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+<!-- BEGIN page_title_block -->
+Weekly News - August 22 2010
+<!-- END page_title_block -->
+
+<h1>PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 22 2010</h1>
+
+<p>
+Call for Papers for PGDay.EU 2010 held on December 6-8 in Stuttgart,
+Germany is open.
+<a href="http://2010.pgday.eu/callforpapers">http://2010.pgday.eu/callforpapers</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Product News</h2>
+<p>
+pgpool-II 3.0beta1, a connection pooler and more, released.
+<a href="http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/">http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Jobs for August</h2>
+<p>
+<a href="http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2010-08/threads.php">http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2010-08/threads.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Local</h2>
+<p>
+The Call for Papers for West is open until September 5, 2010. Details at:
+<a href="http://www.postgresqlconference.org/">http://www.postgresqlconference.org/</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL in the News</h2>
+<p>
+Planet PostgreSQL: <a href="http://planet.postgresql.org/">http://planet.postgresql.org/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
+Please send English language ones to david@fetter.org, German language
+to pwn@pgug.de, Italian language to pwn@itpug.org. Spanish language
+to pwn@arpug.com.ar.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Reviews</h2>
+<h2>Applied Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Tom Lane committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/init/miscinit.c, arrange to fsync the
+ contents of lockfiles (both postmaster.pid and the socket lockfile)
+ when writing them. The lack of an fsync here may well explain two
+ different reports we've seen of corrupted lockfile contents, which
+ doesn't particularly bother the running server but can prevent a new
+ server from starting if the old one crashes. Per suggestion from
+ Alvaro Herrera. Back-patch to all supported versions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Add missing handling of PlannedStmt.transientPlan in
+ copyfuncs/outfuncs. _outPlannedStmt is only debug support, so the
+ omission there was not very serious, but the omission in
+ _copyPlannedStmt is a real bug. The consequence would be that a
+ copied plan tree would never be marked as a transient plan, so that
+ we would forget we ought to replan it after some not-yet-ready index
+ becomes ready for use. This might explain some past complaints
+ about indexes created with CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY not being used
+ right away. Problem spotted by Yeb Havinga. Back-patch to 8.3,
+ where the field was added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix failure of "ALTER TABLE t ADD COLUMN c serial" when done by
+ non-owner. The implicitly created sequence was created as owned by
+ the current user, who could be different from the table owner, eg if
+ current user is a superuser or some member of the table's owning
+ role. This caused sanity checks in the SEQUENCE OWNED BY code to
+ spit up. Although possibly we don't need those sanity checks, the
+ safest fix seems to be to make sure the implicit sequence is
+ assigned the same owner role as the table has. (We still do all
+ permissions checks as the current user, however.) Per report from
+ Josh Berkus. Back-patch to 9.0. The bug goes back to the invention
+ of SEQUENCE OWNED BY in 8.2, but the fix requires an API change for
+ DefineRelation(), which seems to have potential for breaking
+ third-party code if done in a minor release. Given the lack of
+ prior complaints, it's probably not worth fixing in the stable
+ branches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Rename utf2ucs() to utf8_to_unicode(), and export it so it can be
+ used elsewhere. Similarly rename the version in mbprint.c, not
+ because this affects anything but just to keep the two copies in
+ exact sync. There was some discussion of having only one copy in
+ src/port/ instead, but this function is so small and unlikely to
+ change that that seems like overkill. Slightly editorialized
+ version of a patch by Joseph Adams. (The bug-fix aspect of his
+ patch was applied separately, and back-patched.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/executor/nodeModifyTable.c, reset the
+ per-output-tuple exprcontext each time through the main loop in
+ ExecModifyTable(). This avoids memory leakage when trigger
+ functions leave junk behind in that context (as they more or less
+ must). Problem and solution identified by Dean Rasheed. I'm a bit
+ concerned about the longevity of this solution --- once a plan can
+ have multiple ModifyTable nodes, we are very possibly going to have
+ to do something different. But it should hold up for 9.0.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/trigger.c, fix possible corruption of
+ AfterTriggerEventLists in subtransaction rollback.
