--- /dev/null
+<!-- BEGIN page_title_block -->
+Weekly News - December 26 2010
+<!-- END page_title_block -->
+
+<h1>PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 26 2010</h1>
+
+<p>
+Happy Boxing Day from the PostgreSQL Weekly News!
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Product News</h2>
+<p>
+psycopg2 2.3.2 a Python connector for PostgreSQL, released.
+<a href="http://initd.org/psycopg/">http://initd.org/psycopg/</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Jobs for December</h2>
+<p>
+<a href="http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2010-12/threads.php">http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2010-12/threads.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Local</h2>
+<p>
+FOSDEM is one of the biggest Free and Open Source event held annually
+in Brussels, Belgium, on February 5-6, 2011, and attended by around
+4000 people. Send in your proposal to fosdem AT postgresql DOT eu.
+<a href="http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/749-PostgreSQLFOSDEM-2011-Call-for-talks.html">http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/749-PostgreSQLFOSDEM-2011-Call-for-talks.html</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Call for Papers for the fourth annual Prague PostgreSQL
+Developers' Day is open. It will be held February 10, 2011 at Charles
+University in Prague.
+<a href="http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2010-12/msg00009.php">http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2010-12/msg00009.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The PostgreSQLFr Call for Projects has begun. Projects must target
+PostgreSQL and the French-speaking community. Mail appel-projets-2010
+AT postgresql DOT fr.
+<a href="http://www.postgresql.fr/appel_a_projets_2010:call_for_projects">http://www.postgresql.fr/appel_a_projets_2010:call_for_projects</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PGDay is scheduled at this year's Southern California Linux Exposition
+(SCALE) held in the LAX Hilton Hotel in the city of Los Angeles,
+California, on Friday February 25th, 2011. Post your talk submission
+to pgday-submissions AT googlegroups DOT com.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PostgreSQL Conference East 2011: NYC March 22nd - 25th
+<a href="http://www.postgresqlconference.org">http://www.postgresqlconference.org</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PGCon will be May 19-20, 2011 at the University of Ottawa, preceded by
+two days of tutorials on May 17-18. The Call for Papers is open!
+<a href="http://www.pgcon.org/2011/">http://www.pgcon.org/2011/</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>
+Alvaro Herrera pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix typo. Jaime Casanova.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=f9e9763b62df5415a60f30b441a73b381599e760">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=f9e9763b62df5415a60f30b441a73b381599e760</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Allow transactions that don't write WAL to commit asynchronously.
+ This case can arise if a transaction has written data, but only to
+ temporary tables. Loss of the commit record in case of a crash
+ won't matter, because the temporary tables will be lost anyway.
+ Reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas and Simon Riggs.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=f6a0863e3cb72763490ceca2c558d5ef2dddd5f2">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=f6a0863e3cb72763490ceca2c558d5ef2dddd5f2</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Work around unfortunate getppid() behavior on BSD-ish systems. On
+ MacOS X, and apparently also on other BSD-derived systems, attaching
+ a debugger causes getppid() to return the pid of the debugging
+ process rather than the actual parent PID. As a result, debugging
+ the autovacuum launcher, startup process, or WAL sender on such
+ systems causes it to exit, because the previous coding of
+ PostmasterIsAlive() detects postmaster death by testing whether
+ getppid() == PostmasterPid. Work around that behavior by checking
+ the return value of getppid() more carefully. If it's
+ PostmasterPid, the postmaster must be alive; if it's 1, assume the
+ postmaster is dead. If it's any other value, assume we've been
+ debugged and fall through to the less-reliable kill() test. Review
+ by Tom Lane.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=24ecde7742cd4d7c781e6890b07571fff42b25dc">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=24ecde7742cd4d7c781e6890b07571fff42b25dc</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix typos. Andreas Karlsson.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=c5160b7eecf97a357375960b02a30317474334a3">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=c5160b7eecf97a357375960b02a30317474334a3</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Use memcmp() rather than strncmp() when shorter string length is
+ known. It appears that this will be faster for all but the shortest
+ strings; at least one some platforms, memcmp() can use
+ word-at-a-time comparisons. Noah Misch, somewhat pared down.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=32ba2b516066688ff56e6d62a7ff4a01c88f5700">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=32ba2b516066688ff56e6d62a7ff4a01c88f5700</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Typo fix. Noted by Thom Brown.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=2a0f13a765befefc2658d3729f3e174b7c252125">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=2a0f13a765befefc2658d3729f3e174b7c252125</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Document pg_dump(all) --no-security-label instead of --security-label.
