== Postgres Weekly News - February 03 2008 ==

== Postgres Weekly News - February 03 2008 ==

Watch for 8.3 February 4th!

== Postgres Product News ==

Archiveopteryx 2.06 released.
http://www.archiveopteryx.org/2.06

ip4r 1.03 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/ip4r/

Database Designer for PostgreSQL 1.2.3 released.
http://microolap.com/products/database/postgresql-designer/

pgAdmin III 1.8.2 released.
http://www.pgadmin.org/

pgTheme v1.0 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtheme/

ptop 3.6.1 beta3 released.
http://ptop.projects.postgresql.org/

== Postgres Jobs for February ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-02/threads.php

== Postgres Local ==

CfP for OSCON ends February 4. Send yours as soon as you read this.
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/cfp/13

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/

Postgres Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter and
Josh Berkus.

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 ==

Tom Lane committed:

- Minor editorial improvements in documentation of
session_replication_role; in particular correct the obsolete claim
that it can't be changed once any plans have been cached.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-secure.c, arrange to ignore SIGPIPE
during SSL_read() and SSL_shutdown(), as these are known to write on
the socket sometimes and thus we are vulnerable to being killed by
the signal if the server happens to go away unexpectedly. Noticed
while trying (futilely) to reproduce bug #3902. This bug has been
there all along, but since the situation is usually only of interest
to developers, I chose not to back-patch the changes.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c, fix up closePGconn() so
that PQreset() will work on GSSAPI/SSPI connections; the patch for
those features put its cleanup code into freePGconn() which is
really the wrong place. Remove redundant code from freePGconn() and
add comments in hopes of preventing similar mistakes in future.
Noticed while trying (futilely) to reproduce bug #3902.

- In pgsql/src/backend/libpq/auth.c, don't putenv() a string that is
allocated in a context that will go away soon. I suspect this
explains bug #3902, though I'm still not able to reproduce that.

- Add a GUC variable "synchronize_seqscans" 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.
Per recent discussions.

- Add checks to TRUNCATE, CLUSTER, and REINDEX to prevent performing
these operations when the current transaction has any open
references to the target relation or index (implying it has an
active query using the relation). The need for this was previously
recognized in connection with ALTER TABLE, but anything that
summarily eliminates tuples or moves them around would confuse an
active scan. While this patch does not in itself fix bug #3883 (the
deadlock would happen before the new check fires), it will
discourage people from attempting the sequence of operations that
creates a deadlock risk, so it's at least a partial response to that
problem. In passing, add a previously-missing check to REINDEX to
prevent trying to reindex another backend's temp table. This isn't
a security problem since only a superuser would get past the schema
permission checks, but if we are testing for this in other utility
commands then surely REINDEX should too.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/catalogs.sgml, improve pg_autovacuum
documentation to clarify that the enabled field cannot prevent
anti-wraparound vacuuming, and to caution against setting
unreasonably small values of freeze_max_age. Also put in a notice
that this catalog is likely to disappear entirely in some future
release. Per discussion of bug #3898 from Steven Flatt.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-auth.c, fix pg_GSS_error to use
conn->errorMessage more sanely, ie, actually work with the
PQExpBuffer code instead of fighting it. This avoids an unnecessary
limit on message length and fixes the latent bug that
errorMessage.len wasn't getting set.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml, remove the old table of
"supported platforms" in favor of a link to the buildfarm plus a
narrative description of the CPU types and operating systems on
which Postgres is likely to work. Now that we've almost completely
decoupled CPU and OS considerations, the former tabular style isn't
all that enlightening anyway. Perhaps more importantly, no one
seems particularly interested in maintaining the table by hand when
we have the buildfarm.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, mention synchronize_seqscans GUC
variable in release notes. Update expected release date.

- Fix WaitOnLock() to ensure that the process's "waiting" flag is
reset after erroring out of a wait. We can use a PG_TRY block for
this, but add a comment explaining why it'd be a bad idea to use it
for any other state cleanup. Back-patch to 8.2. Prior releases had
the same issue, but only with respect to the process title, which is
likely to get reset almost immediately anyway after the transaction
aborts, so it seems not worth changing them. In 8.2 and HEAD, the
pg_stat_activity "waiting" flag could remain set incorrectly for a
long time. Per report from Gurjeet Singh.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/config.sgml, move example of turning off
synchronous_commit to a more logical place, to wit in the
description of that variable rather than some other one.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, minor wordsmithing in release
notes' description of asynchronous commit.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/vacuum.sgml, fix mistaken duplicate
reference to max_fsm_pages, per bug #3926. Also make links
clickable.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/high-availability.sgml, add "Communication
Method" row to HA feature matrix documentation.

- Remove duplicate item, "Allow the PITR process to be debugged and
data examined" from TODO.

- Add to TODO: "Add autonomous transactions."

- Add to TODO: "Improve deadlock detection when deleting items from
shared buffers."

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml, document the idea of creating a
symbolic link in /tmp to prevent server spoofing when the socket
file has been moved.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml, update spoofing /tmp symlink
instructions to be more specific about the name of the needed
symlink file.

- Add comment about possible URL changes for www7.hp.com:

- Fix spelling typo in comment.

- Update TODO to read: "Improve deadlock detection when a page
cleaning lock conflicts with a shared buffer that is pinned."

- Update FAQ for most recent release as 8.3.

- Stamp 8.3 in CVS. _No_ update of configure/configure.in.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/catalogs.sgml, markup fix from Gevik
Babakhani.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/keywords.sgml, update keywords table for 8.3.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/high-availability.sgml, improve table
reference.

- Translation updates.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/gendef.pl, fix test that wrongly excluded
some dumpbin symbols. Keep the intermediate symbol file rather then
blowing it away, for easier debugging.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/gendef.pl, remove 3 hex digit limit on
symbol number in recent fix.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/ps_status.c, add pid to the pgident
event name on win32. Should fix a problem where two clusters are
running under two different service accounts and get colliding
names, causing only the first cluster to contain the pgident event
description. Per report from Stephen Denne.

Marc Fournier committed:

- configure tag'd 8.3.0 and built witih autoconf 2.59

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

Pavel Stehule's patch to allow people to obfuscate PL/PgSQL functions,
on grounds of its dependency on contrib/pgcrypto.

== Pending Patches ==

Dean Rasheed sent in a patch to allow logging of the explain plan for
each query.

Gokulakannan Somasundaram sent in another revision of his "thick
index" patch.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch for doing prereading while doing bitmap
index scans.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to add TRUNCATE triggers to CVS HEAD.
Intended for 8.4.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix bug #3921, which complained that
CREATE TABLE LIKE INCLUDING INDEXES fails inappropriately for
non-superusers.

Peter Eisentraut sent a patch to upgrade to autoconf 2.61 for 8.4