Postgres Weekly News - 7 settembre 2008

Gli RPM della versione 8.4 Snapshot CVS sono pronti per i vostri test.
http://people.planetpostgresql.org/devrim/index.php?/archives/121-Testers-8.4-snapshot-RPMs-are-available.html

La CommitFest di settembre è iniziata! Nuovi interessanti funzionalità
vengono analizzate:
permessi a livello di colonna, hash indexing, windowing functions,
in-place upgrade e altro.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/CommitFest:2008-09

Quello che potete fare:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Reviewing_a_Patch

Siamo alla ricerca disperata di patch reviewers!
Sei bravo con il C?
Sei pratico di PostgreSQL?
Vuoi migliorare le tue capacità di hacking su Postgres e nel contempo
ottenere fortuna, fama e gloria?
Diventa un reviewer per le patch PostgreSQL! Contatta: josh(at)postgresql(dot)org(dot)

== PostgreSQL news prodotti ==
Rilasciato Continuent Tungsten:
http://www.continuent.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=412&Itemid=88

Once:Radix PostgreSQL GUI di sviluppo diventa 1.0:
http://www.oncetechnologies.com/newonceradix/news.html

Rilasciato pglesslog 1.1 beta.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pglesslog/

Rilasciato PL/Proxy 2.0.6 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/plproxy/

== PostgreSQL news locali ==
Stefan Kaltenbrunner terrà un talk sulle strategie di monitoraggio per
postgresql.org alla conferenza su Nagios
che si terrà a Norimberga, Germania, i giorni 11 e 12 settembre 2008.
http://www.netways.de/nagios_konferenz/y2008/programm/v/postgresql_monitoring/

Selena Deckelmann e Gabrielle Roth terranno una presentazione sulle
performance dei filesystem
per PostgreSQL al Linux Plumbers'
Conference.
http://linuxplumbersconf.org/program/speakers/getspeaker.php?speaker=mwong.txt

PDXPUG si incontrerà il 18 settembre. Tom Raney parlerà del suo tool
Visual Planner.
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/468

Il Prato Linux User Group terrà dei talk su PostgreSQL talks a Settembre.
Il calendario in italiano si trova all'url:
http://www.prato.linux.it/serate_a_tema_2008

Il PGCon Brasile 2008 ci sara' il 26 e 27 settembre 2008 a Unicamp, Campinas.
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/index.en.html

Il PgDay.fr ci sarà il 4 ottobre a Toulouse. Il Call for Papers è aperto:
http://www.postgresqlfr.org/?q=node/1686
Per registrarsi:
http://www.pgday.fr/doku.php/inscription

La conferenza Highload++ ci sarà dal 6 all'8 ottobre a Mosca, Russia.
Gavin Roy, Asko Oja e Maxim Boguk parleranno di PostgreSQL.
http://highload.ru

La conferenza su PostgreSQL della costa occidentale per il 2008
ci sarà dal 10 al 12 ottobre alla Portland State University a Portland
stato dell'Oregon.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/
Invio talk all'indirizzo:
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/west08/talk_submission/

Il PGDay.(IT|EU) 2008 ci sarà il 17 e 18 ottobre a Prato.
Le registrazioni verranno aperte presto.
http://www.pgday.org/it/

PostgreSQL avrà un tavolo al LinuxLive, Olympia, Lonkdra, dal 23 al 25
ottobre 2008. Scrivete a Dave Page per partecipare.
dpage AT pgamin DOT org

== 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,
Josh Berkus, Selena Deckelmann, Devrim GUNDUZ e Nikolay Samokhvalov.

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 ==
Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Synchronize the shared object build rules in Makefile.port with
Makefile.shlib somewhat by adding CFLAGS where the compiler is used
and Makefile.shlib already used CFLAGS.

- Add DSSSL stylesheet location for Mac OS X/Fink installation.

- Code coverage testing with gcov. Documentation is in the regression
test chapter. Michelle Caisse

- Check for gcov and lcov only when coverage testing is enabled.

Heikki Linnakangas committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/time/combocid.c,
HeapTupleHeaderAdjustCmax made the incorrect assumption that the raw
command id is the cmin, when it can in fact be a combo cid. That
made rows incorrectly invisible to a transaction where a tuple was
deleted by multiple aborted subtransactions. Report and patch Karl
Schnaitter. Back-patch to 8.3, where combo cids was introduced.

Tom Lane committed:

- Add a bunch of new error location reports to parse-analysis error
messages. There are still some weak spots around JOIN USING and
relation alias lists, but most errors reported within
backend/parser/ now have locations.

- Add a variant expected-output file for the sequence regression test,
to cover output that is seen when a checkpoint occurs at just the
right time during the test. Per my report of 2008-08-31. This
could be back-patched but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.

