--- /dev/null
+<!-- BEGIN page_title_block -->
+Weekly News - August 01 2010
+<!-- END page_title_block -->
+
+<h1>PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 01 2010</h1>
+
+<p>
+PostgreSQL 9.0 beta 4 is out. Test!
+<a href="http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta">http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Job::Machine 0.011, a reliable Perl Job Queue using PostgreSQL, released.
+<a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/Job-Machine/">http://search.cpan.org/dist/Job-Machine/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+pgAdmin 1.10.5, a GUI management tool for PostgreSQL, released.
+<a href="http://www.pgadmin.org/download/">http://www.pgadmin.org/download/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+pg_sample 0.01, a utility for exporting a small, sample dataset from a
+larger PostgreSQL database, released.
+<a href="http://github.com/mla/pg_sample">http://github.com/mla/pg_sample</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Product News</h2>
+<h2>PostgreSQL 9.0 Feature of the Week</h2>
+<h2>PostgreSQL Tip of the Week</h2>
+<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>
+Reuven Lerner will be teaching a 5-day course in PostgreSQL August
+1-5, 2010 at the Hi-Tech College in Herzliya, Israel.
+<a href="http://www.hi-tech.co.il/college/default.asp?PageID=12&CourseNum=4288">http://www.hi-tech.co.il/college/default.asp?PageID=12&CourseNum=4288</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FrOSCon 2010 will take place in St. Augustin, Germany on August 21-22,
+2010. The German PostgreSQL User Group got his own devroom and is
+looking for talks. More info:
+<a href="http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/711-FrOSCon-2010-PostgreSQL-devroom-Call-for-papers.html">http://andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/711-FrOSCon-2010-PostgreSQL-devroom-Call-for-papers.html</a>
+</p>
+
+<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>
+
+<p>
+
+== PostgreSQL in the News ==
+</p>
+
+<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.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Reviews</h2>
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei reviewed Robert Haas's patch to add get_whatever_oid
+functionality.
+== Applied Patches ==
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peter Eisentraut committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/xfunc.sgml, add table creation and population
+ to example. From John Gage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/perform.sgml, fix grammar. Backpatched to
+ 8.1.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/contrib/xml2/README.xml2, spelling fix.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Spelling fixes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/bin/psql/common.c, show psql timing output even in
+ quiet mode. These two settings ought to be independent of each
+ other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/contrib/chkpass/chkpass.sql.in, remove wildly obsolete type
+ attribute externallength from chkpass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix indentation of verbatim block elements. Block elements with
+ verbatim formatting (literallayout, programlisting, screen,
+ synopsis) should be aligned at column 0 independent of the
+ surrounding SGML, because whitespace is significant, and indenting
+ them creates erratic whitespace in the output. The CSS stylesheets
+ already take care of indenting the output. Assorted markup
+ improvements to go along with it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Translation updates for 9.0beta4.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alvaro Herrera committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In PL/Perl[U], ensure $_SHARED is declared in the main:: namespace,
+ per bugs #5570 and #5571. Author: Alex Hunsaker
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In postgresql.conf.sample, use on/off rather than true/false. We
+ used to be consistent about this, but my recent patch to add a
+ restart_after_crash GUC failed to follow the existing convention.
+ Report and patch from Fujii Masao.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/plpgsql.sgml, fix typo in PL/pgsql code
+ example. Backpatch to 8.4. Marc Cousin. Review by Kevin Grittner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Add ssl_cipher() and ssl_version() functions to contrib/sslinfo.
+ Review by Dave Page.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/access/heap/heapam.c, fix possible page
+ corruption by ALTER TABLE .. SET TABLESPACE. If a zeroed page is
+ present in the heap, ALTER TABLE .. SET TABLESPACE will set the LSN
+ and TLI while copying it, which is wrong, and heap_xlog_newpage()
+ will do the same thing during replay, so the corruption propagates
+ to any standby. Note, however, that the bug can't be demonstrated
+ unless archiving is enabled, since in that case we skip WAL logging
+ altogether, and the LSN/TLI are not set. Back-patch to 8.0; prior
+ releases do not have tablespaces. Analysis and patch by Jeff Davis.
