== Postgres Weekly News - October 22 2007 ==

== Postgres Weekly News - October 22 2007 ==

Watch for Postgres 8.3 beta 2, and keep testing. :)

The PostgreSQL Fall Conference was a smashing success. Pictures
below.
http://db.endpoint.com/pgcon07/

== Postgres Product News ==

explain-analyze.info is now online!
http://explain-analyze.info

pgAdmin3 1.8.0 released.
http://www.pgadmin.org/news.php

PL/php 1.3.5 beta 1 released.
http://projects.commandprompt.com/public/plphp

== Postgres Jobs for October ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-10/threads.php

== Postgres Local ==

New Zealand PUG's first meeting will take place in Wellington
November 6, 2007. Details below.
http://pgug.org.nz

Check out the new German-language Postgres job board.
http://www.pg-forum.de/jobboerse-marktplatz/

== Postgres in the News ==

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

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

Postgres 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 to
pwn(at)pgug(dot)de(dot)

== Applied Patches ==

Neil Conway committed:

- Minor fixes for the release notes.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Re-allow UTF8 encodings on win32. Since UTF8 is converted to UTF16
before being used, all (valid) locales will work for this.

- Hiroshi Saito's patch which updates URLs to a couple of external
projects in pgsql/doc/src/sgml/external-projects.sgml.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/external-projects.sgml, fix the URL properly
per Robert Treat.

- In pgsql/contrib/pgbench/pgbench.c, increase FD_SETSIZE on Win32 to
allow for more than 54 clients. Per Greg Stark & Dave Page

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/initdb/initdb.c, remove quotes around locale names
in some places for consistency.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Add mention of Slony for in-place upgrades to
pgsql/doc/src/sgml/backup.sgml.

- Mention that Slony switch is only seconds of downtime.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/backup.sgml, add doc clarifications for warm
standby.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/backup.sgml, mention Slony as just an example.

- Re-add FAQ item, 'Why do I get "relation with OID ##### does not
exist" errors when accessing temporary tables in PL/PgSQL
functions?'

- First pass over release documentation. I trimmed down some of the
entries and removed a few.

- Small changes to release note descriptions.

- Move a few items into migration from the main changes section.
Indent 8.3 consistently.

- More indenting cleanup, tag additions.

- More release wording adjustments.

- Consistently indent release notes for prior releases.

- More indenting cleanup for release notes.

- Update German FAQ. Ian Barwick

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, more release note wording
improvements.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, fix release tag spelling typo.

- More release note word-smithing in pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml

- Update Japanese FAQ. Jun Kuwamura

Tom Lane committed:

- Include NOLOGIN roles in the 'flat' password file. In the original
coding this was seen as useless, but the problem with not including
them is that the error message will often be something about
authentication failure, rather than the more helpful one about 'role
is not permitted to log in'. Per discussion.

- Back-patch some plpython patches previously made only in HEAD:
changes of 3-Apr and 4-Apr to declare interface functions properly
and eliminate casts, thereby fixing potential problems on 64-bit
machines; and changes of 13-Jul to volatile-qualify some variables
to suppress compiler warnings. Per discussion, we're only worrying
about Python 2.5 in PG 8.2 and up, so no need to patch further back.

- Add sample text search dictionary templates and parsers, to replace
the hard-to-maintain textual examples currently in the SGML docs.
From Sergey Karpov.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/textsearch.sgml, remove obsolete examples of
add-on parsers and dictionary templates; these are more easily and
usefully maintained as contrib modules. Various other wordsmithing,
markup improvement, etc.

- Fix pg_wchar_table[] to match revised ordering of the encoding ID
enum. Add some comments so hopefully the next poor sod doesn't fall
into the same trap. (Wrong comments are worse than none at all...)

- Teach pgxs.mk and Install.pm how to install files from a contrib
module into SHAREDIR/tsearch_data. Use this instead of ad-hoc
coding in dict_xsyn/Makefile. Should fix current ContribCheck
failures on MSVC.

- Tweak toast-related logic in pgsql/src/backend/access/heap/heapam.c
so that the toaster is only invoked when relkind = RELKIND_RELATION.
This syncs these tests with the Asserts in tuptoaster.c, and ensures
that we won't ever try to, for example, compress a sequence's tuple.
Problem found by Greg Stark while stress-testing with
much-smaller-than-normal page sizes.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/describe.c, use 'token' not 'lexeme' to
describe the output of a parser.

- Another round of editorialization on the text search documentation.
Notably, standardize on using "token" for the strings output by a
parser, while "lexeme" is reserved for the normalized strings
produced by a dictionary.

- In pgsql/src/port/chklocale.c, add missing entry for PG_WIN1250
encoding, per gripe from Pavel Stehule. Also enable translation of
PG_WIN874, which certainly seems to have an obvious translation now,
though maybe it did not at the time this table's ancestor was
created.

- ts_rewrite() does not return a set, only one row; fix mislabeling in
pg_proc.h. Catversion bumped.

- Found another small glitch in tsearch API: the two versions of
ts_lexize() are really redundant, since we invented a regdictionary
alias type. We can have just one function, declared as taking
regdictionary, and it will handle both behaviors. Noted while
working on documentation.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/config.sgml, add a note pointing out that you
can't log to syslog without tweaking the syslog configuration file
(at least not on most known Unixen). I dunno why we hadn't had that
info in the docs all along ...

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/tsginidx.c, adjust error message to
agree with documentation. The tsearch documentation uniformly calls
these things weights, not classes.

- Editorial overhaul for text search documentation. Organize the info
more clearly, improve a lot of unclear descriptions, add some
missing material. We still need a migration guide though.

- Fix shared tsvector/tsquery input code so that we don't say "syntax
error in tsvector" when we are really parsing a tsquery. Report the
bogus input, too. Make styles of some related error messages more
consistent.

- In pgsql/src/backend/regex/regc_lex.c, add a useless return
statement to suppress a warning seen with some versions of gcc (I'm
seeing it with Apple's gcc 4.0.1). I think the reason we did not
see this before was that the assert() macros in the regex code were
all no-ops till recently.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/textsearch.sgml, create a quick-and-dirty list
of known migration issues for pre-8.3 users of tsearch. This isn't
meant to be permanent documentation, but to call out the areas that
need either fixing or real documentation.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/prep/prepunion.c, remove an Assert
that's been obsoleted by recent changes in the parsetree
representation of DECLARE CURSOR. Report and fix by Heikki.

- In pgsql/contrib/pgstattuple/pgstattuple.c, be careful to get share
lock on each page before computing its free space. ITAGAKI Takahiro

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Brendan Jurd sent in another revision of his quote_null patch.

Neil Conway sent in a patch to avoid a needless copy in nodeMaterial
in src/backend/executor/nodeMaterial.c.

Marko Kreen sent in two versions of new documentation for the txid
feature.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch for testing query modes on pgbench
per discussion
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-10/msg00755.php

Volkan YAZICI sent in a patch which implements configurable penalty
costs for the Levenshtein distance metric in the fuzzystrmatch contrib
module.

Hiroshi Saito sent in a patch to adjust test_fsync.c

Greg Sabino Mullane sent in a patch which improves psql's tab
completion for schemas and tables.

Tom Raney sent in another revision of his hash index build patch.

Albert Cervera i Areny sent in a patch to include contrib docs in the
docbook SGML.