== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 09 2010 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 09 2010 ==

PostgreSQL 9.0 beta 1 released. Test!
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta

Prague PostgreSQL Test Day will be May 21, 2010 in Prague, Czech Republic.
http://www.nic.cz/page/747/test-the-new-beta-version-of-postgresql-in-the-cz.nic-laboratories/

PostgreSQLFr's new executive committee consists of President
Jean-Christophe Arnu, Vice President Cedric Villemain, Treasurer
Stephane Schildknecht and Secretary Patrick Francelle. More details:
http://www.postgresql.fr/asso:elections

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgfincore, 0.41, a set of functions to handle low-level management of
relations using mincore to explore cache memory, released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgfincore/

James W. Pye has published another PL/Python3.
http://python.projects.postgresql.org/backend/

RHQ 3.0.0.B05, a systems management and monitoring tool that runs atop
PostgreSQL, released.
http://rhq-project.org/

== PostgreSQL 9.0 Feature of the Week ==

You can create per-column triggers, i.e. triggers which only fire on
modification of specified columns. The syntax, as described in
SQL:2008, is CREATE TRIGGER trigger_name (BEFORE|AFTER) UPDATE OF col1
[,col2...coln] ON tablename FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE
trigger_function();

== PostgreSQL Jobs for May ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2010-05/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

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

Registration for Open Source Bridge is open and talks are announced!
June 1-4, 2010 in Portland, Oregon.
http://opensourcebridge.org/events/2010/proposals/

Michael Renner will be speaking at AMOOCON, which goes from June 4-6, 2010.
http://www.amoocon.de/speakers/214

Southeast Linuxfest 2010 will take place in Spartanburg, SC, USA on
June 12-13.  Booths and sponsorships are still available.
http://southeastlinuxfest.org/

OSCON will take place in Portland, Oregon July 19-23, 2010.
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

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

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) Spanish language
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== Applied Patches ==

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- Add cross-reference from wal_level to hot_standby setting. Update
the PITR documentation to mention that you need to set wal_level to
'archive' or 'hot_standby', to enable WAL archiving. Per Simon
Riggs's request.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/high-availability.sgml, change "literal" tag
to the more appropriate "firstterm", when describing what
"eventually consistent" means.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/config.sgml, change wording so that you don't
need to understand that wal_levels form a hierarchy. Per Simon
Riggs's suggestion.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c, need to hold
ControlFileLock while updating control file. Update
minRecoveryPoint in control file when replaying a parameter change
record, to ensure that we don't allow hot standby on WAL generated
without wal_level='hot_standby' after a standby restart.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/intarray.sgml, fix incorrect parameter tag in
docs, spotted by KOIZUMI Satoru.

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/mvcc.sgml, remove spurious dot, per bug #5446
reported by Koizumi Satoru.

Tom Lane committed:

- Fix backpatching error in recent patch for ALTER USER f RESET ALL
behavior. The argument list for array_set() changed in 8.2 (in
connection with allowing nulls in arrays) but the newer argument
list was used in the patches applied to 8.1 and 8.0 branches. The
patch for 7.4 was OK though. Per compiler warnings.

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/psqlscan.l, fix psql to not go into infinite
recursion when expanding a variable that refers to itself (directly
or indirectly). Instead, print a message when recursion is
detected, and don't expand the repeated reference. Per bug #5448
from Francis Markham. Back-patch to 8.0. Although the issue exists
in 7.4 as well, it seems impractical to fix there because of the
lack of any state stack that could be used to track active
expansions.

- In pgsql/src/makefiles/Makefile.linux, on Linux, use
--enable-new-dtags when specifying -rpath to linker. This should
allow LD_LIBRARY_PATH to work as desired. Per trouble report from
Andy Colson.

- Work around a subtle portability problem in use of printf %s format.
Depending on which spec you read, field widths and precisions in %s
may be counted either in bytes or characters. Our code was assuming
bytes, which is wrong at least for glibc's implementation, and in
any case libc might have a different idea of the prevailing encoding
than we do. Hence, for portable results we must avoid using
anything more complex than just "%s" unless the string to be printed
is known to be all-ASCII. This patch fixes the cases I could find,
including the psql formatting failure reported by Hernan Gonzalez.
In HEAD only, I also added comments to some places where it appears
safe to continue using "%.*s".

- Adjust comments about avoiding use of printf's %.*s. My initial
impression that glibc was measuring the precision in characters
(which is what the Linux man page says it does) was incorrect. It
does take the precision to be in bytes, but it also tries to
truncate the string at a character boundary. The bottom line
remains the same: it will mess up if the string is not in the
encoding it expects, so we need to avoid %.*s anytime there's a
significant risk of that. Previous code changes are still good, but
adjust the comments to reflect this knowledge. Per research by
Hernan Gonzalez.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ecpg.sgml, fix typo: PGTYPES_NUM_OVERFLOW
should be PGTYPES_NUM_UNDERFLOW. Noted by KOIZUMI Satoru.

- In pgsql/src/backend/replication/walsender.c, fix missing static
declaration for XLogRead().

- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/print.c, suppress signed-vs-unsigned-char
warning.

ITAGAKI Takahiro committed:

- In pgsql/src/port/chklocale.c, code page for EUC-KR is surely 51949.

Michael Meskes committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/connect.c, ECPG connect routine
only checked for NULL to find empty parameters, but user and
password can also be "".

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to remove the limit on the number of
parameters passed to xslt_process() in contrib/xml2. It had been 10.

Simon Riggs sent in a WIP patch to change max_standby_delay to rely on
WAL receipt timestamp instead of log timestamp, per suggestion from
Tom Lane.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to add new optional arguments to
string_to_array() and array_to_string() which allow for an explicit
NULL string rather than to have NULL disappear unconditionally.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to fix bug 5447, which relates to
VPATH builds.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch intended to fix the issue where Hot
Standby/Streaming Replication databases have slower queries on
replicas than origin.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to create to_string() and to_array()
functions which include NULL handling different from the current
"eliminate NULLs" behavior of array_to_string() and string_to_array().

Andy Lester and Robert Haas traded patches to clarify some CLUSTER
behavior.

Joel Jacobson and ITAGAKI Takahiro traded patches to add some new stat
transaction views for 9.1.

Nikhil Sontakke sent in two revisions of a patch intended to change
the behavior of memory with set-returning functions.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch intended to fix some behavior with Hot
Standby.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to add a SQLSTATE for Hot Standby.

Robert Haas sent in a patch to avert doom around temprels.