From 0f0e8457e9c1e75b698d86bedeb31133c33e5a9b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: David Fetter <david@fetter.org>
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 02:04:36 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] PostgreSQL Weekly News September 06, 2009

git-svn-id: file:///Users/dpage/pgweb/svn-repo/trunk@2556 8f5c7a92-453e-0410-a47f-ad33c8a6b003
---
 portal/files/weeklynews.xml                   |  23 +-
 portal/template/en/community/weeklynews.html  |   1 +
 .../en/community/weeklynews/pwn20090906.html  | 467 ++++++++++++++++++
 3 files changed, 480 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 portal/template/en/community/weeklynews/pwn20090906.html

diff --git a/portal/files/weeklynews.xml b/portal/files/weeklynews.xml
index 5f9e7445..3e3de15a 100644
--- a/portal/files/weeklynews.xml
+++ b/portal/files/weeklynews.xml
@@ -10,6 +10,18 @@
 <description></description>
 <language>en</language>
 
+<item>
+<title>PostgreSQL Weekly News September 6th 2009</title>
+<description>
+New Survey:  Which 8.5 Alpha1 feature do you find the most
+interesting?
+&#x3C;a href=&#x22;http://www.postgresql.org/community&#x22;&#x3E;http://www.postgresql.org/community&#x3C;/a&#x3E;
+
+
+</description>
+<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20090906</guid>
+<pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PST</pubDate>
+</item>
 <item>
 <title>PostgreSQL Weekly News August 30th 2009</title>
 <description>
@@ -119,16 +131,5 @@ PostgreSQL 8.4.0 released.
 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20090705</guid>
 <pubDate>Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PST</pubDate>
 </item>
-<item>
-<title>PostgreSQL Weekly News June 28th 2009</title>
-<description>
-8.4.0 will be out soon.  Meanwhile, keep testing!
-&#x3C;a href=&#x22;http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta&#x22;&#x3E;http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta&#x3C;/a&#x3E;
-
-
-</description>
-<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20090628</guid>
-<pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PST</pubDate>
-</item>
 </channel>
 </rss>
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews.html b/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews.html
index 7faa5105..5bf33767 100644
--- a/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews.html
+++ b/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews.html
@@ -9,6 +9,7 @@ Weekly News
 <p>To receive the Weekly News in your inbox, please subscribe to the <a href="/community/lists/subscribe">pgsql-announce@postgresql.org</a> mailing list.</p>
 
 <ul>
+    <li><a href="/community/weeklynews/pwn20090906">September 6th 2009</a></li>
     <li><a href="/community/weeklynews/pwn20090830">August 30th 2009</a></li>
     <li><a href="/community/weeklynews/pwn20090823">August 23rd 2009</a></li>
     <li><a href="/community/weeklynews/pwn20090816">August 16th 2009</a></li>
diff --git a/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews/pwn20090906.html b/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews/pwn20090906.html
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..f763f711
--- /dev/null
+++ b/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews/pwn20090906.html
@@ -0,0 +1,467 @@
+<!-- BEGIN page_title_block -->
+Weekly News - September 06 2009
+<!-- END page_title_block -->
+
+<h1>PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 06 2009</h1>
+
+<p>
+New Survey:  Which 8.5 Alpha1 feature do you find the most
+interesting?
+<a href="http://www.postgresql.org/community">http://www.postgresql.org/community</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Registration for PostgreSQL Conference West is now open:
+<a href="http://www.postgresql.us/purchase">http://www.postgresql.us/purchase</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PostgreSQL Live CD Project started a mailing list to build a live CD
+with comments from community:
+<a href="http://www.pglivecd.org/community.php">http://www.pglivecd.org/community.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Product News</h2>
+<p>
+GTpB portalBase, a web plaform based on PostgreSQL, is now available
+under the GPL.
+<a href="http://www.gtportalbase.com/">http://www.gtportalbase.com/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PostgreSQL RPM Building Project another version of The PostgreSQL
+Live CD, this time based on PostgreSQL 8.4.0 and CentOS 5.3:
+<a href="http://yum.pgsqlrpms.org/livecd.php">http://yum.pgsqlrpms.org/livecd.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+AnySQL Maestro 9.8, a GUI for administration and development on
+Windows, released.
