[ANNOUNCE] == PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 25 2015 ==

2015-01-26 Thread David Fetter 
== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 25 2015 ==

Early Bird registration is available for PGConf.US.
http://pgconfus2015.eventbrite.com/?aff=pgann1

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

POWA 1.2.1, a PostgreSQL workload analyzer, released.
http://dalibo.github.io/powa/

Pyrseas 0.7.2, a toolkit for PostgreSQL version control, released.
https://github.com/pyrseas/Pyrseas

Slony-I 2.2.4, a trigger-based replication system for PostgreSQL, released.
http://www.slony.info/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for January ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2015-01/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

FOSDEM PGDay (January 30, 2015) and the FOSDEM PostgreSQL
Dev Room (January 31-February 1, 2015)
http://fosdem2015.pgconf.eu/

Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day (P2D2) 2015 will be in Prague, Czech
Republic February 11-12, 2015.
http://www.p2d2.cz/

The Melbourne PostgreSQL meetup on February 18, 2015 will be hosting
Gabriele Bartolini on PostgreSQL 9.4 for devops.  Details below, and
R, SVP.
http://www.meetup.com/melpug/events/219082475/

pgDaySF 2015 will be held March 10, 2015 in Burlingame, California.
http://sfpostgres.org/pgday-sf-2015-call-for-speakers-and-sponsors/

Registration for Nordic PostgreSQL Day, March 11, 2015 in  Copenhagen,
Denmark, is open.
http://2015.nordicpgday.org/registration/

PGConf US 2015 takes place March 25-27, 2015 in NYC.
http://nyc.pgconf.us/2015/

PGCon 2015 is June 16-20 in Ottawa, Canada.
http://www.pgcon.org/2015/

== 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 da...@fetter.org, German language
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== Applied Patches ==

Robert Haas pushed:

- BRIN typo fix.  Amit Langote
  
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9d54b93239040dab49111b6d7e9d6bfe9c71f419

- Typo fix.  Etsuro Fujita
  
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1605291b6c14be92915948d17f5509191632c97f

- Use abbreviated keys for faster sorting of text datums.  This commit
  extends the SortSupport infrastructure to allow operator classes the
  option to provide abbreviated representations of Datums; in the case
  of text, we abbreviate by taking the first few characters of the
  strxfrm() blob.  If the abbreviated comparison is insufficent to
  resolve the comparison, we fall back on the normal comparator.  This
  can be much faster than the old way of doing sorting if the first
  few bytes of the string are usually sufficient to resolve the
  comparison.  There is the potential for a performance regression if
  all of the strings to be sorted are identical for the first 8+
  characters and differ only in later positions; therefore, the
  SortSupport machinery now provides an infrastructure to abort the
  use of abbreviation if it appears that abbreviation is producing
  comparatively few distinct keys.  HyperLogLog, a streaming
  cardinality estimator, is included in this commit and used to make
  that determination for text.  Peter Geoghegan, reviewed by me.
  
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4ea51cdfe85ceef8afabceb03c446574daa0ac23

- Add strxfrm_l to list of functions where Windows adds an underscore.
  Per buildfarm failure on bowerbird after last night's commit
  4ea51cdfe85ceef8afabceb03c446574daa0ac23.  Peter Geoghegan
  
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f32a1fa462c88676105445f26885d7a0656b6806

- Disable abbreviated keys on Windows.  Most of the Windows buildfarm
  members (bowerbird, hamerkop, currawong, jacana, brolga) are unhappy
  with yesterday's abbreviated keys patch, although there are some
  (narwhal, frogmouth) that seem OK with it.  Since there's no obvious
  pattern to explain why some are working and others are failing, just
  disable this across-the-board on Windows for now.  This is a bit
  unfortunate since the optimization will be a big win in some cases,
  but we can't leave the buildfarm broken.
  
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1be4eb1b2d436d1375899c74e4c74486890d8777

- Heavily refactor btsortsupport_worker.  Prior to commit
  4ea51cdfe85ceef8afabceb03c446574daa0ac23, this function only had one
  job, which was to decide whether we could avoid trampolining through
  the fmgr layer when performing sort comparisons.  As of that commit,
  it has a second job, which is to decide whether we can use
  abbreviated keys.  Unfortunately, those two tasks are somewhat
  intertwined in the existing coding, which is likely why neither
  Peter Geoghegan nor I noticed prior to commit that this calls
  pg_newlocale_from_collation() in cases where it didn't previously.
  The buildfarm noticed, though.  To fix, rewrite the logic so that
  the decision as to which comparator to use is more cleanly separated
  from the decision about abbreviation.
  
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b529b65d1bf8537ca7fa

[ANNOUNCE] New user group in Atlanta

2015-01-26 Thread Moshe Jacobson 
To all Atlanta PostgreSQL enthusiasts,

I'm excited to announce that I have started a new user group called PostgreSQL
in Atlanta . The group meets on the 2nd
Wednesday of each month.

Clicking the link above will send you to the meetup.com page, where you can
learn more. We already held our first meeting and it was a great success
with 8 attendees and some great ideas. If you live in Atlanta, I hope to
see you at the next one!

