== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 06 2009 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 06 2009 ==

The current commitfest is ending soon. Keep reviewing others' patches
so you can start fresh on your own :)

PostgreSQL now has an official release support policy. Details below.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_Release_Support_Policy

New Survey: How do you contribute to PostgreSQL?
http://www.postgresql.org/community

Jeff Davis presents Operator Exclusion Constraints at SFPUG on
Tuesday, December 8 in San Francisco.
http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/11928447/

The next AustinPUG meeting is Wednesday, December 9th, 2009. Jim
Nasby will talk about table inheritance.
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/1500

The New York Capital District PUG's first meeting will be January 7,
2010.
http://nycdpug.x10hosting.com/

PGDay-Cuba 2010 will be held 4-6 February 2010, in La Havana at the
University of Science Informatic. Attendees from Cuba, the Dominican
Republic and Venezuela are invited.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

COBOL-IT Precompiler for PostgreSQL released.
http://www.cobol-it.com/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=31&cntnt01detailtemplate=simple&cntnt01returnid=58

GT portalBase 2.4, a framework for PostgreSQL, released.
http://www.gtportalbase.com/

PostgreSQL Maestro 9.12, a GUI for administration and development on
Windows, released.
http://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/postgresql/maestro/

MicroOLAP Database Designer 1.2.9 for PostgreSQL released.
http://microolap.com/products/database/postgresql-designer/

PgCon 2010 will be held May 20-21 2010 in Ottawa with tutorials before
on the 18th and 19th. The RfP is open!
http://www.pgcon.org/2010/papers.php

pgpool-II 2.2.6, a connection pooler and more, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/

PostgreDAC 2.5.4 beta, a Delphi/C++ builder for PostgreSQL, released.
http://microolap.com/products/connectivity/postgresdac/download/

Quick Application Suite and Quick Application Builder released.
http://www.datawarestudio.com/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for December ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-12/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Stefan Keller will be teach a course called, "Introducion to
PostGIS/PostgreSQL" at the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil
(HSR) on January 14, 2010 in Zurich, Switzerland.
http://www.gis.hsr.ch/wiki/Agenda

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

Chemnitzer Linuxtage will be in Chemnitz, Germany on March 13-14, 2010.
http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/

== 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)

== Reviews ==

- Josh Tolley reviewed the PL/Python array support patch and sent a
patch atop it to fix regression tests.

- Jeff Davis reviewed Joachim Wieland's Listen/Notify patch and
requested further rework from the author.

- Andrew (RhodiumToad) Gierth reviewed Hitoshi Harada's patch to
improve window frame control with ROWS BETWEEN. To complete the
review, he will need a decision on the API for aggregate functions.

- Hitoshi Harada marked Andrew (RhodiumToad) Gierth's patch, "ready
for committer."

- Simon Riggs did a preliminary review of ITAGAKI Takahiro's
partitioning syntax patch.

- ITAGAKI Takahiro reviewed Greg Smith's patch to enable resetting
statistics.
== Applied Patches ==

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ecpg.sgml, properly indent SGML.

- There is no reference to THREAD_SUPPORT outside configure, and it is
never set, so remove it.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/hstore.sgml, update hstore docs, mostly
word-smithing. David E. Wheeler

- Add ProcessUtility_hook() to handle all DDL to contrib/pg_stat_statements.
Itagaki Takahiro.

- Revert due to Tom's concerns: Add ProcessUtility_hook() to handle
all DDL to contrib/pg_stat_statements.

- Adjust 'psql -f -' to behave like a normal file and honor the -1
flag. Report from Robert Haas.

- Enable thread safety on all platforms. This will either be followed
up by a more extensive patch, or reverted, depending on the build
farm results.

- Apply full patch to enable thread-safety by default, e.g. doc
changes.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/xfunc.sgml, in SRF example, move oldcontext
variable definition into the FIRSTCALL branch, which is how most
actual code is actually structured. Also fix slight whitespace
misalignment.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/information_schema.sgml, add a sentence of
documentation about the differences between the *_privileges and the
role_*_grants views.

- Speed up information schema privilege views. Instead of expensive
cross joins to resolve the ACL, add table-returning function
aclexplode() that expands the ACL into a useful form, and join
against that. Also, implement the role_*_grants views as a thin
layer over the respective *_privileges views instead of essentially
repeating the same code twice. Fixes bug #4596. By Joachim
Wieland, with cleanup by me.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/tsearch/dict_thesaurus.c, avoid core dump on
empty thesaurus dictionary. Per report from Robert Gravsjo.