+<a href="http://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/anysql/maestro/">http://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/anysql/maestro/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+pg51g, a data diff toolkit for PostgreSQL, released.
+<a href="http://pgdba.net/pg51g/">http://pgdba.net/pg51g/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+pgDesigner 1.2.11, a graphical schema design program for PostgreSQL,
+released.
+<a href="http://pgdesigner.sourceforge.net/en/index.html">http://pgdesigner.sourceforge.net/en/index.html</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Jobs for September</h2>
+<p>
+<a href="http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-09/threads.php">http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-09/threads.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Local</h2>
+<p>
+SFPUG presents: Nathan Boley on Statistics and Postgres.
+September 8, 2009.  Details including live webcast info below.
+<a href="http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/11030245/">http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/11030245/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There will be a conference in Seattle, Washington, USA October 16-18,
+2009.  The CfP is still open.
+<a href="http://www.postgresqlconference.org/2009/west">http://www.postgresqlconference.org/2009/west</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in
+Campinas, Sao Paulo state.  The CfP is open!
+<a href="http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/2009/chamadas.en.php">http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/2009/chamadas.en.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PGDay.EU 2009 will be at Telecom ParisTech in Paris, France on
+November 6-7, 2009.  The CfP is out.  Submit!
+<a href="http://www.pgday.eu/">http://www.pgday.eu/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+OpenSQL Camp in Portland is looking for sponsors.  Make your travel plans now! :)
+<a href="http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2009/07/29/opensql-camp-comes-to-portland-november-14-15-2009/">http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2009/07/29/opensql-camp-comes-to-portland-november-14-15-2009/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+JPUG 10th Anniversary Conference is November 20-21, 2009 in Tokyo, Japan.
+<a href="http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2009-05/msg00018.php">http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2009-05/msg00018.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FOSDEM 2010 will be in Brussels on February 6-7, 2010.
+<a href="http://www.fosdem.org/">http://www.fosdem.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,
+Josh Berkus, and Devrim GUNDUZ.
+</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.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Applied Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Tom Lane committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Track the current XID wrap limit (or more accurately, the oldest
+  unfrozen XID) in checkpoint records.  This eliminates the need to
+  recompute the value from scratch during database startup, which is
+  one of the two remaining reasons for the flatfile code to exist.  It
+  should also simplify life for hot-standby operation.  To avoid
+  bloating the checkpoint records unreasonably, I switched from
+  tracking the oldest database by name to tracking it by OID.  This
+  turns out to save cycles in general (everywhere but the
+  warning-generating paths, which we hardly care about) and also helps
+  us deal with the case that the oldest database got dropped instead
+  of being vacuumed.  The prior coding might go for a long time
+  without updating the wrap limit in that case, which is bad because
+  it might result in a lot of useless autovacuum activity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Change the autovacuum launcher to read pg_database directly, rather
+  than via the "flat files" facility.  This requires making it enough
+  like a backend to be able to run transactions; it's no longer an
+  "auxiliary process" but more like the autovacuum worker processes.
+  Also, its signal handling has to be brought into line with
+  backends/workers.  In particular, since it now has to handle
+  procsignal.c processing, the special autovac-launcher-only signal
+  conditions are moved to SIGUSR2.  Alvaro Herrera, with some cleanup
+  from Tom Lane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Move processing of startup-packet switches and GUC settings into
+  InitPostgres, to fix the problem that SetClientEncoding needs to be
+  done before InitializeClientEncoding, as reported by Zdenek Kotala.