+ The former is the option actually supported by these commands.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=a1b0035949da09bb0f19d2d9c2d54ca54ca55752">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=a1b0035949da09bb0f19d2d9c2d54ca54ca55752</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Correct spelling: longjump() -> longjmp().
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=4ec92b05e640b0991ba67d41cbb097200200fe70">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=4ec92b05e640b0991ba67d41cbb097200200fe70</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Add foreign data wrapper error code values for SQL/MED. Extracted
+ from a much larger patch by Shigeru Hanada.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=85cff3ce7f360d139d87aee836d75a6202fee066">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=85cff3ce7f360d139d87aee836d75a6202fee066</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Corrections to patch adding SQL/MED error codes. My previous
+ commit, 85cff3ce7f360d139d87aee836d75a6202fee066 on 2010-12-25,
+ failed to update errcodes.sgml or plerrcodes.h. This patch corrects
+ that oversight, per a gripe from Tom Lane, and also corrects a
+ typographical error.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=63676ebff402050f6b0b347188f5e857474da9e1">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=63676ebff402050f6b0b347188f5e857474da9e1</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Magnus Hagander pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Add PQlibVersion() function to libpq. This function is like the
+ PQserverVersion() function except it returns the version of libpq,
+ making it possible for a client program or driver to determine which
+ version of libpq is in use at runtime, and not just at link time.
+ Suggested by Harald Armin Massa and several others.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=de9a4c27fefcc0d104bc9c97f4a93a49a25bf66d">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=de9a4c27fefcc0d104bc9c97f4a93a49a25bf66d</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bruce Momjian pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Wording improvements for pg_ctl manual page.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=28d5c565ced893366d010e6754a9fad6d0a40364">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=28d5c565ced893366d010e6754a9fad6d0a40364</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Document that BBU's do not allow partial page writes to be safely
+ turned off unless they guarantee that all writes to the BBU arrive
+ in 8kB chunks. Per discussion with Greg Smith
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=7a1ca8977fd109a86b540444f71f24bd2f38ea43">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=7a1ca8977fd109a86b540444f71f24bd2f38ea43</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Improve "pg_ctl -w start" server detection by writing the postmaster
+ port and socket directory into postmaster.pid, and have pg_ctl read
+ from that file, for use by PQping().
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=075354ad1bc0496c30dbd4dafb0f88a4d3e54cbc">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=075354ad1bc0496c30dbd4dafb0f88a4d3e54cbc</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Backpatch to 9.0 a doc mention that a BBU does not prevent partial
+ page writes.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=c47458529533bc88e34778818a4ce7d5c309d7a8">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=c47458529533bc88e34778818a4ce7d5c309d7a8</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Remove quotes from boolean recovery.conf.sample parameters, now that
+ the quotes are not required. This now matches postgresql.conf's
+ specification of booleans.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=5000472112da91023bf468e57bb8ce9217426ed7">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=5000472112da91023bf468e57bb8ce9217426ed7</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heikki Linnakangas pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Rewrite the GiST insertion logic so that we don't need the
+ post-recovery cleanup stage to finish incomplete inserts or splits
+ anymore. There was two reasons for the cleanup step: 1. When a new
+ tuple was inserted to a leaf page, the downlink in the parent needed
+ to be updated to contain (i.e. to be consistent with) the new key.
+ Updating the parent in turn might require recursively updating the
+ parent of the parent. We now handle that by updating the parent
+ while traversing down the tree, so that when we insert the leaf
+ tuple, all the parents are already consistent with the new key, and
+ the tree is consistent at every step. 2. When a page is split, we
+ need to insert the downlink for the new right page(s), and update
+ the downlink for the original page to not include keys that moved to
+ the right page(s). We now handle that by setting a new flag,
+ F_FOLLOW_RIGHT, on the non-rightmost pages in the split. When that
+ flag is set, scans always follow the rightlink, regardless of the
+ NSN mechanism used to detect concurrent page splits. That way the
+ tree is consistent right after split, even though the downlink is
+ still missing. This is very similar to the way B-tree splits are
+ handled. When the downlink is inserted in the parent, the flag is
+ cleared. To keep the insertion algorithm simple, when an insertion
+ sees an incomplete split, indicated by the F_FOLLOW_RIGHT flag, it
+ finishes the split before doing anything else. These changes allow
+ removing the whole "invalid tuple" mechanism, but I retained the
+ scan code to still follow invalid tuples correctly. While we don't
+ create any such tuples anymore, we want to handle them gracefully in
+ case you pg_upgrade a GiST index that has them. If we encounter any
+ on an insert, though, we just throw an error saying that you need to
+ REINDEX. The issue that got me into doing this is that if you did a
+ checkpoint while an insert or split was in progress, and the
+ checkpoint finishes quickly so that there is no WAL record related
+ to the insert between RedoRecPtr and the checkpoint record, recovery
+ from that checkpoint would not know to finish the incomplete insert.
