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+<!-- BEGIN page_title_block -->
+Weekly News - February 15 2009
+<!-- END page_title_block -->
+
+<h1>PostgreSQL Weekly News - February 15 2009</h1>
+
+<p>
+At Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day, the Czech and Slovak people
+reunited to form a Czechoslovakian PostgreSQL Users' Group. Expect
+news from them soon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Save The Date: pgDay San Jose. Sunday, July 19th immediately before
+OSCON. CfP, more info TBA!
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Product News</h2>
+<p>
+Benetl 2.5, an ETL tool for files using PostgreSQL, released.
+<a href="http://www.benetl.net">http://www.benetl.net</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+pgpool-II 2.2 RC1, a connection pooler and more, released.
+<a href="http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/">http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL 8.4 Feature of the Week</h2>
+<p>
+Parallel Restore. Andrew Dunstan parallelized pg_restore to that you
+can put all of your processors to work loading (or upgrading) a
+database. In testing, this feature cuts load times by 50% with 4
+cores and 75% with 8. Even better, this new pg_restore will work with
+8.3 databases.
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Tip of the Week</h2>
+<p>
+Don't index low-cardinality columns, except as part of a multicolumn
+index.
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Jobs for February</h2>
+<p>
+<a href="http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-02/threads.php">http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2009-02/threads.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Local</h2>
+<p>
+Ed Borasky will be speaking about Data Visualization at PDXPUG on
+February 19, 2009, 7-9pm in Portland.
+<a href="http://calagator.org/events/1250456619">http://calagator.org/events/1250456619</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PostgreSQL will be at SCALE February 20-22, 2009 in Los Angeles.
+<a href="http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/">http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum will be presenting a talk at Perl Workshop
+2009 on February 25 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
+<a href="http://www.perl-workshop.de/talks/151/view">http://www.perl-workshop.de/talks/151/view</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+<a href="http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/525-PostgreSQL-auf-den-Chemnitzer-Linuxtagen.html">http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/525-PostgreSQL-auf-den-Chemnitzer-Linuxtagen.html</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+
+PostgreSQL Conference, U.S. will be holding a PgDay at LinuxFest
+Northwest (April 25/26th). The call for papers is out at
+<a href="http://www.postgresqlconference.org/">http://www.postgresqlconference.org/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+<a href="http://www.pgcon.org/2009/papers.php">http://www.pgcon.org/2009/papers.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PGCon Brazil will be take place October 23-24 2009 at Unicamp in
+Campinas, Sao Paulo state.
+</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
+and Josh Berkus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Applied Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Bruce Momjian committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml, fix spelling error in docs.
+ Erik Rijkers
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/pg_dump.sgml, update wording of how to
+ prevent pg_dump from affecting statistics collection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, clarify PQinitSSL() documentation
+ to mention what the argument controls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/create_table.sgml, remove tabs from SGML.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alvaro Herrera committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Update autovacuum to use reloptions instead of a system catalog, for
+ per-table overrides of parameters. This removes a whole class of
+ problems related to misusing the catalog, and perhaps more
+ importantly, gives us pg_dump support for the parameters. Based on
+ a patch by Euler Taveira de Oliveira, heavily reworked by me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/describe.c, improve psql \d+ to show TOAST
+ reloptions too. Per complaint from ITAGAKI Takahiro.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tom Lane committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Adopt Bob Jenkins' improved hash function for hash_any(). This
+ changes the contents of hash indexes (again), so bump catversion.
