== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 13 2007 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 13 2007 ==

There are some Lively Discussions about patches going on on the
-patches list.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PostgreSQL Code Factory released.
http://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/postgresql/codefactory/

EnterpriseDB is now available on Red Hat Exchange.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=250943

MediaWiki 1.10 released.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

PostgresDAC 2.3.9-beta2 released.
http://microolap.com/products/connectivity/postgresdac/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for May ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-05/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Get on the Road to PgDay!
http://www.pgday.it/en/node/95

Registration is still open for PGCon 2007
http://www.pgcon.org/2007/registration.php

== 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

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 ==

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Document that CLUSTER breaks MVCC visibility rules. (Not needed in
cvs head, because CLUSTER itself is fixed there). Heikki
Linnakangas. Back-patched to 7.4.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Install.pm, log directory we're installing
into. Per request from Andrew Dunstan.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Mark TODO as done: "Add support for arrays of complex types."

- Add to TODO: "Have configure choose integer datetimes by default."

- Add to TODO: "Allow data to be passed in native language formats,
rather than only text.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Added some more error logging to
pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/data.c.

- Synced parser and keyword list for ECPG. Renamed update test in the
hope that it will run on Vista.

Neil Conway committed:

- Improvements to the SGML docs for TRUNCATE and CLUSTER.

- Add a hash function for "numeric". Mark the equality operator for
numerics as "oprcanhash", and make the corresponding system catalog
updates. As a result, hash indexes, hashed aggregation, and hash
joins can now be used with the numeric type. Bump the catversion.
The only tricky aspect to doing this is writing a correct hash
function: it's possible for two Numerics to be equal according to
their equality operator, but have different in-memory bit patterns.
To cope with this, the hash function doesn't consider the Numeric's
"scale" or "sign", and explictly skips any leading or trailing zeros
in the Numeric's digit buffer (the current implementation should
suppress any such zeros, but it seems unwise to rely upon this). See
discussion on pgsql-patches for more details.

Tom Lane committed:

- Improve predicate_refuted_by_simple_clause() to handle IS NULL and
IS NOT NULL more completely. The motivation for having it
understand IS NULL at all was to allow use of "foo IS NULL" as one
of the subsets of a partitioning on "foo", but as reported by
Aleksander Kmetec, it wasn't really getting the job done. Backpatch
to 8.2 since this is arguably a performance bug.

- Fix the problem that creating a user-defined type named _foo,
followed by one named foo, would work but the other ordering would
not. If a user-specified type or table name collides with an
existing auto-generated array name, just rename the array type out
of the way by prepending more underscores. This should not create
any backward-compatibility issues, since the cases in which this
will happen would have failed outright in prior releases. Also fix
an oversight in the arrays-of-composites patch: ALTER TABLE RENAME
renamed the table's rowtype but not its array type.

- Fix my oversight in enabling domains-of-domains: ALTER DOMAIN ADD
CONSTRAINT needs to check the new constraint against columns of
derived domains too. Also, make it error out if the domain to be
modified is used within any composite-type columns. Eventually we
should support that case, but it seems a bit painful, and not
suitable for a back-patch. For the moment just let the user know we
can't do it. Backpatch to 8.2, which is the only released version
that allows nested domains. Possibly the other part should be
back-patched further.

- Support arrays of composite types, including the rowtypes of regular
tables and views (but not system catalogs, nor sequences or toast
tables). Get rid of the hardwired convention that a type's array
type is named exactly "_type", instead using a new column
pg_type.typarray to provide the linkage. (It still will be named
"_type", though, except in odd corner cases such as maximum-length
type names.) Along the way, make tracking of owner and schema
dependencies for types more uniform: a type directly created by the
user has these dependencies, while a table rowtype or auto-generated
array type does not have them, but depends on its parent object
instead. David Fetter, Andrew Dunstan, Tom Lane

- Reserve some pg_statistic "kind" codes for use by the ESRI
ST_Geometry datatype project. Per request from Ale Raza (araza at
esri.com).

- Add an explicit comment about POSIX time zone names having the
reverse sign convention from everyplace else in Postgres. I don't
suppose that this will stop people from being confused, but at least
we can say that it's documented.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- The appended patch addresses the outstanding issues of the recent
guc patch. It makes PGCLIENTENCODING work again and uses bsearch()
instead of iterating over the array of guc variables in
guc_get_index().

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- Make sure we don't skip databases that are supposed to be vacuumed
"exactly now". This can happen if the time granularity is not very
high. Per ITAGAKI Takahiro.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Grammar correction in pgsql/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Pavan Deolassee sent in a flock of patches for HOT, broken out per
discussion.

William Lawrance sent in two revisions of a patch for ECPG that makes
it use PQprepare and PQexecPrepared functions to cache SQL statements.

Tomas Doran sent in three revisions of a patch which exposes a
current_query() function to SQL.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another version of his GENERATED patch.

Gregory Stark sent in a doc patch explaining how to use packed
varlenas.

Jim Nasby sent in a patch to have vacuum emit a warning when it runs
out of maintenance_work_mem.

CK Tan sent in a patch which improves the performance of scans on big
relations.

Gregory Stark sent in another revision of his concurrent psql patch.