+ Adjustments for back-branches and minor wordsmithing by me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/contrib/fuzzystrmatch/fuzzystrmatch.c, avoid using
+ text_to_cstring() in levenshtein functions. Operating directly on
+ the underlying varlena saves palloc and memcpy overhead, which
+ testing shows to be significant. Extracted from a larger patch by
+ Alexander Korotkov.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Make details of the Numeric representation private to numeric.c.
+ Review by Tom Lane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Make psql distinguish between unique indices and unique constraints.
+ Josh Kupershmidt. Reviewing and kibitzing by Kevin Grittner and me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tom Lane committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Rewrite the rbtree routines so that an RBNode is the first field of
+ the
+ struct representing a tree entry, rather than being a separately
+ allocated
+ piece of storage. This API is at least as clean as the old one (if
+ not
+ more so --- there were some bizarre choices in there) and it permits
+ a
+ very substantial memory savings, on the order of 2X in ginbulk.c's
+ usage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix an additional set of problems in GIN's handling of lossy page
+ pointers. Although the key-combining code claimed to work correctly
+ if its input contained both lossy and exact pointers for a single
+ page in a single TID stream, in fact this did not work, and could
+ not work without pretty fundamental redesign. Modify keyGetItem so
+ that it will not return such a stream, by handling lossy-pointer
+ cases a bit more explicitly than we did before. Per followup
+ investigation of a gripe from Artur Dabrowski. An example of a
+ query that failed given his data set is select count(*) from
+ search_tab where (to_tsvector('german', keywords ) @@
+ to_tsquery('german', 'ee:* | dd:*')) and (to_tsvector('german',
+ keywords ) @@ to_tsquery('german', 'aa:*')); Back-patch to 8.4 where
+ the lossy pointer code was introduced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/tsearch/ts_selfuncs.c, add some knowledge about
+ prefix matches to tsmatchsel(). It's not terribly bright, but it
+ beats assuming that a prefix match behaves identically to an exact
+ match, which is what the code was doing before :-(. Noted while
+ experimenting with Artur Dobrowski's example.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix ANALYZE's ancient deficiency of not trying to collect stats for
+ expression indexes when the index column type (the opclass
+ opckeytype) is different from the expression's datatype. When
+ coded, this limitation wasn't worth worrying about because we had no
+ intelligence to speak of in stats collection for the datatypes used
+ by such opclasses. However, now that there's non-toy estimation
+ capability for tsvector queries, it amounts to a bug that ANALYZE
+ fails to do this. The fix changes struct VacAttrStats, and
+ therefore constitutes an API break for custom typanalyze functions.
+ Therefore we can't back-patch it into released branches, but it was
+ agreed that 9.0 isn't yet frozen hard enough to make such a change
+ unacceptable. Ergo, back-patch to 9.0 but no further. The API
+ break had better be mentioned in 9.0 release notes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Back-patch fix for renaming asyncCommitLSN to asyncXactLSN. AIUI
+ this was supposed to go into 9.0 as well as HEAD.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix an ancient typo that prevented the detection of conflicting
+ fields when interval input "invalid" was specified together with
+ other fields. Spotted by Neil Conway with the help of a clang
+ warning. Although this has been wrong since the interval code was
+ written more than 10 years ago, it doesn't affect anything beyond
+ which error message you get for a wrong input, so not worth
+ back-patching very far.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Tweak a couple of macros in the regex code to suppress compiler
+ warnings from "clang". The VERR changes make an assignment
+ unconditional, which is probably easier to read/understand anyway,
+ and one can hardly argue that it's worth shaving cycles off the case
+ of reporting another error when one has already been detected. The
+ INSIST change limits where that macro can be used, but not in a way
+ that creates a problem for any existing call.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/template/darwin, don't try to force use of
+ -no-cpp-precomp on OS X. It's been five years since Apple shipped a
+ compiler that needed this switch, and there's increasing interest in
+ using other compilers that won't accept the switch at all. Better
+ to let anybody who still needs the switch inject it via CPPFLAGS.
