== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 04 2008 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 04 2008 ==

The May commit-fest has begun, and as predicted, is going even more
smoothly than March's.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Benetl 1.8 released.
http://www.benetl.net/

Continuent uni/cluster for PostgreSQL 2008 released.
http://www.continuent.com/

DBD::Pg 2.6.4 released.
http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBD-Pg/

check_postgres 1.5.2 released.
http://bucardo.org/check_postgres/

PL/LOLCODE 0.2b1 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pllolcode/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for May ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-05/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

AustinPUG is meeting on May 6, 2008, 6pm at Sun's offices in Riata
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/388

BWPUG will be holding their first ever meeting Wednesday, May 14th, at
OmniTI world headquarters in Columbia, MD.

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

The Greek PUG will be putting up a booth at the third Greek FLOSS
conference on May 27-28 at NTUA, Athens.
http://www.postgresql.gr

LAPUG will be meeting May 30, 2008 at Cal Poly
Non-trivial updateable views, from Keith Larson
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/390

PGDay will be in Portland the day before OSCON.
http://pugs.postgresql.org/taxonomy/term/53

Utah Open Source Conference 2008's CfP is open through June 1.
This 2nd annual conference is August 28-30, 2008 in Salt Lake City, UT
http://2008.utosc.com/

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

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

PostgreSQL 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 ==

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- Add generate_subscripts, a series-generation function which
generates an array's subscripts. Pavel Stehule, some
editorialization by me.

- Bump the catversion for the previous patch.

- Fix volatility marking for the generate_series and
generate_subscripts families of functions.

- Remove typename from A_Const. Brendan Jurd, minor editorialization
by me.

- Fix REASSIGN OWNED so that it works on procedural languages too.
The capability for changing language owners is new in 8.3, so that's
how far back this needs to be backpatched. Per bug #4132 by Kirill
Simonov.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/alter_role.sgml, add example showing how
to remove a password from a role. Andreas Scherbaum.

Tom Lane committed:

- Fix broken configure test for libxslt: it was probing for
xsltLibxmlVersion, which is a global variable not a function, and so
the probe failed on machines where the linker makes a distinction
(cf. Red Hat bug #444317). Probe for an actual function instead.

- Increase the statement_timeout value used in the prepared_xacts
regression test. We have seen some buildfarm failures that seem to
be due to this limit being unexpectedly exceeded when the machine is
under load.

- Some minor further cleanup around A_Const. Don't attach a typecast
in makeFloatConst, and avoid "manual" construction of A_Const nodes
in grammar productions, in favor of using makeXXXConst subroutines.

- In pgsql/src/backend/executor/nodeTidscan.c, fix nodeTidscan.c to
not trigger an error if the block number portion of a user-supplied
TID is out of range for the relation. This is needed to preserve
compatibility with our pre-8.3 behavior, and it is sensible anyway
since if the query were implemented by brute force rather than
optimized into a TidScan, the behavior for a non-existent TID would
be zero rows out, never an error. Per gripe from Gurjeet Singh.

- Make the minimum allowed value of work_mem be 64KB always, rather
than having it vary with BLCKSZ as before. This agrees with what
the documentation says, and avoids a regression test problem when
BLCKSZ is larger than default. Per recent discussion.

- Add SGT (Singapore time) to the default list of known timezone
abbreviations. It doesn't conflict with any other abbreviation so
there seems no reason not to include it. Per a recent gripe.

- Remove the recently added USE_SEGMENTED_FILES option, and indeed
remove all support for a nonsegmented mode from md.c. Per recent
discussions, there doesn't seem to be much value in a "never
segment" option as opposed to segmenting with a suitably large
segment size. So instead provide a configure-time switch to set the
desired segment size in units of gigabytes. While at it, expose a
configure switch for BLCKSZ as well. Zdenek Kotala

- In pgsql/src/include/pg_config.h.win32, sigh ... pg_config.h.win32
needs to define BLCKSZ and RELSEG_SIZE now.

- Extend yesterday's patch making BLCKSZ and RELSEG_SIZE configurable
to also let XLOG_BLCKSZ and XLOG_SEG_SIZE be set via configure. Per
a proposal by Mark Wong, though I thought it better to call the
switches after "wal" rather than "xlog".

- Allow the planner's estimate of the fraction of a cursor's rows that
will be retrieved to be controlled through a GUC variable. Robert
Hell

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml, update documentation for
psql relation-size-in-\dt+ patch.

- Support RETURN QUERY EXECUTE in plpgsql. Pavel Stehule.

- Fix plpython to not get totally confused by OUT arguments. (It
still doesn't support multiple OUT arguments, though.) Hannu Krosing

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/ruleutils.c, the 8.2 patch that added
support for an alias on the target table of UPDATE/DELETE forgot to
teach ruleutils.c to display the alias. Per bug #4141 from Mathias
Seiler.

- Use new cstring/text conversion functions in some additional places.
These changes assume that the varchar and xml data types are
represented the same as text. (I did not, however, accept the
portions of the proposed patch that wanted to assume bytea is the
same as text --- tgl.) Brendan Jurd

- Add pg_conf_load_time() function to report when the Postgres
configuration files were last loaded. George Gensure

- Add timestamp and timestamptz versions of generate_series().
Hitoshi Harada

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Update TODO comment for 8.4: '#A hyphen, "-", marks changes that
will appear in the upcoming 8.4 release.#'

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In psql, one-letter backslash commands now need a space before the
first argument. This has been the only documented and encouraged
syntax for a long time, and with extension facilities such as
aliases being proposed, it is a good time to clean up the legacy
syntax a bit. Bernd Helmle.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/Gen_fmgrtab.sh, make the AWK default
value also take effect if $AWK is an empty string.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/describe.c, show relation size in verbose
(e.g. \d+) output. Dickson S. Guedes.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- Provide for MSVC config equivalents of recently added configure
options. Remove any hardcoding of those options. Along the way,
reorder the expression used to calculate RELSEG_SIZE to make it
slightly clearer. For now wal_segsize is only allowed to have a
value of 1 on Windows - we can relax that when we get full large
file support in the backend.

- Disable statement timeouts while making or restoring dumps. Joshua
Drake.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_backup_archiver.c, place statement
timeout more appropriately, per gripe from Tom Lane.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_backup_archiver.c, add ; missing due to
my carelessness.

- Show enum values in psql's \dT+. David Fetter.

- Display ACLS using multiple lines for psql's \z. Brendan Jurd.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml, document extra information
provided by psql's \dT+.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

Sergey Zubkovsky's patch to patch pg_total_relation_size() for
Windows. Magnus Hagander had already committed a similar patch.

== Pending Patches ==

Bruce Momjian sent in another revision of Bryce Nesbitt's patch to
wrap psql output at window width.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a WIP patch to implement map forks.

George Gensure sent in two revisions of a patch to add
pg_conf_load_time().

Merlin Moncure sent in another revision of the libpq object hooks
patch.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to add functions which make it
possible to implement pg_stat_activity as a SRF.

Andreas (ads) Scherbaum sent in another revision of his patch to
implement "CREATE OR REPLACE LANGUAGE."

Dave Page sent in three revisions of a patch which implements
pg_get_keywords().

Tom Lane sent in a revised version of ITAGAKI Takahiro's patch to sort
writes during checkpoints.