+ Kenneth Marshall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Tweak configure to attempt to add -qnoansialias to CFLAGS whenever
+ running on AIX with a non-gcc compiler. The previous coding would
+ do this only if CC was exactly "xlc"; which is a bad idea, as
+ demonstrated by trouble report from Mihai Criveti.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Change ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS to rewrite the whole table to
+ physically get rid of the OID column. This eliminates the problem
+ discovered by Heikki back in November that 8.4's suppression of
+ "unnecessary" junk filtering in INSERT/SELECT could lead to an
+ Assert failure, or storing of oids into a table that shouldn't have
+ them if Asserts are off. While that particular problem could have
+ been solved in other ways, it seems likely to be just a forerunner
+ of things to come if we continue to allow tables to contain rows
+ that disagree with the pg_class.relhasoids setting. It's better to
+ make this operation slow than to sacrifice performance or risk bugs
+ in more common code paths. Also, add ALTER TABLE SET WITH OIDS to
+ rewrite the table to add oids. This was a bit more controversial,
+ but in view of the very small amount of extra code needed given the
+ current ALTER TABLE infrastructure, it seems best to eliminate the
+ asymmetry in features.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix UNLISTEN to fall out quickly if the current backend has never
+ executed any LISTEN command. This is more important than it used to
+ be because DISCARD ALL invokes UNLISTEN. Connection-pooled
+ applications making heavy use of DISCARD ALL were seeing significant
+ contention for pg_listener, as reported by Matteo Beccati. It seems
+ unlikely that clients using LISTEN would use pooled connections, so
+ this simple tweak seems sufficient, especially since the pg_listener
+ implementation is slated to go away soon anyway. Back-patch to 8.3,
+ where DISCARD ALL was introduced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/catalog/information_schema.sql, a couple of
+ marginal performance hacks for the information_schema views: replace
+ the old recursive-SQL-function implementation of _pg_keysequal()
+ with use of the built-in array containment operators, and change
+ table_constraints' UNION to UNION ALL. Per discussion with Octavio
+ Alvarez. initdb not forced since this doesn't affect results, but
+ you'd need to initdb or reload the information_schema to see the new
+ definitions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/config.sgml, minor wordsmithing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Teach the planner to treat a partial unique index as proving a
+ variable is unique for a particular query, if the index predicate is
+ satisfied. This requires a bit of reordering of operations so that
+ we check the predicates before doing any selectivity estimates, but
+ shouldn't really cause any noticeable slowdown. Per a comment from
+ Michal Politowski.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peter Eisentraut committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/mb/Unicode/UCS_to_most.pl, add
+ possibility to generate only some files, by passing command-line
+ arguments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/mb/wchar.c, remove the encoding *numbers*
+ from the comments. They are useless, and make maintenance harder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Support for KOI8U encoding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Only unset the locale environment when --no-locale is used (the way
+ it was presumably designed, but didn't act). This allows running
+ the temp install tests in a non-C locale, thus exercising users'
+ real environments better. Document how to change locales for test
+ runs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Unset language-related locale settings in any case, otherwise psql
+ will speak in tongues and mess up the regression test diffs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- The Czech (cs_CZ) and Slovak (sk_SK) locales sort numbers after
+ letters, instead of vice versa. Update the regression test
+ expectations to support that. In the plpgsql test, adjust the test
+ data so that this isn't an issue. In the char and varchar tests,
+ add new expected files.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Magnus Hagander committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/port/win32env.c, don't call SetEnvironmentVariable()
+ when removing an environment variable, as this seems to crash on at
+ least some versions of MingW. Our current usage of this function
+ does not require it, so it should be ok to ignore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/port/kill.c, loop calling CallNamedPipe() several times
+ in case it fails, since it can be transient failures, causing kill()
+ to not properly send signals. Original patch from Steve Marshall,
+ modified by me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Andrew Dunstan committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Do not use unsetenv.c on mingw.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Rejected Patches (for now)</h2>
+<p>
+No one was disappointed this week :-)
+</p>
+
+<h2>Pending Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of the recovery
+infrastructure patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heikki Linnakangas sent in a change to the way subtransaction cache
+works. This is in aid of Hot Standby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ITAGAKI Takahiro sent in a patch to reject toast.fillfactor as a
+reloption, modify the relopt_kind to bit flags, and report the
+relation type on "unrecognized parameter" errors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Teodor Sigaev sent in another revision of the fast GIN insert patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to add in some parser hooks for
+Oracle-compatible DECODE support.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jeff Davis sent in a patch to advance xmin more aggressively in
+long-running transactions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei sent in two more revisions of the SE-PostgreSQL patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alvaro Herrera sent in two revisions of a patch to adjust psql's
+describe to do the right thing in when talking to different versions
+of PostgreSQL (pre-8.4 vs. later) pursuant to the reloptions patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fujii Masao sent in another revision of the synchronous replication
+patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Teodor Sigaev sent in another revision of the B-Tree emulation for GIN
+patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Andrew Chernow sent in two revisions of a patch which adds a
+PQInitCrypto(int) function to libpq so that it's possible to use a
+crypto library separately from SSL.
+
+</p>
+
projects / pgweb-old.git / commitdiff