Moshe Jacobson
Principal Architect, Nead Werx Inc. 
2323 Cumberland Parkway · Suite 201 · Atlanta, GA 30339

"Quality is not an act, it is a habit." -- Aristotle

[ANNOUNCE] Nordic PGDay 2015 - registration open and schedule posted

2015-01-26 Thread Magnus Hagander 
Nordic PGDay 2015 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the
Radisson Blu Falconer hotel in Fredriksberg, on March 11.
It will feature a full day with a single track of PostgreSQL
presentations from both Nordic and global PostgreSQL experts,
covering a wide range of topics.

The schedule has now been posted, and is available at
http://2015.nordicpgday.org/schedule/.

We have also opened up registration for the event. Early bird
registration (before Feb 11th or the first 40 registrations)
costs €40, and normal registration costs €60. There is a limited
number of seats available, so we suggest you register early to
make sure you get a seat.

Registration is available at http://2015.nordicpgday.org/registration/.

We also still have openings for Supporter sponsorship, which
includes free entrance to the conference. For more information
and instant sign-up, see http://2015.nordicpgday.org/sponsors/.

We look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen in March!

[ANNOUNCE] Barman 1.4.0 released

2015-01-26 Thread Gabriele Bartolini 
26 January 2015: 2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of
version 1.4.0 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

This major release features file-level incremental backup, a kind of
full periodic backup which saves only data changes from the latest
full backup available in the catalogue for a specific PostgreSQL
server. Depending on the context and the database workload, the data
deduplication ratio might easily reach 50-70% per full backup,
leading to significant reductions in both backup time and disk space.

PostgreSQL 9.4 users will transparently benefit from the integration
of Barman with pg_stat_archiver view. In particular, any continuous
archiving problem will be immediately spotted by the barman check
command directly on the source.

Management of WAL files has been improved, by optimising the
calculation of WAL statistics, tying archiving with backup and by
distinctively managing WAL trashing for exclusive and concurrent
backups.

Relevant efforts in unit testing have made the code more robust.
Minor bugs have also been fixed.

Many thanks for funding towards the development of this release go to
BIJ12 (www.bij12.nl), Jobrapido (www.jobrapido.com), Navionics (
www.navionics.com), Sovon Vogelonderzoek Nederland (www.sovon.nl),
and Subito.it (www.subito.it).

For a complete list of changes, see the "Release Notes" section
below.

Incremental backup. Incremental backup is a kind of full periodic
backup which saves only data changes from the latest full backup
available in the catalogue for a specific PostgreSQL server. The main
goals of incremental backup in Barman are:

  * Reduce the time taken for the full backup process
  * Reduce the disk space occupied by several periodic backups (data
deduplication)

This feature heavily relies on rysnc and hard links, which must be
therefore supported by both the underlying operating system and the
file system where the backup data resides.

The main concept is that two periodic base backups will share those
files that have not changed, leading to relevant savings in disk
usage. This is particularly true of VLDB contexts and, more in
general, of those databases containing a high percentage of read-only
historical tables. Barman implements incremental backup through a
global/server option, called reuse_backup, that transparently manages
the barman backup command. Behaviour can also be changed at runtime
through the --reuse-backup runtime option for the barman backup
command.

Links

  * Website: http://www.pgbarman.org/
  * Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
  * Documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation/
  * Man page, section 1: http://docs.pgbarman.org/barman.1.html
  * Man page, section 5: http://docs.pgbarman.org/barman.5.html
  * Support: http://www.pgbarman.org/support/
  * pgespresso extension: https://github.com/2ndquadrant-it/
pgespresso

Release notes

  * Incremental base backup implementation through the reuse_backup
global/server option. Possible values are off (disabled,
default), copy (preventing unmodified files from being
transferred) and link (allowing for deduplication through hard
links).
  * Store and show deduplication effects when using reuse_backup=
link.
  * Added transparent support of pg_stat_archiver (PostgreSQL 9.4) in
check, show-server and status commands.
  * Improved administration by invoking WAL maintenance at the end of
a successful backup.
  * Changed the way unused WAL files are trashed, by differentiating
between concurrent and exclusive backup cases.
  * Improved performance of WAL statistics calculation.
  * Treat a missing pg_ident.conf as a WARNING rather than an error.
  * Refactored output layer by removing remaining yield calls.
  * Check that rsync is in the system path.
  * Include history files in WAL management.
  * Improved robustness through more unit tests.
  * Fixed bug #55: Ignore fsync EINVAL errors on directories.
  * Fixed bug #58: retention policies delete.

Download

  * Release Notes: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
1.4.0/
  * Sources: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.4.0/
barman-1.4.0.tar.gz/download
  * RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 5: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/
files/1.4.0/barman-1.4.0-1.rhel5.noarch.rpm/download
(dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
rhel5-deps/)
  * RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 6: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/
files/1.4.0/barman-1.4.0-1.rhel6.noarch.rpm/download
(dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
rhel6-deps/)
  * PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/barman/1.4.0
  * pgespresso on PostgreSQL Extension framework (PGXN): http://
pgxn.org/dist/pgespresso/
  * pgespresso RPM/Debian packages: https://sourceforge.net/projects/
pgbarman/files/pgespresso/
  * Online documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation
  * PDF documentation: http://sourceforge.ne