+ afterTriggerInvokeEvents failed to adjust events->tailfree when
+ truncating the last chunk of an event list. This could result in
+ the data being "de-truncated" by afterTriggerRestoreEventList during
+ a subsequent subtransaction abort. Even that wouldn't kill us,
+ because the re-added data would just be events marked DONE ---
+ unless the data had been partially overwritten by new events. Then
+ we might crash, or in any case misbehave (perhaps fire triggers
+ twice, or fire triggers with the wrong event data). Per bug #5622
+ from Thue Janus Kristensen. Back-patch to 8.4 where the current
+ trigger list representation was introduced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/buffer/localbuf.c, allocate local
+ buffers in a context of their own, rather than dumping them into
+ TopMemoryContext. This makes no functional difference, but makes it
+ easier to see what the space is being used for in MemoryContextStats
+ dumps. Per a recent example in which I was surprised by the size of
+ TopMemoryContext.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/pl/plpgsql/src/pl_exec.c, be a bit less cavalier with
+ both the code and the comment for UNKNOWN fix.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/pl/plpgsql/src/pl_exec.c, keep exec_simple_check_plan()
+ from thinking "SELECT foo INTO bar" is simple. It's not clear if
+ this situation can occur in plpgsql other than via the EXECUTE USING
+ case Heikki illustrated, which I will shortly close off. However,
+ ignoring the intoClause if it's there is surely wrong, so let's
+ patch it for safety. Backpatch to 8.3, which is as far back as this
+ code has a PlannedStmt to deal with. There might be another way to
+ make an equivalent test before that, but since this is just
+ preventing hypothetical bugs, I'm not going to obsess about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/pl/plpgsql/src/gram.y, allow USING and INTO clauses of
+ plpgsql's EXECUTE to appear in either order. Aside from being more
+ forgiving, this prevents a rather surprising misbehavior when the
+ "wrong" order was used: the old code didn't throw a syntax error,
+ but absorbed the INTO clause into the last USING expression, which
+ then did strange things downstream. Intentionally not changing the
+ documentation; we'll continue to advertise only the "standard"
+ clause order. Backpatch to 8.4, where the USING clause was added to
+ EXECUTE.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Bring some sanity to the trace_recovery_messages code and docs. Per
+ gripe from Fujii Masao, though this is not exactly his proposed
+ patch. Categorize as DEVELOPER_OPTIONS and set context PGC_SIGHUP,
+ as per Fujii, but set the default to LOG because higher values
+ aren't really sensible (see the code for trace_recovery()). Fix the
+ documentation to agree with the code and to try to explain what the
+ variable actually does. Get rid of no-op calls trace_recovery(LOG),
+ which accomplish nothing except to demonstrate that this option
+ confuses even its author.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Avoid saying "random" when randomness is not actually meant. Per
+ Thom Brown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/parser/gram.y, add missing processing of
+ OptTemp in CREATE IF NOT EXISTS variant for typed tables. Noted by
+ Robert Haas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_backup_archiver.c, improve parallel
+ restore's ability to cope with selective restore (-L option). The
+ original coding tended to break down in the face of modified restore
+ orders, as shown in bug #5626 from Albert Ullrich, because it would
+ flip over into parallel-restore operation too soon. That causes
+ problems because we don't have sufficient dependency information in
+ dump archives to allow safe parallel processing of SECTION_PRE_DATA
+ items. Even if we did, it's probably undesirable to allow that to
+ override the commanded restore order. To fix the problem of omitted
+ items causing unexpected changes in restore order, tweak
+ SortTocFromFile so that omitted items end up at the head of the list
+ not the tail. This ensures that they'll be examined and their
+ dependencies will be marked satisfied before we get to any
+ interesting items. In HEAD and 9.0, we can easily change
+ restore_toc_entries_parallel so that all SECTION_PRE_DATA items are
+ guaranteed to be processed in the initial serial-restore loop, and
+ hence in commanded order. Only DATA and POST_DATA items are
+ candidates for parallel processing. For them there might be
+ variations from the commanded order because of parallelism, but we
+ should do it in a safe order thanks to dependencies. In 8.4 it's
+ much harder to make such a guarantee. I settled for not letting the
+ initial loop break out into parallel processing mode if it sees a
+ DATA/POST_DATA item that's not to be restored; this at least
+ prevents a non-restorable item from causing premature exit from the
+ loop. This means that 8.4 will be more likely to fail given a
+ badly-ordered -L list than 9.x, but we don't really promise any such
+ thing will work anyway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/arrayfuncs.c, use a
+ non-locale-dependent definition of isspace() in array_in/array_out.
+ array_in discards unquoted leading and trailing whitespace in array
+ values, while array_out is careful to quote array elements that
+ contain whitespace. This is problematic when the definition of
+ "whitespace" varies between locales: array_in could drop characters
+ that were meant to be part of the value. To avoid that, lock down
+ "whitespace" to mean only the traditional six ASCII space
+ characters. This change also works around a bug in OS X and some
+ older BSD systems, in which isspace() could return true for
+ character fragments in UTF8 locales. (There may be other places in
+ PG where that bug could cause problems, but this is the only one
+ complained of so far; see recent report from Steven Schlansker.)
