== Postgres Weekly News - January 27 2008 ==

== Postgres Weekly News - January 27 2008 ==

8.3 RC2 is out. Test!
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta

Congratulations to Selena Deckelmann on her new job as PostgreSQL User
Group Liaison.

Look for an upgraded PUG server this coming week.
http://pugs.postgresql.org/

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

== Postgres Product News ==

ip4r 1.02 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/ip4r/

pg_proboscis 0.9.4 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/python/

== Postgres Jobs for January ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-01/threads.php

== Postgres Local ==

The European PostgreSQL User Group will elect a new board of
directors. If you want to suggest a candidate or for the voting rules
look at:
http://www.pgug.eu/election.txt

Prague PostgreSQL Developers' Day 2008 will be on February 13th.
http://www.dbsvet.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2008011101

PGCon 2008 will be May 20-23 in Ottawa - now accepting proposals.
http://www.pgcon.org/2008/papers.php

FOSDEM has organized its usual event Friday 8pm, February 22 at Bier
Circus in Brussels.
http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/27/27650/Le_Bier_Circus/Brussels

The BSD and PostgreSQL teams share a developer room at FOSDEM 2008 in
Brussels February 23-34, 2008. If you want to give a talk or help
managing the dev room, contact fosdem(at)pgug(dot)eu(dot) For more information,
see:
https://www.bsdwiki.de/FOSDEM_2008

PostgreSQL Conference East '08 talks are March 29 and 30 at the
University of Maryland, College Park. The Call for Papers is open.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

FISL 9.0 will be happening April 17-19, 2008 at PUCRS in Porto Alegre,
Brazil.
https://fisl.softwarelivre.org/9.0/

== Postgres in the News ==

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

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

Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
Please send English language ones to david(at)fetter(dot)org, German language
to pwn(at)pgug(dot)de, Italian language to pwn(at)itpug(dot)org(dot)

== Applied Patches ==

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/pg_enum.c, split error message.

- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/pg_shdepend.c, improve lock level
choices in pg_shdepend.c. Noticed by Tom Lane.

Tom Lane committed:

- Fix psql \h output for case of no parameters (ie, list all the known
commands) to format properly for the actually needed column width,
instead of having a hard-wired assumption about the longest command
name length. Also make it respond to the current screen width. In
passing, const-ify the constant table.

- Fix RS_isRegis() to agree exactly with RS_compile()'s idea of what's
a valid regis. Correct the latter's oversight that a
bracket-expression needs to be terminated. Reduce the ereports to
elogs, since they are now not expected to ever be hit (thus
addressing Alvaro's original complaint). In passing, const-ify the
string argument to RS_compile.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/config.sgml, improve description of
bgwriter_lru_multiplier, per discussion.

- Reference pgAdmin as a typical client-side tool, rather than the
no-longer-maintained PgAccess. Per Erik Rijkers.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/syntax.sgml, avoid mathematical inconsistency
in example about avoiding division by zero with a CASE expression.
Per gripe from Russell Smith.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/backup.sgml, provide a concrete example of
parameter expansion in archive_command. Per discussion of bug
#3877. Simon Riggs, some fixes by moi.

- In pgsql/src/include/utils/timestamp.h, prevent integer overflow
within the integer-datetimes version of TimestampTzPlusMilliseconds.
An integer argument of more than INT_MAX/1000 milliseconds (ie,
about 35 minutes) would provoke a wrong result, resulting in
incorrect enforcement of statement_timestamp values larger than
that. Bug was introduced in my rewrite of 2006-06-20, which fixed
some other overflow risks, but missed this one :-( Per report from
Elein.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/ri_triggers.c, release any detoasted
copies of arrays that are made temporarily in ri_FetchConstraintInfo,
to avoid a query-duration memory leak when that routine is called by
RI_FKey_keyequal_upd_fk (which isn't executed in a short-lived
context). This problem was latent when the routine was added in
February, but it didn't become serious until the varvarlena patch
made it quite likely that the fields being examined would be
"toasted" (ie, have short headers). Per report from Stephen Denne.

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/syslogger.c, fix two different
copy-and-paste-os in CSV log rotation logic; one that led to a
double-pfree crash and another that effectively disabled size-based
rotation for CSV logs. Also suppress a memory leak and make some
trivial cosmetic improvements. Per bug #3901 from Chris Hoover and
additional code-reading.

- Change StatementCancelHandler() to check the DoingCommandRead flag
to decide whether to execute an immediate interrupt, rather than
testing whether LockWaitCancel() cancelled a lock wait. The old way
misclassified the case where we were blocked in ProcWaitForSignal(),
and arguably would misclassify any other future additions of new
ImmediateInterruptOK states too. This allows reverting the old
kluge that gave LockWaitCancel() a return value, since no callers
care anymore. Improve comments in the various implementations of
PGSemaphoreLock() to explain that on some platforms, the assumption
that semop() exits after a signal is wrong, and so we must ensure
that the signal handler itself throws elog if we want cancel or die
interrupts to be effective. Per testing related to bug #3883,
though this patch doesn't solve those problems fully. Perhaps this
change should be back-patched, but since pre-8.3 branches aren't
really relying on autovacuum to respond to SIGINT, it doesn't seem
critical for them.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Provide a clearer error message if the pg_control version number
looks wrong because of mismatched byte ordering.

- Change /contrib to contrib for consistency.

Andrew Dunstan commited:

- In pgsql/src/pl/plperl/plperl.c, work around for perl 5.10 bug - fix
due to perl hacker Simon Cozens.

- In pgsql/src/pl/plperl/plperl.c, document the fix for perl 5.10 with
the following comment: "The temporary enabling of the caller opcode
here is to work around a bug in perl 5.10, which unkindly changed
the way its Safe.pm works, without notice. It is quite safe, as
caller is informational only, and in any case we only enable it
while we load the 'strict' module."

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/plperl.sgml, fix example of de-escaping bytea
argument, per Florian Weimer. Also fix example of escaping bytea
return value. Both cases did not handle backslash values properly.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

Simon Riggs's patch to reduce the contention on SInvalLock, due to its
untestedness.

== Pending Patches ==

Tom Lane sent in a patch for renaming constraints along with the
corresponding indexes.

Simon Riggs sent in a doc patch for bug 3877 (re: WAL/PITR).

Greg Sabino Mullane sent in a patch to add a useful response to 'help'
and variants in psql.

Hiroshi Saito sent in a patch to fix testlo on Windows.

Gokulakannan Somasundaram sent in two more revisions of his thick
index patch.

Pavel Stehule sent in a WIP patch for variadic functions.

Neil Conway sent in an updated version of Gregory Stark's
non-recursive WITH patch with the WITH RECURSIVE parts trimmed out.

Tom Lane sent in a patch which adds a GUC variable to allow clients to
disable the new synchronized-scanning behavior, and make pg_dump
disable sync scans so that it will reliably preserve row ordering.