Postgres Weekly News - February 10 2008

== Postgres Weekly News - February 10 2008 ==

PostgreSQL 8.3.0 released!

Kudos to the SCALE team and LAPUG for making that event a success.

PGDG RPMs for PostgreSQL 8.3.0 released.
http://yum.pgsqlrpms.org

== Postgres Product News ==

Benetl 1.2 released.
http://www.benetl.net/spip/index.php

MyJSQLView 2.81 beta released.
http://myjsqlview.sourceforge.net/

PGCluster-1.9.0rc1 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgcluster/

pgloader 2.2.6 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgloader/

pgSphere 1.0.0 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgsphere/

PL/Java has released a version for 8.3.
http://pgfoundry.org/frs/?group_id=1000038&release_id=1024

Slony-I 1.2.13 released. This release works with PostgreSQL 8.3.
http://slony.info/

SQLPro 1.4 released.
http://www.vive.net/products/sqlpro.htm

Staplr 0.5 released.
http://area51.myyearbook.com/trac.cgi/wiki/Staplr

== Postgres Jobs for February ==

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

== Postgres Local ==

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

Federico Campoli will be speaking on Postgres internals at the
GRASS/FOSS Meeting at DICA in Perugia, Italy on February 22.
Information in Italian below.
http://www.grassmeeting2008.unipg.it/?q=node/10

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

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

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/

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

== 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 language
to pwn(at)pgug(dot)de, Italian language to pwn(at)itpug(dot)org(dot)

== Applied Patches ==

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Handle libraries in directories with spaces in them. Gevik
Babakhani.

- Fix very broken clean.bat for msvc install. The way we used
subroutines in .bat simply did not work, and it called them in the
wrong order, some several times, and some not at all, so this
unrolls all subroutine calls. This should fix the issues with clean
deleting the wrong files reported by Dave Page. While at it, add
the "clean dist" option to act like "make distclean", and no longer
remove the flex/bison output files by default. This should fix the
problem reported by Pavel Golub in bug #3909.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Install.pm, fix msvc install script to
properly install NLS files when built with gettext.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Install.pm, fix msvc install for cases where
msgfmt (from gettext) is in a directory that contains spaces. Per
complaint from Gevik Babakhani, like the last one.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Fixed segfault in ecpg when using an array element. Free all memory
in auto-prepare mode.

Tom Lane committed:

- Fix CREATE TABLE ... LIKE ... INCLUDING INDEXES to not cause
unwanted tablespace permissions failures when copying an index that
is in the database's default tablespace. A side-effect of the
change is that explicitly specifying the default tablespace no
longer triggers a permissions check; this is not how it was done in
pre-8.3 releases but is argued to be more consistent. Per bug #3921
from Andrew Gilligan. (Note: I argued in the subsequent discussion
that maybe LIKE shouldn't copy index tablespaces at all, but since
no one indicated agreement with that idea, I've refrained from doing
it.)

- Fix silly mistake in expand_indexqual_rowcompare --- in converting a
forboth() into an iteration over three parallel lists, I had
accidentally put the lnext steps outside the loop. Sigh. Per bug
#3938.

- Add missing copyfuncs/equalfuncs support for AlterTSDictionaryStmt
and AlterTSConfigurationStmt. All utility statement node types are
expected to be supported here, though they do not have to have
outfuncs/readfuncs support. Found by running regression tests with
COPY_PARSE_PLAN_TREES enabled.

- Add missing copyfuncs/equalfuncs support for AlterTSDictionaryStmt
and AlterTSConfigurationStmt. All utility statement node types are
expected to be supported here, though they do not have to have
outfuncs/readfuncs support. Found by running regression tests with
COPY_PARSE_PLAN_TREES enabled.

- Some variants of ALTER OWNER tried to make the "object" field of the
statement be a list of bare C strings, rather than String nodes,
which is what they need to be for copyfuncs/equalfuncs to work.
Fortunately these node types never go out to disk (if they did, we'd
likely have noticed the problem sooner), so we can just fix it
without creating a need for initdb. This bug has been there since
8.0, but 8.3 exposes it in a more common code path (Parse messages)
than prior releases did. Per bug #3940 from Vladimir Kokovic.

- Avoid misbehavior in foreign key checks when casting to a datatype
for which the parser supplies a default typmod that can result in
data loss (ie, truncation). Currently that appears to be only
CHARACTER and BIT. We can avoid the problem by specifying the
type's internal name instead of using SQL-spec syntax. Since the
queries generated here are only used internally, there's no need to
worry about portability. This problem is new in 8.3; before we just
let the parser do whatever it wanted to resolve the operator, but
8.3 is trying to be sure that the semantics of FK checks are
consistent. Per report from Harald Fuchs.

- In pgsql/src/backend/libpq/auth.c, since GSSAPI and SSPI
authentication don't work in protocol version 2, issue a helpful
error message instead of sending unparsable garbage. (It is clearly
a design error that this doesn't work, but fixing it is not worth
the trouble at this point.) Per discussion.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/protocol.sgml, some small editorialization on
the protocol documentation for GSSAPI/SSPI authentication.

- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/page/bufpage.c, fix
PageGetExactFreeSpace() so that it actually behaves sensibly if
pd_lower > pd_upper, rather than merely claiming to. This would
only matter if the page header were corrupt, which shouldn't occur,
but ...

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release.sgml, add "automatically" to HOT
release note description.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Manolo di Domenico sent in two revisions of a patch intended to refine
the external sorting algorithm by using a two-way replacement
selection algorithm.

Simon Riggs sent in an optimization of TransactionIdIsInProgress().

Tom Lane sent in a patch to fix a bug in VACUUM FULL.