(highly-updated tuples) patch.