+ Per gripe from Neil Conway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ Also, fix minor memory leaks in code called by ginEntryInsert, in
+ particular in ginInsertValue and entryFillRoot, as well as
+ ginEntryInsert itself. These leaks resulted in the GIN index build
+ context continuing to bloat even after we'd filled it to
+ maintenance_work_mem and started to dump data out to the index. In
+ combination these fixes restore the GIN index build code to honoring
+ the maintenance_work_mem limit about as well as it did in 8.4.
+ Speed seems on par with 8.4 too, maybe even a bit faster, for a
+ non-pathological case in which HEAD was formerly slower. Back-patch
+ to 9.0 so we don't have a performance regression from 8.4.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix potential failure when hashing the output of a subplan that
+ produces a pass-by-reference datatype with a nontrivial projection
+ step. We were using the same memory context for the projection
+ operation as for the temporary context used by the hashtable
+ routines in execGrouping.c. However, the hashtable routines feel
+ free to reset their temp context at any time, which'd lead to
+ destroying input data that was still needed. Report and diagnosis
+ by Tao Ma. Back-patch to 8.1, where the problem was introduced by
+ the changes that allowed us to work with "virtual" tuples instead of
+ materializing intermediate tuple values everywhere. The earlier
+ code looks quite similar, but it doesn't suffer the problem because
+ the data gets copied into another context as a result of having to
+ materialize ExecProject's output tuple.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/executor/nodeLockRows.c, fix oversight in new
+ EvalPlanQual logic: the second loop over the ExecRowMark list in
+ ExecLockRows() forgot to allow for the possibility that some of the
+ rowmarks are for child tables that aren't relevant to the current
+ row. Per report from Kenichiro Tanaka.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml, work around a documentation
+ toolchain problem by replacing the "AIX-fixlevels" table with a
+ <variablelist> carrying the same information. Previously the 9.0
+ documentation was failing to build as a US-size PDF file. It's
+ quite obscure what the real problem is or why this avoids it, but we
+ need a hack now so we can build docs for beta4. In passing do a bit
+ of editing in the AIX installation docs, in particular remove a
+ long-obsolete claim that the regression tests are likely to fail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/tablecmds.c, fix another longstanding
+ problem in copy_relation_data: it was blithely assuming that a local
+ char[] array would be aligned on at least a word boundary. There
+ are architectures on which that is pretty much guaranteed to NOT be
+ the case ... and those arches also don't like non-aligned memory
+ accesses, meaning that log_newpage() would crash if it ever got
+ invoked. Even on Intel-ish machines there's a potential for a large
+ performance penalty from doing I/O to an inadequately aligned
+ buffer. So palloc it instead. Backpatch to 8.0 --- 7.4 doesn't
+ have this code.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/include/catalog/pg_proc.h, clean up some
+ inconsistencies in the volatility marking of various I/O related
+ functions. Per today's discussion, we will henceforth assume that
+ datatype I/O functions are either stable or immutable, never
+ volatile. (This implies in particular that domain CHECK constraint
+ expressions shouldn't be volatile, since domain_in executes them.)
