== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 01 2009 == Denver PUG will be meeting March 27. Stay tuned for details.
Michael Renner will be giving a PostgreSQL replication workshop at Netways OSDC 2009 in Nuremberg, Germany. http://www.netways.de/english/osdc/y2009/programm/w/michael_renner_postgresql_repliziert_ein_ueberblick/ PostgreSQLFr will have a booth at Solutions Linux 2009 in Paris. Sign up with sas AT postgresql DOT fr or at the French-language wiki: http://postgresql.fr/sl2009:start == PostgreSQL Product News == Npgsql2 2.0.3, a .NET data provider for PostgreSQL, released. http://www.npgsql.org pgpool-II 2.2, a connection pooler and more, and pgpoolAdmin 2.2, a GUI front ent for pgpool-II, released. http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/ Simpycity, a python mapping system for PostgreSQL, released. https://projects.commandprompt.com/public/simpycity/ == PostgreSQL 8.4 Feature of the Week == pg_stat_statements. This contrib module by Itagaki Takahiro will give you pg_fouine-like "Top 25 queries" reporting on your database activity in near-real time. == PostgreSQL Tip of the Week == Autovacuum should be on for most database applications, but should be turned off for large bulk loads of data, such as ETL or restoring a database. == PostgreSQL Jobs for March == http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-03/threads.php == PostgreSQL Local == The German PostgreSQL User Group will have a booth, 2 talks and a workshop on the Linuxdays Chemnitz on March 14 and 15, 2009. More information in German here: http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/525-PostgreSQL-auf-den-Chemnitzer-Linuxtagen.html PostgreSQL Conference, U.S. will be holding a PgDay at LinuxFest Northwest (April 25/26th). The call for papers is out at http://www.postgresqlconference.org/ PGCon 2009 will be held 21-22 May 2009, in Ottawa at the University of Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 19-20 May 2009. http://www.pgcon.org/2009/papers.php Save The Date: pgDay San Jose. Sunday, July 19th 2009 immediately before OSCON. CfP, more info TBA! PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in Campinas, Sao Paulo state. == PostgreSQL in the News == Planet PostgreSQL: http://planet.postgresql.org/ PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter, Josh Berkus and Devrim GUNDUZ. Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time. Please send English language ones to da...@fetter.org, German language to p...@pgug.de, Italian language to p...@itpug.org. == Applied Patches == Heikki Linnakangas committed: - Change the signaling of end-of-recovery. Startup process now indicates end of recovery by exiting with exit code 0, like in previous releases. Per Tom's suggestion. - In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/postmaster.c, put back a "continue" that went missing in the changes to start background writer in WAL recovery. - In pgsql/src/pl/plpgsql/src/pl_exec.c, set isnull for errm and sqlstate local variables when they're free'd. Because they are out of scope for any code after that anyway, leaving isnull true should be harmless. However, PL/pgSQL Debugger doesn't seem to care about the scoping and crashed, per report by Robert Walker (bug #4635). And it's good to be tidy for debugging purposes too. Fix in 8.3, 8.2 and 8.1 branches, CVS HEAD was fixed earlier already. Analysis and fix by Ashesh Vashi and Dave Page. - In pgsql/src/backend/commands/conversioncmds.c, in CREATE CONVERSION, test that the given function is a valid conversion function for the specified source and destination encodings. We do that by calling the function with an empty string. If it can't perform the requested conversion, it will throw an error. Backport to 7.4 - 8.3. Per bug report #4680 by Denis Afonin. Peter Eisentraut committed: - In pgsql/src/pl/plpgsql/src/pl_exec.c, add quotes to message. - Add the possibility to specify an explicit validator function for foreign-data wrappers (similar to procedural languages). This way we don't need to retain the nearly empty libraries, and we are more free in how to implement the wrapper API in the future. - Don't append epoch to log_filename if no format specifier is given. Robert Haas - Sort the output of --help mostly alphabetical, make it align better, make help of pg_dump and pg_dumpall more similar. - Remove feof(stdin) calls related to when to prompt for a password, leftovers from when the password was read from stdin. - In pgsql/contrib/vacuumlo/vacuumlo.c, clean up help (-?) output. - In pgsql/src/bin/pg_config/pg_config.c, use the same style in the help synopsis that other programs are using. - Add a -w/--no-password option that prevents all password prompts to all programs that have a -W/--password option. In passing, remove the ancient PSQL_ALWAYS_GET_PASSWORDS compile option. - Final removal of -q options, which haven't done anything since 8.3 and were marked for removal in 8.4. - Fix the inconsistent and wrong claims that the option value in CREATE FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER/SERVER/USER MAPPING is optional. - Equip the programs installed by contrib with proper --help and --version options and normally formatted help output. - In pgsql/src/bin/psql/help.c, add the long options to the psql --help display, where they were curiously missing. Since this touches most lines of the help output, also change the mix of puts and printf calls to printf everywhere, for easier code editing and reviewing. Tom Lane committed: - In pgsql/src/bin/psql/describe.c, fix psql's \dD to show only one row per domain, even when the domain has multiple check constraints. - Repair a longstanding bug in CLUSTER and the rewriting variants of ALTER TABLE: if the command is executed by someone other than the table owner (eg, a superuser) and the table has a toast table, the toast table's pg_type row ends up with the wrong typowner, ie, the command issuer not the table owner. This is quite harmless for most purposes, since no interesting permissions checks consult the pg_type row. However, it could lead to unexpected failures if one later tries to drop the role that issued the command (in 8.1 or 8.2), or strange warnings from pg_dump afterwards (in 8.3 and up, which will allow the DROP ROLE because we don't create a "redundant" owner dependency for table rowtypes). Problem identified by Cott Lang. Back-patch to 8.1. The problem is actually far older --- the CLUSTER variant