+  We get at least the small consolation of being able to remove the
+  bizarre API detail that had InitPostgres returning whether user is a
+  superuser.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Bump catversion for flat-file-ectomy.  Also remove a missed dead
+  extern declaration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/access/transam/twophase.c, actually, we need to
+  bump the format identifier on twophase files because of readjustment
+  of 2PC rmgr IDs for flatfile removal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Force VACUUM to recalculate oldestXmin even when we haven't changed
+  our own database's datfrozenxid, if the current value is old enough
+  to be forcing autovacuums or warning messages.  This ensures that a
+  bogus value is replaced as soon as possible.  Per a comment from
+  Heikki.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix pg_ctl's readfile() to not go into infinite loop on an empty
+  file (could happen if either postgresql.conf or postmaster.opts is
+  empty).  It's been broken since the C version was written for 8.0,
+  so patch all the way back.  initdb's copy of the function is broken
+  in the same way, but it's less important there since the input files
+  should never be empty.  Patch that in HEAD only, and also fix some
+  cosmetic differences that crept into that copy of the function.  Per
+  report from Corry Haines and Jeff Davis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix subquery pullup to wrap a PlaceHolderVar around the entire
+  RowExpr that's generated for a whole-row Var referencing the
+  subquery, when the subquery is in the nullable side of an outer
+  join.  The previous coding instead put PlaceHolderVars around the
+  elements of the RowExpr.  The effect was that when the outer join
+  made the subquery outputs go to null, the whole-row Var produced
+  ROW(NULL,NULL,...) rather than just NULL.  There are arguments afoot
+  about whether those things ought to be semantically
+  indistinguishable, but for the moment they are not entirely so, and
+  the planner needs to take care that its machinations preserve the
+  difference.  Per bug #5025.  Making this feasible required
+  refactoring ResolveNew() to allow more caller control over what is
+  substituted for a Var.  I chose to make ResolveNew() a wrapper
+  around a new general-purpose function replace_rte_variables().  I
+  also fixed the ancient bogosity that ResolveNew might fail to set a
+  query's hasSubLinks field after inserting a SubLink in it.  Although
+  all current callers make sure that happens anyway, we've had bugs of
+  that sort before, and it seemed like a good time to install a proper
+  solution.  Back-patch to 8.4.  The problem can be demonstrated clear
+  back to 8.0, but the fix would be too invasive in earlier branches;
+  not to mention that people may be depending on the subtly-incorrect
+  behavior.  The 8.4 series is new enough that fixing this probably
+  won't cause complaints, but it might in older branches.  Also, 8.4
+  shows the incorrect behavior in more cases than older branches do,
+  because it is able to flatten subqueries in more cases.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/bin/initdb/initdb.c, remove initdb's rather gratuitous
+  check to see if the backend created a flat password file, because it
+  never will anymore.  We had managed to miss this during the recent
+  flat-file-ectomy because it only happens if --pwfile or --pwprompt
+  is specified to initdb.  Apparently, few hackers use those.
+  Reported by Erik Rijkers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2009l: DST law changes
+  in Egypt, Mauritius, Bangladesh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Install a workaround for a longstanding gcc bug that allows SIGFPE
+  traps to occur for division by zero, even though the code is
+  carefully avoiding that.  All available evidence is that the only
+  functions affected are int24div, int48div, and int28div, so patch
+  just those three functions to include a "return" after the ereport()
+  call.  Backpatch to 8.4 so that the fix can be tested in production
+  builds.  For older branches our recommendation will continue to be
+  to use -O1 on affected platforms (which are mostly non-mainstream
+  anyway).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Final updates of release notes for 8.4.1, 8.3.8, 8.2.14, 8.1.18,
+  8.0.22, 7.4.26.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/postmaster/pgstat.c, remove pgstat's
+  discrimination against MsgVacuum and MsgAnalyze messages.  Formerly,
+  these message types would be discarded unless there was already a
+  stats hash table entry for the target table.  However, the intent of
+  saving hash table space for unused tables was subverted by the fact
+  that the physical I/O done by the vacuum or analyze would result in
+  an immediately following tabstat message, which would create the
+  hash table entry anyway.  All that we had left was surprising loss
+  of statistical data, as in a recent complaint from Jaime Casanova.