- Teach the regular expression functions to do case-insensitive
matching and locale-dependent character classification properly when
the database encoding is UTF8. The previous coding worked okay in
single-byte encodings, or in any case for ASCII characters, but
failed entirely on multibyte characters. The fix assumes that the
<wctype.h> functions use Unicode code points as the wchar
representation for Unicode, ie, wchar matches pg_wchar. This is
only a partial solution, since we're still stupid about non-ASCII
characters in multibyte encodings other than UTF8. The practical
effect of that is limited, however, since those cases are generally
Far Eastern glyphs for which concepts like case-folding don't apply
anyway. Certainly all or nearly all of the field reports of
problems have been about UTF8. A more general solution would
require switching to the platform's wchar representation for all
regex operations; which is possible but would have substantial
disadvantages. Let's try this and see if it's sufficient in
practice.

- Instead of sending application_name as a SET command after the
connection is made, include it in the startup-packet options. This
makes it work more like every other libpq connection option, in
particular it now has the same response to RESET ALL as the rest.
This also saves one network round trip for new applications using
application_name. The cost is that if the server is pre-8.5, it'll
reject the startup packet altogether, forcing us to retry the entire
connection cycle. But on balance we shouldn't be optimizing that
case in preference to the behavior with a new server, especially
when doing so creates visible behavioral oddities. Per discussion.

- Mark application_name as GUC_REPORT so that the value will be
reported back to the client by the server. This might seem pretty
pointless but apparently it will help pgbouncer, and perhaps other
connection poolers. Anyway it's practically free to do so for the
normal use-case where appname is only set in the startup packet ---
we're just adding a few more bytes to the initial ParameterStatus
response packet. Per comments from Marko Kreen.

- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/postmaster.c, ignore attempts to set
"application_name" in the connection startup packet. This avoids a
useless connection retry and complaint in the postmaster log when
receiving a connection from 8.5 or later libpq. Backpatch in all
supported branches, but of course *not* HEAD.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/rollback_to.sgml, clarify what's supposed
to happen when a cursor FETCH is rolled back by aborting a
subtransaction. Per discussion with Heikki.

- In pgsql/src/include/catalog/pg_proc.h, don't use a duplicate OID
for aclexplode().

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- in contrib/btree_gist, prevent intersection of ranges during page
split. Changes are only optimization, so don't backpatch.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- Fix bug in temporary file management with subtransactions. A cursor
opened in a subtransaction stays open even if the subtransaction is
aborted, so any temporary files related to it must stay alive as
well. With the patch, we use ResourceOwners to track open temporary
files and don't automatically close them at subtransaction end
(though in the normal case temporary files are registered with the
subtransaction resource owner and will therefore be closed). At end
of top transaction, we still check that there's no temporary files
marked as close-at-end-of-transaction open, but that's now just a
debugging cross-check as the resource owner cleanup should've closed
them already.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the YAML output patch for
EXPLAIN.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the VACUUM FULL patch per
review from Jeff Davis. Jeff Davis sent three patches atop that one.

Andrew (RhodiumToad) Gierth sent in another revision of the patch to
add ORDER BY to aggregates.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the SE-PostgreSQL patch.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch to modify the result type of
pg_read_file to bytea.

Bruce Momjian sent in two revisions of a patch to enable thread safety
in client libraries by default.

Zdenek Kotala sent in another revision of a patch to correct the
Docbook path in Solaris.

Tsutomu Yamada sent in two revisions of a patch to support Windows 64.

Caleb Welton sent in two revisions of a patch to fix int2vectorin.

Jeff Davis sent in another revision of the operator exclusion
constraints patch per review from Robert Haas.

Michael Paquier sent in two more revisions of the patch to add shell
calls to pgbench, per review from Greg Smith.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the ProcessUtility_hook
patch per feedback from Tom Lane.

Bruce Momjian sent in a patch to install PL/pgsql by default.

Tim Bunce sent in a patch to refactor PL/Perl, and a patch atop that
to add some new GUCs with promising names including
plperl.on_perl_init, plperl.on_trusted_init, and
plperl.on_untrusted_init, along with some bug fixes and general code
correctness improvements.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the ACL patch for large
objects.

ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the SQL syntax patch for
partitioning.

Zdenek Kotala sent in another revision of the patch to enable pg_ctl
to do an initdb.

Hitoshi Harada sent in another revision of the ROWS functionality for
windowing per review from Andrew (RhodiumToad) Gierth.

Jeff Davis sent in another revision of the VACUUM FULL removal patch.

Greg Smith sent in a patch to enable resetting statistics.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to fix an issue with running out of lock
space in certain hot standby scenarios.