== Postgres Weekly News - 4 maggio 2008 ==

La commit-fest di maggio è iniziata e come previsto sta procedendo in
maniera più rilassata rispetto a quella di marzo.

== Postgres News prodotti ==
Rilasciato Benetl 1.8
http://www.benetl.net/

Rilasciato Continuent uni/cluster per PostgreSQL 2008.
http://www.continuent.com/

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

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

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

== Offerte di lavoro legate a PostgreSQL per il mese di Maggio ==
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-05/threads.php

== PostgreSQL news locali ==
AustinPUG si incontrerà il 6 maggio 2008, alle 18 presso gli uffici Sun a Riata
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/388

Il BWPUG terrà il suo primo meeting mercoledi 14 maggio presso la sede
OmniTI world a Columbia, MD.

Il PGCon 2008 ci sarà dal 20 al 23 maggio a Ottawa.
http://www.pgcon.org/2008/

Il PUG Grecia gestirà uno stand alla terza conferenza FLOSS greca
il 27 e 28 maggio al NTUA, Atene.
http://www.postgresql.gr

Il LAPUG si incontrerà il 30 maggio 2008 al Cal Poly
viste updatabili non triviali di Keith Larson
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/390

Il PGDay ci sarà a Portland il giorno precedente all'OSCON.
http://pugs.postgresql.org/taxonomy/term/53

La conferenza Open Source 2008 dello stato dell'Utah ha aperto il call
for paper fino al primo giugno.
Questa seconda conferenza annuale ci sarà dal 28 al 30 agosto a Salt Lake City
http://2008.utosc.com/

== News su PostgreSQL ==

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

General Bits, archivi e nuovi articoli occasionali:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News è stato spedito questa settimana grazie a David Fetter.

Per segnalare news e annunci invia un email in inglese entro le ore 15,
fuso orario della costa orientale degli U.S.A, di domenica.

Per segnalazioni in inglese david(at)fetter(dot)org, per segnalazioni in
Tedesco pwn(at)pgug(dot)de, per segnalazioni in italiano pwn(at)itpug(dot)org

== Patch applicate ==
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+.

== Patch rigettate (per ora) ==
Sergey Zubkovsky's patch to patch pg_total_relation_size() for
Windows. Magnus Hagander had already committed a similar patch.

== Patch in attesa ==
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.

--
(all opinions expressed are my own)
Federico Campoli
PostgreSQL Consulting -> PGHost http://www.pghost.eu