== PostgreSQL Weekly News - February 08 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - February 08 2009 ==

PostgreSQL 8.3.6, 8.2.12, 8.1.16, 8.0.20 and 7.4.24 released. Upgrade!
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/release.html

PostgreSQL Conference East 2nd Call for Papers ends February 23, 2009.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

If you'd like to stuff folders at the LAPUG Pizza Party, Friday,
February 20th at the Westin in Los Angeles, write to lapug AT
postgresql DOT org to volunteer.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgpool-II 2.2 beta2 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/

== PostgreSQL Tip of the Week ==

Until 8.4 comes out with a super-effient native one, you can add the
array_accum() function in the PostgreSQL documentation for rolling up
any column into an array, which can then be used by application code,
or combined with array_to_string() to format it as a list:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/xaggr.html

== PostgreSQL Jobs for February ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-02/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

JNBPUG will be meeting February 9 19:00 at News Cafe on New Road in
Midrand.

Stephen Frost will be talking about column-level permissions at BWPUG
February 9 at 6:30pm in the OmniTI offices.
http://pugs.postgresql.org/bwpug

Prague PostgreSQL Developers' Day 2009 will be on February 12, 2009
http://www.postgresql.org/about/event.808
Schedule:
http://www.postgres.cz/p2d2/2009/sched_en.html

The Bulgarian PostgreSQL Users' Group will be meeting February 12,
2009 at 7pm at Vinarnata, 19 Lavele str., Sofia.
http://www.doodle.com/participation.html?pollId=vb788q7v8ybi4z39

SFPUG presents: Reece Hart on Unison DB for Computational Biology.
February 10, 2009, location to be announced.
http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/9351228/

PostgreSQL will be at SCALE February 20-22 in Los Angeles.
http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum will be presenting a talk at Perl Workshop
2009 on February 25 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
http://www.perl-workshop.de/talks/151/view

PostgreSQL Conference, U.S. will be holding a PgDay at LinuxFest
Northwest (April 25/26th). The call for papers is out at
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

PGCon 2009 will be held 21-22 May 2009, in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 19-20 May
2009.
http://www.pgcon.org/2009/papers.php

PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in
Campinas, Sao Paulo state.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://planet.postgresql.org/

PostgreSQL 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 ==

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/catalogs.sgml, put pg_user_mapping section
into the right (alphabetical) order.

- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/sql_features.txt, set column privileges
to supported.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Fixed bug in ecpg's %s handling.

- Fixed auto allocation for binary data types in ecpg.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/test/sql/binary.pgc, set memory segment
to '0', just to be sure.

- In ecpg, when changing a regression test file one should also change
the expected output file.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/execute.c, fixed copy&paste
mistake that made library use uninitialized variable.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/execute.c, argh, wrong line
copied again.

- In ecpg, added result checks for calls to gmtime().

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/pgtypeslib/dt_common.c, mixing long and
int entries of a union only works on some architectures.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- Allow reloption names to have qualifiers, initially supporting a
TOAST qualifier, and add support for this in pg_dump. This allows
TOAST tables to have user-defined fillfactor, and will also enable
us to move the autovacuum parameters to reloptions without taking
away the possibility of setting values for TOAST tables.

- Fix some SGML-compiler warnings on -wxml mode.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- Provide for parallel restoration from a custom format archive. Each
data and post-data step is run in a separate worker child (a thread
on Windows, a child process elsewhere) up to the concurrent number
specified by the new pg_restore command-line --multi-thread | -m
switch. Andrew Dunstan, with some editing by Tom Lane.

- Allow alternative names for tclsh used on Windows.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/src/pl/plpgsql/src/gram.y, fix plpgsql to not treat INSERT
INTO as an INTO-variables clause anywhere in the string, not just at
the start. Per bug #4629 from Martin Blazek. Back-patch to 8.2;
prior versions don't have the problem, at least not in the reported
case, because they don't try to recognize INTO in non-SELECT
statements. (IOW, this is really fallout from the RETURNING patch.)

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/select.sgml, document the longstanding
behavior of LIMIT NULL and OFFSET NULL, per gripe from David Wheeler
that this was mentioned nowhere. In passing, editorialize a bit on
the description of the SQL:2008 equivalent syntax.