+  It seems unlikely that a real database would have many tables that
+  go totally untouched over the long haul, so the consensus is that
+  this "optimization" serves little purpose anyhow.  Remove it, and
+  just create the hash table entry on demand in all cases.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/Makefile, revert ill-considered restriction of
+  dtrace support to Solaris only.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/Makefile, put back "ifeq ($(PORTNAME),
+  solaris)", this time with some documentation of why it's not as
+  broken as it appears on first glance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/copy.sgml, add a note warning that COPY
+  BINARY is very datatype-specific.  Per a complaint from Gordon
+  Shannon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Update the tznames reference files, and add IDT (Israel Daylight
+  Time) to the Default timezone abbreviation set.  Back-port the the
+  current file set to all branches that contain tznames.  This
+  includes adding SGT to the Default set in pre-8.4 releases.  Joachim
+  Wieland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alvaro Herrera committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- This patch removes flatfiles.c for good.  It doesn't change the
+  keeping of locks in dbcommands.c and user.c, because at least some
+  of them are still required.  Regarding sync commits that previously
+  happen and now won't, I think the only case worth worrying about is
+  the one in vacuum.c.  Do we need a ForceSyncCommit() in there?  I'm
+  not sure if vacuum itself already forces sync commit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Remove flatfiles.c, which is now obsolete.  Recent commits have
+  removed the various uses it was supporting.  It was a performance
+  bottleneck, according to bug report #4919 by Lauris Ulmanis; seems
+  it slowed down user creation after a billion users.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peter Eisentraut committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/access/gist/gist.c, improve picksplit debug
+  message.  Missed this earlier because the translation site was
+  broken for the 7.4 branch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Translation updates
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Magnus Hagander committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/Makefile, revert Makefile
+  modification that broke the MSVC build.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Michael Meskes committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/misc.c, do not set connection
+  values if no connection is open.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In ECPG, removed some variables no longer needed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/execute.c, fixed incorrect
+  memory management.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marc Fournier committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Tag 8.4.1, 8.3.8, 8.2.14, 8.1.18, 8.0.22, and 7.4.26.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heikki Linnakangas committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/xml.c, fix encoding handling in xml
+  binary input function. If the XML header didn't specify an encoding
+  explicitly, we used to treat it as being in database encoding when
+  we parsed it, but then perform a UTF-8 -> database encoding
+  conversion on it, which was completely bogus. It's now consistently
+  treated as UTF-8.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Tighten binary receive functions so that they reject values that the
+  text input functions don't accept either.  While the backend can
+  handle such values fine, they can cause trouble in clients and in
+  pg_dump/restore.  This is followup to the original issue on time
+  datatype reported by Andrew McNamara a while ago.  Like that one,
+  none of these seem worth back-patching.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Rejected Patches (for now)</h2>
+<p>
+No one was disappointed this week :-)
+</p>
+
+<h2>Pending Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to make some of the binary recv
+functions stricter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the patch to add access
+controls for large objects.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Greg Sabino Mullane sent in another revision of the patch to add YAML
+as a formatting option for EXPLAIN output.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kevin Grittner sent in two more revisions of the patch to add a LSB
+conformant init script to contrib/start-scripts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peter Eisentraut sent in another patch to help with PL/PythonU data
+type conversion improvements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jeff Janes sent in a patch to rearrange pgbench's handling of
+#define'd constants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sam Mason sent in a patch which throws an error when anything but a
+one-byte char is sent to the "char" type.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch to add column-level triggers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the patch to refactor ACL
+facilities in PostgreSQL.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another revision of the patch to implement
+SELECT...FOR UPDATE [WAIT integer | NOWAIT].
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in new revisions of the ECPG patches for
+dynamic cursor name, sqlda, describe, and fixes for cursor scope error
+handling in Informix compatibility mode.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alvaro Herrera sent in a doc patch for logging at high loads.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Simon Riggs sent in a patch to skip SignalAutoVacuumWorkers(SIGTERM)
+during recovery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another revision of the cursor-handling
+patch for ECPG.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas sent in another revision of the join removal patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in another revision of the patch to make
+DML nodes in support of writeable CTEs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the patch to add access
+controls to large objects.
+
+</p>
+
-- 
2.39.5