+ Back-patch to 9.0, but not further. Given the lack of previous
+ reports of trouble, changing this behavior in stable branches seems
+ to offer more risk of breaking applications than reward of avoiding
+ problems.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peter Eisentraut committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Spell and markup checking for docs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/lo.sgml, revert: looks like Binary Large
+ OBject[sic] wasn't a misspelling
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Backpatch some blatant spelling mistakes in the docs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Remove extra newlines at end and beginning of files, add missing
+ newlines at end of files.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Michael Meskes committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Applied Zoltan Boszormenyi's patch to fix a few memleaks in ecpg's
+ pgtypeslib.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heikki Linnakangas committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/parser/parse_param.c, coerce 'unknown' type
+ parameters to the right type in the fixed-params parse_analyze()
+ function. That case occurs e.g with PL/pgSQL EXECUTE ... USING
+ 'stringconstant'. The coercion with a CoerceViaIO node. The result
+ is similar to the coercion via input function performed for unknown
+ constants in coerce_type(), except that this happens at runtime.
+ Backpatch to 9.0. The issue is present in 8.4 as well, but the
+ coerce param hook infrastructure this patch relies on was introduced
+ in 9.0. Given the lack of user reports and harmlessness of the bug,
+ it's not worth attempting a different fix just for 8.4.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Revert patch to coerce 'unknown' type parameters in the backend. As
+ Tom Lane pointed out, it would need a 2nd pass after the whole query
+ is processed to correctly check that an unknown Param is coerced to
+ the same target type everywhere. Adding the 2nd pass would add a
+ lot more code, which doesn't seem worth the risk given that there
+ isn't much of a use case for passing unknown Params in the first
+ place. The code would work without that check, but it might be
+ confusing and the behavior would be different from the varparams
+ case. Instead, just coerce all unknown params in a PL/pgSQL USING
+ clause to text. That's simple, and is usually what users expect.
+ Revert the patch in CVS HEAD and master, and backpatch the new
+ solution to 8.4. Unlike the previous solution, this applies easily
+ to 8.4 too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Tidy up a few calls to smrgextend(). In the new API introduced by
+ my patch to include the backend ID in temprel filenames, the last
+ argument to smrgextend() became skipFsync rather than isTemp, but
+ these calls didn't get the memo. It's not really a problem to pass
+ rel->rd_istemp rather than just plain false, because smgrextend()
+ now automatically skips the fsync for temprels anyway, but this
+ seems cleaner and saves some minute number of cycles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/storage/buffer/bufmgr.c, remove the isLocalBuf
+ argument from ReadBuffer_common. Since an SMgrRelation now knows
+ whether or not the underlying relation is temporary, there's no
+ point in also passing that information via an additional argument.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Magnus Hagander committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Add vacuum and analyze counters to pg_stat_*_tables views.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/test/regress/expected/rules.out, adjust regression
+ tests for previous commit, that I forgot to include...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bruce Momjian committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/config.sgml, document that autovacuum_freeze_max_age
+ is used for pg_clog recycling. We already mentioned xid wraparound.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Rejected Patches (for now)</h2>
+<p>
+No one was disappointed this week :-)
+</p>
+
+<h2>Pending Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Pavel Stehule sent in two revisions of a patch to extend psql's tab
+completion to more entities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei sent in a patch to implement preload libraries for
+single-user mode.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peter Eisentraut sent in a prototype query progress indicator.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quan Zongliang sent in a patch to enable pg_ctl on Windows to select a
+service start type (auto or on-demand), then a follow-up patch to add
+the docs. David Fetter unified these into standard format.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas and Alex Hunsaker traded patches to create a new tool for
+git histories.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to fix an issue in PL/PythonU with
+Python 2.7.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heikki Linnakangas sent in a WIP patch to fix an issue with type
+coercion in PL/pgsql's EXECUTE ... USING construct.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pavel Stehule sent in two revisions of a patch to add MEDIAN() and
+PERCENTILE() as contrib modules.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Boxuan Zhai sent in another revision of the MERGE patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas sent in another refactor of comment.c.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin Pihlak sent in a patch to add a system-wide fallback directory
+for SSL root certificates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei sent in a patch to add a security hook at authorization
+time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas sent in a patch to clean up smgr, which kicked off a
+discussion of the design of the abstraction layers nearby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to add columns the pg_stat_*_tables
+which record the number of [auto]vacuum and [auto]analyze runs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to refactor makeVar in the back end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Erik Rijkers sent in two revisions of a patch to make the debug
+messages in pg_archivecleanup more consistent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to track more vacuum stats.
+
+</p>
+
projects / pgweb-old.git / commitdiff