== Postgres Weekly News - February 24 2008 ==

== Postgres Weekly News - February 24 2008 ==

FOSDEM was a smash hit for Postgres. The talks were frequently
standing room only; the people staffing the booth were enthusiastic
and knowledgeable, and the donations were sky high. Kudos to all who
made it happen.

The EU PostgreSQL User Group now has a board of directors: Jean-Paul
Agudo of France, Gabriele Bartolini of Italy, Magnus Hagander of
Sweden and Andreas Scherbaum of Germany. Congratulations to all!

== Postgres Product News ==

Benetl 1.5 for Windows released.
http://www.benetl.net

Pg::Snapshot and Materialized Views version 0.3.2 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/snapshot/

Peter Eisentraut et al. have started the Debian PostgreSQL Packaging Project.
http://pkg-postgresql.alioth.debian.org/

Greg Sabino Mullane has made MediaWiki compatible with Postgres 8.3.
http://people.planetpostgresql.org/greg/index.php?/archives/123-MediaWiki-is-Postgres-8.3-compatible.html
MicroOLAP Database Designer 1.2.3 for PostgreSQL released.
http://microolap.com/products/database/postgresql-designer/

Nagios Plugin for Postgres 1.2.0 released.
http://bucardo.org/nagios/

PGCluster packages 1.9, 1.7, 1.5 and 1.3 updated.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgcluster/

ptop 3.6.1 beta4 released.
http://ptop.projects.postgresql.org/

textsearch-ja 8.3.0 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/textsearch-ja/

VTD-XML 2.3 released.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=110612&package_id=120172

== Postgres Jobs for February ==

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

== Postgres Local ==

PG UK day will be April 2 in Birmingham.
http://www.postgresql.org.uk/

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

PostgreSQL Conference East '08 talks are March 29 and 30 at the
University of Maryland, College Park.
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

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 ==

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/tsearch/Makefile, observe errors.

- Added --htmldir option to pg_config, equivalent to the new configure
option.

- Refactor backend makefiles to remove lots of duplicate code.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/common/Makefile, remove another target I
forgot during the refactoring.

- Remove pgsql/src/backend/port/sunos4. This subdirectory has been
unused, dead, and broken for 10 years.

- More refactoring, so that the SUBSYS.o rules are now all in one
place.

- Backport fixed AC_FUNC_FSEEKO

Bruce Momjian committed:

- autoconf 2.61's AC_FUNC_FSEEKO reports success/failure differently,
so reorganize code for NetBSD/BSDi port/fseeko.c usage, and make
code more modular.

- Put fseeko check back in old location, in hopes of silencing build
warnings.

- Put back code modularization of fseeko() configure checks.

Tom Lane committed:

- Remove unnecessary opening of other relation in RI_FKey_keyequal_upd_pk
and RI_FKey_keyequal_upd_fk, as well as no-longer-needed calls of
ri_BuildQueryKeyFull. Aside from saving a few cycles, this avoids
needless deadlock risks when an update is not changing the columns
that participate in an RI constraint. Per a gripe from Alexey
Nalbat. Back-patch to 8.3. Earlier releases did have a need to
open the other relation due to the way in which they retrieved
information about the RI constraint, so this problem unfortunately
can't easily be improved pre-8.3. Tom Lane and Stephan Szabo

- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/catalog.c, put a CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS
call into the loops that try to find a unique new OID or new
relfilenode. If the existing OIDs are sufficiently densely
populated, this could take a long time (perhaps even be an infinite
loop), so it seems wise to allow the system to respond to a cancel
interrupt here. Per a gripe from Jacky Leng. Backpatch as far as
8.1. Older versions just fail on OID collision, instead of looping.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_ctl/pg_ctl.c, fix mistakes in pg_ctl's code for
"start -w" that tries to cope with non-default settings for the
postmaster's port number. The code to parse command line options
and postgresql.conf entries wasn't quite right about whitespace or
quotes, and it was coded in a not-very-readable way too. Per bug
#3969 from Itagaki Takahiro, though this is more extensive than his
proposed patch (which fixed only the whitespace problem). This code
has been broken since it was put in in 8.0, so patch all the way
back.

- In pgsql/src/test/regress/pg_regress.c, make pg_regress -V
consistent with the corresponding code in other programs: use puts
with a compile-time-constant string.

- Rename miscadmin.h's PG_VERSIONSTR macro to PG_BACKEND_VERSIONSTR to
make it a bit clearer what it is, and get rid of duplicate
definitions in initdb and pg_ctl.

- Change the declaration of struct varlena so that the length word is
represented as "char ...[4]" not "int32". Since the length word is
never supposed to be accessed via this struct member anyway, this
won't break any existing code that is following the rules. The
advantage is that C compilers will no longer assume that a pointer
to struct varlena is word-aligned, which prevents incorrect
optimizations in TOAST-pointer access and perhaps other places. gcc
doesn't seem to do this (at least not at -O2), but the problem is
demonstrable on some other compilers. I changed struct inet as
well, but didn't bother to touch a lot of other struct definitions
in which it wouldn't make any difference because there were other
fields forcing int alignment anyway. Hopefully none of those struct
definitions are used for accessing unaligned Datums.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/help_config.c, avoid trying to print
a NULL char pointer in --describe-config. On some platforms this
works, but on some it crashes. Zdenek Kotala

- Use our own getopt() and getopt_long() on Solaris, because that
platform's versions don't handle long options the way we want. Per
Zdenek Kotala.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Solution.pm, unbreak MSVC build after recent
addition of HTMLDIR.

- In pgsql/src/timezone/strftime.c, fix function prototype to silence
compiler warnings.

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Project.pm, un-break msvc port yet again (it
started pulling in the Darwin port files, which obviously didn't
compile).

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/autovacuum.c, change error message
to be able to differentiate the two cases. Per suggestion from
Jaime Casanova.

- Improve error messages emitted when VACUUM and ANALYZE skip a table.
Per gripe from Clodoaldo Pinto Neto.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Gevik Babakhani sent in a patch to fix MSVC compilation on MSVC.

Tatsuhito Kasahara sent in two revisions of a patch intended to change
pgstatindex.c and pgstattuple.sql, where some variables are defined
with int type, to a larger numeric type, which in turn allows for
larger tables.

Davd Page sent in a patch which fixes initdb failures on Windows
stemming from recent security-related changes to that platform.

Zdenek Kotala sent in three revisions of a patch intended to fix
non-portable getopt() code.

Neil Conway sent in a patch to fix some memory leaks in the
implementaiton of set-returning functions.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch links the backend in one piece
instead of many SUBSYS.so files.

Robert Lor sent in a patch to change the DTrace probes from the
DTRACE_PROBEn implementation to the header macro implementation so
that the probes can be used on OSs other than Solaris including OSX
Tiger.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in an optimization for CopyReadLineText which
should speed up COPY operations in many common cases.