- Sigh, I missed checking the ecpg tests ...

- Fix plpgsql's exec_move_row() to supply valid type OIDs to
exec_assign_value() whenever possible, as per bug report from Oleg
Serov. While at it, reorder the operations in the RECORD case to
avoid possible palloc failure while the variable update is only
partly complete. Back-patch as far as 8.1. Although the code of
the particular function is similar in 8.0, 8.0's support for
composite fields in rows is sufficiently broken elsewhere that it
doesn't seem worth fixing this.

- Prevent memory leaks in our various bison parsers when an error
occurs during parsing. Formerly the parser's stack was allocated
with malloc and so wouldn't be reclaimed; this patch makes it use
palloc instead, so that flushing the current context will reclaim
the memory. Per Marko Kreen.

- If a loadable module has wrong values in its magic block, spell out
exactly what they are in the complaint message. Marko Kreen, some
editorialization by me.

- Add some additional casts and regression tests for the citext data
type. David Wheeler

- Fix an oversight in the 8.2 patch that improved mergejoin
performance by inserting a materialize node above an inner-side sort
node, when the sort is expected to spill to disk. (The materialize
protects the sort from having to support mark/restore, allowing it
to do its final merge pass on-the-fly.) We neglected to teach
cost_mergejoin about that hack, so it was failing to include the
materialize's costs in the estimated cost of the mergejoin. The
materialize's costs are generally going to be pretty negligible in
comparison to the sort's, so this is only a small error and probably
not worth back-patching; but it's still wrong. In the similar case
where a materialize is inserted to protect an inner-side node that
can't do mark/restore at all, it's still true that the materialize
should not spill to disk, and so we should cost it cheaply rather
than expensively. Noted while thinking about a question from Tom
Raney.

- Implement a psql command "\ef" to edit the definition of a function.
In support of that, create a backend function pg_get_functiondef().
The psql command is functional but maybe a bit rough around the
edges... Abhijit Menon-Sen

- Adjust psql's new \ef command to present an empty CREATE FUNCTION
template for editing if no function name is specified. This seems a
much cleaner way to offer that functionality than the original patch
had. In passing, de-clutter the error displays that are given for a
bogus function-name argument, and standardize on "$function$" as the
default delimiter for the function body. (The original coding would
use the shortest possible dollar-quote delimiter, which seems to
create unnecessarily high risk of later conflicts with the
user-modified function body.)

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/sources.sgml, add a few more details in the
source-code-formatting documentation. This isn't exhaustive but it
covers some of the more common layout mistakes I've seen in
submitted patches.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/varlena.c, reimplement text_position
and related functions to use Boyer-Moore-Horspool searching instead
of naive matching. In the worst case this has the same O(M*N)
complexity as the naive method, but the worst case is hard to hit,
and the average case is very fast, especially with longer patterns.
David Rowley.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/pg_restore.sgml, clarify description of
pg_restore's handling of large objects.

- Support set-returning functions in the target lists of Agg and Group
plan nodes. This is a pretty ugly feature but since we don't yet
have a plausible substitute, we'd better support it everywhere. Per
gripe from Jeff Davis.

- Create a separate grantable privilege for TRUNCATE, rather than
having it be always owner-only. The TRUNCATE privilege works
identically to the DELETE privilege so far as interactions with the
rest of the system go. Robert Haas

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- In GIN, fix strategy propagation to scanEntry for partial match by
moving propagation to initializaion of scanEntry.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Add Win32 MSVC code to support this recent patch: "Add missing
descriptions for aggregates, functions and conversions." Bernd
Helmle

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_backup_archiver.c, add comment about why
pg_dump doesn't dump the public schema comment.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml, clarify documention workding for
xip_list().
== Patch rigettate (per ora) ==
Nessuno è stato scontentato questa settimana :-)

== Patch in attesa ==

Marko Kreen sent in a patch to make GUC variable parsing case
insensitive.

Stephen Frost sent in two revisions of a patch to add column-level
privileges.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a revised version of Greg Smith's patch to add
source file and line to GUC variables to pg_settings.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a revised version of Andrew Chernow's patch to
add libpq object hooks.

Ryan Bradetich sent in a patch to align tuples more efficiently on
database pages.

Andrew Chernow sent in five revisions of his libpq events patch.

David Rowley sent in a patch to make string-matching operations use
Boyer-Moore search.

Brendan Jurd sent in a patch to add pg_typeof().

Robert Haas sent in another revision of his patch to add a TRUNCATE
permission.

Zdenek Kotala sent in another revision of his in-place upgrade patch.

Volkan YAZICI sent in five revisions of a patch to increase the
verbosity of return type checks in PL/PgSQL.

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