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/syslogger.c, add a failure check for
syslogger's use of _beginthreadex(), and remove unnecessary thread
address output parameter, to make this code look more like that in
pg_restore.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/path/joinpath.c, fix an old
corner-case error in match_unsorted_outer(): don't consider the
cheapest-total inner path as a new candidate while truncating the
sort key list, if it already matched the full sort key list. This
is too much of a corner case to be worth back-patching, since it's
unusual for the cheapest total path to be sorted, and anyway no real
harm is done (except in JOIN_SEMI/ANTI cases where cost_mergejoin is
a bit broken at the moment). But it wasn't behaving as intended, so
fix it. Noted while examining a test case from Kevin Grittner.
This error doesn't explain his issue, but it does explain why "set
enable_seqscan = off" seemed to reproduce it for me.

- Clean up some loose ends from the column privileges patch: add
has_column_privilege and has_any_column_privilege SQL functions; fix
the information_schema views that are supposed to pay attention to
column privileges; adjust pg_stats to show stats for any column you
have select privilege on; and fix COPY to allow copying a subset of
columns if the user has suitable per-column privileges for all the
columns. To improve efficiency of some of the information_schema
views, extend the has_xxx_privilege functions to allow inquiring
about the OR of a set of privileges in just one call. This is just
exposing capability that already existed in the underlying aclcheck
routines. In passing, make the information_schema views report the
owner's own privileges as being grantable, since Postgres assumes
this even when the grant option bit is not set in the ACL. This is
a longstanding oversight. Also, make the new has_xxx_privilege
functions for foreign data objects follow the same coding
conventions used by the older ones. Stephen Frost and Tom Lane

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/copy.sgml, ooops, forgot to update COPY
reference page to mention column privileges.

- Fix cost_mergejoin's failure to adjust for rescanning of non-unique
merge join keys when considering a semi or anti join. This requires
estimating the selectivity of the merge qual as though it were a
regular inner join condition. To allow caching both that and the
real outer-join-aware selectivity, split RestrictInfo.this_selec
into two fields. This fixes one of the problems reported by Kevin
Grittner.

- In pgsql/src/backend/executor/execMain.c, ensure that INSERT ...
SELECT into a table with OIDs never copies row OIDs from the source
table. This could never happen anyway before 8.4 because the
executor invariably applied a "junk filter" to rows due to be
inserted; but now that we skip doing that when it's not necessary,
the case can occur. Problem noted 2008-11-27 by KaiGai Kohei,
though I misunderstood what he was on about at the time (the opacity
of the patch he proposed didn't help).

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/mvcc.sgml, update read committed documentation
to better explain undesirable behavior of concurrent commands in
cases where rows are being added and removed from matching query
criteria. Minor word-smithing.

- Add PL/PgSQL FOUND and GET DIAGNOSTICS support for RETURN QUERY
statement. Pavel Stehule.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, document ways to avoid libpq
WSACleanup() overhead on Windows. Andrew Chernow.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, fix typo in docs.

- Fix to_timestamp() to not require upper/lower case matching for
meridian designations (AM/PM). Also separate out matching of a
meridian with periods (e.g. A.M.) and with those without. Do the
same for AD/BC. Brendan Jurd

- Document disabling the statistics collector pg_dump activity, and
give a bit more visibility to the PGOPTIONS environment variable
supported by libpq. Bryce Nesbitt

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/catalogs.sgml, update pg_constraint.conkey
documentation description.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/pg_dump.sgml, properly wrap new pg_dump
doc text.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/Makefile, ecpg requires libpq;
add Makefile rules to require libpq to be built first. Alvaro
Herrera.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/catalogs.sgml, uppercase CHECK mention in
relchecks documentation mention.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/indices.sgml, remove documentation mention
that hash indexes perform no better than btree; keep mention about
missing WAL logging. Kenneth Marshall

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/queries.sgml, document that LIMIT NULL is the
same as no LIMIT clause. Report by David Wheeler.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c, fix obsolete comment.
Zdenek Kotala.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Fernando Ike de Oliveira sent in another revision of his patch to add
\dL (show languages) to psql.

David Wheeler sent in a doc patch to explicate that LIMIT NULL returns
all rows.

Zdenek Kotala sent in a fix for Czech (cs_CZ) locale regression tests.

Stephen Frost sent in another revision of his column-level privileges
patch.

Teodor Sigaev sent in another revision of his GIN improvements patch.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of his SE-PostgreSQL patches.

Alvaro Herrera sent in another revision of the reloptions patch to
remove autovacuum parameters.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to add basic KOI8-U support.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a doc patch for the reloptions patch.

David Lee Lambert sent in a patch which lets Linux use the ext2fs UUID
generator for UUIDs.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to make ALTER TABLE SET WITH OIDS actually
add the aforementioned OIDs.