can be demonstrated in 7.0 --- but it's mostly cosmetic before 8.1 because we didn't track ownership dependencies before 8.1. Also, fixing it before 8.1 would require changing the call signature of heap_create_with_catalog(), which seems to carry a nontrivial risk of breaking add-on modules. - Get rid of the rather fuzzily defined FlattenedSubLink node type in favor of making pull_up_sublinks() construct a full-blown JoinExpr tree representation of IN/EXISTS SubLinks that it is able to convert to semi or anti joins. This makes pull_up_sublinks() a shade more complex, but the gain in semantic clarity is worth it. I still have more to do in this area to address the previously-discussed problems, but this commit in itself fixes at least one bug in HEAD, as shown by added regression test case. - In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/ruleutils.c, fix an old problem in decompilation of CASE constructs: the ruleutils.c code looks for a CaseTestExpr to figure out what the parser did, but it failed to consider the possibility that an implicit coercion might be inserted above the CaseTestExpr. This could result in an Assert failure in some cases (but correct results if Asserts weren't enabled), or an "unexpected CASE WHEN clause" error in other cases. Per report from Alan Li. Back-patch to 8.1; problem doesn't exist before that because CASE was implemented differently. - Remove outdated join_1.out regression test comparison file. This has been broken for more than a month, so evidently it's not needed, at least not for any configuration in the buildfarm. We can correct it and replace it later if we find something that still needs it. - In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/util/pathnode.c, improve create_unique_path to not be fooled by unrelated clauses that happen to be syntactically part of a semijoin clause. For example given WHERE EXISTS(SELECT ... WHERE upper.var = lower.var AND some-condition) where some-condition is just a restriction on the lower relation, we can use unique-ification on lower.var after having applied some-condition within the scan on lower. - Tighten up join ordering rules to account for recent more-careful analysis of the associativity of antijoins. Also improve optimizer/README discussion of outer join ordering rules. - In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/prep/prepjointree.c, temporarily (I hope) disable flattening of IN/EXISTS sublinks that are within the ON clause of an outer join. Doing so is semantically correct but results in de-optimizing queries that were structured to take advantage of the sublink style of execution, as seen in recent complaint from Kevin Grittner. Since the user can get the other behavior by reorganizing his query, having the flattening happen automatically is just a convenience, and that doesn't justify breaking existing applications. Eventually it would be nice to re-enable this, but that seems to require a significantly different approach to outer joins in the executor. - Reduce the maximum value of vacuum_cost_delay and autovacuum_vacuum_cost_delay to 100ms (from 1000). This still seems to be comfortably larger than the useful range of the parameter, and it should help discourage people from picking uselessly large values. Tweak the documentation to recommend small values, too. Per discussion of a couple weeks ago. - In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/path/pathkeys.c, shave a few cycles in compare_pathkeys() by checking for pointer-identical input lists before we grovel through the lists. This doesn't save much, but testing shows that the case of both inputs NIL is common enough that it saves something. And this is used enough to be a hotspot. - Fix buffer allocations in encoding conversion routines so that they won't fail on zero-length inputs. This isn't an issue in normal use because the conversion infrastructure skips calling the converters for empty strings. However a problem was created by yesterday's patch to check whether the right conversion function is supplied in CREATE CONVERSION. The most future-proof fix seems to be to make the converters safe for this corner case. Magnus Hagander committed: - In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Mkvcbuild.pm, remove references to foreign data wrapper libraries, since they have been removed. This should unbreak the msvc build again. Andrew Dunstan committed: - In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/xml.c, don't mangle xml and xpath unless xml is not in fact a well-formed document, in xpath(). If mangling xpath, make a saner attempt where xpath expression does not begin with '/'. == Rejected Patches (for now) == James Pye's patch which changes the behavior of xpath processing to account for fragments. Returned for review as it changes a functionality in a non-bug-fixing way. Sushint Sinhas's patch to add space when FragmentDelimiter is specified in tsearch2. Functionality is available via less invasive means. Pavel Stehule's patch to support a mix of named parameters and default values for functions. Too much ambiguity in interpretation. == Pending Patches == KaiGai Kohei sent in two more revisions of his SE-PostgreSQL patches. Alan Li sent in a patch to fix a back-end assertion failure which can be triggered by defining a VIEW with CASE on a table. Martin Pihlak sent in a patch to have the \d commands treat information schema as system objects, making them invisible by default. They are still visible via the \d*S commands. Damien Clochard sent in a patch to psql which shows tables which inherit a given table when invoking \d table. Heikki Linnakangas sent in a WIP patch for Hot Standby showing how transaction tracking could work using "unobserved xids," now actually all master transactions, alone. Robert Lor sent in a doc patch for the recently added DTrace probes. Dave Page sent in a patch from Ashesh Vashi which fixes a PL/PgSQL bug in 8.3 where after setting state_var->value and errm_var->value to null, state_var->isnull and errm_var->isnull are not set correspondingly. Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to add SQL:2008 error codes for LIMIT and OFFSET values. Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch which prevents PostgreSQL from violating the system limit of maximum open files. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- -To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to: pgsql-announce-unsubscr...@postgresql.org