+ In turn, functions that execute the I/O functions of arbitrary
+ datatypes should always be labeled stable. This affects the
+ labeling of array_to_string, which was unsafely marked immutable,
+ and record_in, record_out, record_recv, record_send, domain_in,
+ domain_recv, which were over-conservatively marked volatile. The
+ array I/O functions were already marked stable, which is correct per
+ this policy but would have been wrong if we maintained domain_in as
+ volatile. Back-patch to 9.0, along with an earlier fix to correctly
+ mark cash_in and cash_out as stable not immutable (since they depend
+ on lc_monetary). No catversion bump --- the implications of this
+ are not currently severe enough to justify a forced initdb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/release-9.0.sgml, update release notes for 9.0
+ beta 4. Back-patch some changes that were made only in HEAD.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Improved version of patch to protect pg_get_expr() against misuse:
+ look through join alias Vars to avoid breaking join queries, and
+ move the test to someplace where it will catch more possible ways of
+ calling a function. We still ought to throw away the whole thing in
+ favor of a data-type-based solution, but that's not feasible in the
+ back branches. This needs to be back-patched further than 9.0, but
+ I don't have time to do so today. Committing now so that the fix
+ gets into 9.0beta4.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Rewrite the key-combination logic in GIN's keyGetItem() and
+ scanGetItem() routines to make them behave better in the presence of
+ "lossy" index pointers. The previous coding was outright incorrect
+ for some cases, as recently reported by Artur Dabrowski: scanGetItem
+ would fail to return index entries in cases where one index key had
+ multiple exact pointers on the same page as another key had a lossy
+ pointer. Also, keyGetItem was extremely inefficient for cases where
+ a single index key generates multiple "entry" streams, such as an @@
+ operator with a multiple-clause tsquery. The presence of a lossy
+ page pointer in any one stream defeated its ability to use the
+ opclass consistentFn, resulting in probing many heap pages that
+ didn't really need to be visited. In Artur's example case, a query
+ like WHERE tsvector @@ to_tsquery('a & b') was about 50X slower than
+ the theoretically equivalent WHERE tsvector @@ to_tsquery('a') AND
+ tsvector @@ to_tsquery('b') The way that I chose to fix this was to
+ have GIN call the consistentFn twice with both TRUE and FALSE values
+ for the in-doubt entry stream, returning a hit if either call
+ produces TRUE, but not if they both return FALSE. The code handles
+ this for the case of a single in-doubt entry stream, but punts
+ (falling back to the stupid behavior) if there's more than one lossy
+ reference to the same page. The idea could be scaled up to deal
+ with multiple lossy references, but I think that would probably be
+ wasted complexity. At least to judge by Artur's example, such cases
+ don't occur often enough to be worth trying to optimize. Back-patch
+ to 8.4. 8.3 did not have lossy GIN index pointers, so not subject
+ to these problems.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- In pgsql/src/backend/tsearch/ts_selfuncs.c, tweak tsmatchsel() so
+ that it examines the structure of the tsquery whenever possible (ie,
+ whenever the tsquery is a constant), even when no statistics are
+ available for the tsvector. For example, foo @@ 'a & b'::tsquery
+ can be expected to be more selective than foo @@ 'a'::tsquery,
+ whether or not we know anything about foo. We use
+ DEFAULT_TS_MATCH_SEL as the assumed selectivity of individual query
+ terms when no stats are available, then combine the terms according
+ to the query's AND/OR structure as usual. Per experimentation with
+ Artur Dabrowski's example. (The fact that there are no stats
+ available in that example is a problem in itself, but nonetheless
+ tsmatchsel should be smarter about the case.) Back-patch to 8.4 to
+ keep all versions of tsmatchsel() in sync.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Simon Riggs committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Add explicit regression tests for ALTER TABLE lock levels. Use this
+ to catch a couple of lock level assignments that slipped through
+ manual testing, per Peter Eisentraut.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Rename asyncCommitLSN to asyncXactLSN to reflect changed role in
+ 9.0. Transaction aborts now record their LSN to avoid corner case
+ behaviour in Streaming Replication/Hot Standby, hence change of name
+ of variables and functions. As pointed out by Fujii Masao.
+ Cosmetic changes only.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marc Fournier committed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Tag for beta4.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Rejected Patches (for now)</h2>
+<p>
+No one was disappointed this week :-)
+</p>
+
+<h2>Pending Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Robert Haas sent in a patch to add ssl_version() and ssl_cipher() to
+contrib/sslinfo.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei sent in two more patches implementing SECURITY LABEL.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Boxuan Zhai sent in two more revisions of the WIP patch for MERGE.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alexander Korotkov sent in two more revisions of the patch to make
+levenshtein multibyte-aware in contrib/fuzzystrmatch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fujii Masao sent in another revision of the patch to do synchronous
+replication.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Simon Riggs sent in another patch to reduce the needed locking for
+ALTER TABLE.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Florian Pflug sent in another revision of the patch to show individual
+statement latencies in pgbench output.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Erik Rijkers sent in a patch to fix an oversight in the variadic
+function docs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas sent in another revision of the patch to reduce the
+on-disk size of NUMERICs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another WIP patch to add a lock_timeout
+GUC.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henk Enting sent in a patch to help with the intersection of CHECK
+constraints and multiple inheritance.
+
+</p>
+
projects / pgweb-old.git / commitdiff