+ IOW, we have the same issue we solved with the rm_safe_restartpoint
+ mechanism during normal operation too. It's highly unlikely to
+ happen in practice, and this fix is far too large to backpatch, so
+ we're just going to live with in previous versions, but this
+ refactoring fixes it going forward. With this patch, you don't get
+ the annoying 'index "FOO" needs VACUUM or REINDEX to finish crash
+ recovery' notices anymore if you crash at an unfortunate moment.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=9de3aa65f01fb51cbc725e8508ea233e4e92c46c">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=9de3aa65f01fb51cbc725e8508ea233e4e92c46c</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Michael Meskes pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Added rule to ecpg lexer to accept "Unicode surrogate pair in
+ extended quoted string". This is not really needed because the
+ string gets copied to the output untranslated anyway, but by adding
+ this rule the lexer stays in sync with the backend lexer.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=727a5a1620dd9f84036f8094f99a6ea494143bef">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=727a5a1620dd9f84036f8094f99a6ea494143bef</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peter Eisentraut pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Move the documentation of --no-security-label to a more sensible
+ place. The order on the pg_dump/pg_dumpall man pages is not very
+ strict, but surely putting it under connection options was wrong.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=4b1742a192a60b9c063fd7e93f5aed7a697bece1">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=4b1742a192a60b9c063fd7e93f5aed7a697bece1</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Release notes for 9.1alpha3.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=b2fd345ab9ef5857ff42e6d81d57a0f15247b430">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=b2fd345ab9ef5857ff42e6d81d57a0f15247b430</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix grammar.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=79a9decdd33c9662c0722ef1d49d8aa951739da4">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=79a9decdd33c9662c0722ef1d49d8aa951739da4</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Andrew Dunstan pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Allow vpath builds and regression tests to succeed on Mingw.
+ Backpatch to release 8.4 - earlier releases would require more
+ changes and it's not worth the trouble.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=04ee0db6b287a1ff41b55cc440769a1dddc318a7">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=04ee0db6b287a1ff41b55cc440769a1dddc318a7</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Only build in crashdump support on Windows if there's a working
+ dbghelp.h.
+ <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=a534728afb7341e1ddf2df16196ed501eaa378c2">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=a534728afb7341e1ddf2df16196ed501eaa378c2</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>Rejected Patches (for now)</h2>
+<p>
+No one was disappointed this week :-)
+</p>
+
+<h2>Pending Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Magnus Hagander sent in another revision of the patch to allow
+querying the version of libpq.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the patch to export some
+of the functions COPY uses. This will help, among other things, the
+SQL/MED file-based operations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dimitri Fontaine sent in two more revisions of the patch to add
+extensions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Andrew Dunstan sent in a patch to allow a vpath build to be used on
+MingW.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Noah Misch sent in a patch to change strncmp to memcmp when we know
+the shorter length. In the tests he ran, this resulted in a 13% speed
+boost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Noah Misch sent in a patch based on the above patch to check lengths
+texteq, textne, byteaeq and byteane before detoasting, as unequal
+lengths imply inequality without further elaboration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alvaro Herrera sent in a patch atop Dimitri Fontaine's extension
+patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sushant Sinha sent in a patch to fix an off-by-one error in
+ts_rank_cd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shigeru HANADA sent in another revision of the file_fdw patch for
+SQL/MED.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Merlin Moncure sent in a patch which makes the existence of hint bits
+a compile time option.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alex Hunsaker sent in another revision of the patch to fix an issue
+with PL/PerlU's handling of utf8.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fujii Masao sent in two more revisions of a patch to fix a bug in
+SignalSomeChildren.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bruce Momjian sent in a patch to add the port number and optionally
+socket directory location to postmaster.pid, and modify pg_ctl to use
+that information.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jan Urbanski sent in a flock of patches to refactor PL/PythonU.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tomas Vondra sent in another revisions of the patch to allow people to
+see the timestamp at which stats were reset by database if any table,
+index or function's statistics have been reset.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to change walsender to require a
+special privilege for replication.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei sent in SE-PostgreSQL as a contrib module.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shigeru HANADA sent in another revision of the patch to make file_fdw
+work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas sent in another revision of the patch to add unlogged
+tables.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kevin Grittner sent in a patch to address issues with long-running
+transactions in SERIALIZABLE isolation mode.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in another revision of the patch to add SQL
+standard MULTISETs.
+
+</p>
+
projects / pgweb-old.git / commitdiff