== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 23 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 23 2009 ==

The first commitfest of the 8.5 cycle has now closed, with 35 patches
done. Kudos to Robert Haas, commitfest mom, and all the submitters
and reviewers.

New Survey: Which of these DBA mistakes has caused you the most
down time?
http://www.postgresql.org/community

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

check_postgres 2.11.0, a Nagios plugin for monitoring PostgreSQL, released.
http://bucardo.org/check_postgres/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for August ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-08/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PyCon Argentina will be in Beunos Aires on September 4-5 2009.
http://ar.pycon.org/2009/

Andreas (ads) Scherbaum will be teaching a "PostgreSQL for Corporate
Use" course at the adult education center in Magdeburg, Germany on
September 7-11, 2009. Details below:
http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/574-PostgreSQL-als-Bildungsurlaub.html

There will be a conference in Athens, Georgia, USA on September 19,
2009. The CfP is open.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/2009/pgday/athens

There will be a conference in Seattle, Washington, USA October 16-18,
2009. The CfP is open.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/2009/west

PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in
Campinas, Sao Paulo state. The CfP is open!
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/2009/chamadas.en.php

PGDay.EU 2009 will be at Telecom ParisTech in Paris, France on
November 6-7, 2009. The CfP is out. Submit!
http://www.pgday.eu/

OpenSQL Camp in Portland is looking for sponsors. Make your travel plans now! :)
http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2009/07/29/opensql-camp-comes-to-portland-november-14-15-2009/

JPUG 10th Anniversary Conference is November 20-21, 2009 in Tokyo, Japan.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2009-05/msg00018.php

FOSDEM 2010 will be in Brussels on February 6-7, 2010.
http://www.fosdem.org/

== 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 ==

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/common/tupconvert.c, department of
marginal improvements: teach tupconvert.c to avoid doing a physical
conversion when there are dropped columns in the same places in the
input and output tupdescs. This avoids possible performance loss
from the recent patch to improve dropped-column handling, in some
cases where the old code would have worked.

- In pgsql/contrib/unaccent/unaccent.c, suppress compiler warnings
about uninitialized variables.

- In pgsql/contrib/unaccent/Makefile, fix copy-and-pasteo that might
explain some of the buildfarm's indigestion about this module.

- In pgsql/contrib/unaccent/unaccent.c, fix some *other* compiler
warnings from a different gcc version.

- Print the actual DB encoding in the unaccent regression test. This
is to help make it more obvious what the problem is, if the encoding
isn't what the test expects.

- Fix overflow for INTERVAL 'x ms' where x is more than a couple
million, and integer datetimes are in use. Per bug report from
Hubert Depesz Lubaczewski. Alex Hunsaker.

- Allow mixing of traditional and SQL:2008 LIMIT/OFFSET syntax. Being
rigid about it doesn't simplify the grammar at all, and it does
invite confusion among those who only read the SELECT syntax summary
and not the full details. Per gripe from Jaime Casanova.

- In pgsql/src/tools/version_stamp.pl, fix version_stamp.pl to allow
'alphaN' version stamps. Not sure how Peter Eisentraut did that
without fixing this ...

- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/explain.c, include resjunk columns in
EXPLAIN VERBOSE output lists. Per discussion.

- Tweak ExecIndexEvalRuntimeKeys to forcibly detoast any toasted
comparison values before they get passed to the index access method.
This avoids repeated detoastings that will otherwise ensue as the
comparison value is examined by various index support functions. We
have seen a couple of reports of cases where repeated detoastings
result in an order-of-magnitude slowdown, so it seems worth adding a
bit of extra logic to prevent this. I had previously proposed
trying to avoid duplicate detoastings in general, but this fix takes
care of what seems the most important case in practice with very
little effort or risk. Back-patch to 8.4 so that the PostGIS folk
won't have to wait a year to have this fix in a production release.
(The issue exists further back, of course, but the code's diverged
enough to make backpatching further a higher-risk action. Also it
appears that the possible gains may be limited in prior releases
because of different handling of lossy operators.)

- Make TRUNCATE do truncate-in-place when processing a relation that
was created or previously truncated in the current (sub)transaction.
This is safe since if the (sub)transaction later rolls back, we'd
just discard the rel's current physical file anyway. This avoids
unreasonable growth in the number of transient files when a relation
is repeatedly truncated. Per a performance gripe a couple weeks ago
from Todd Cook.

- Fix a violation of WAL coding rules in the recent patch to include
an "all tuples visible" flag in heap page headers. The flag update
*must* be applied before calling XLogInsert, but heap_update and the
tuple moving routines in VACUUM FULL were ignoring this rule. A
crash and replay could therefore leave the flag incorrectly set,
causing rows to appear visible in seqscans when they should not be.
This might explain recent reports of data corruption from Jeff Ross
and others. In passing, do a bit of editorialization on comments in
visibilitymap.c.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/Makefile, make version.sgml depend on
configure instead of Makefile.global. This cheats a bit, but it
avoids unsatisfied dependencies in distribution tarballs. (found by
make distcheck)

- Add release notes for 8.5alpha1

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release-8.5.sgml, remove duplicate from
release notes, and reorganize slightly.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release-8.5.sgml, update alpha release notes
to current.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release-8.5.sgml, alter release note item
about PL/pgSQL functions and dropped columns. per Pavel Stehule

- Version stamp 8.5alpha1

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- Introduce filtering dictionary support to tsearch. Propagate
--nolocale option to CREATE DATABASE command in pg_regress to allow
correct checking of locale-sensitive contrib modules.

- Add unaccent dictionary to text search.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/vcregress.pl, pick up REGRESS_OPTS from
contrib makefiles. Along the way, fix ordering of makefile tests to
mimic gmake.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/unaccent.sgml, remove tabs from SGML.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a WIP patch which adds buffer usage
information to EXPLAIN and contrib/pg_stat_statements.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another revision of his ECPG patch.

Andrew Dunstan sent in a patch which sets the "explain" root element
for auto-explain XML/JSON output.

Jan Otto sent in a patch to work around a bug in OS/X Snow Leopard's
readdir().

Tom Lane and Josh Berkus sent in revisions of the alpha1 release
notes.

Tom Lane sent in a WIP patch to make a case common in PostGIS work
faster by not repeatedly de-TOASTing under certain conditions.

Stef Walter sent in another revision of the patch to add samehost and
samenet directives to pg_hba.conf.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another WIP patch to base dblink on SQL/MED
Foreign Data Wrappers.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch intended to fix a bug in handling
default values in reloptions.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch to fix the cache lookup failure in
auto_explain log_verbose

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch intended to help add 2PC semantics to
foreign data wrappers.

Robert Haas sent in an updated version of the hot standby patch.

Kevin Grittner sent in a patch to change the supplied module for Linux
startup scripts.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in two patches to return data from b-tree
indexes and use it to satisfy qualifiers. The first patch changes the
API for indexam by splitting indexam_getnext into two pieces. The
second does the actual work.

Robert Haas sent in another update to the hot standby patch.

James Pye sent in another revision of his PL/Python3 patch.

Roger Leigh sent in a flock of patches intended to allow psql to use
Unicode box-drawing characters for borders.

Paul Matthews sent in a patch to add a hypot() function.