== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 15 2007 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 15 2007 ==

Lots of lively discussions going on in this (we hope) brief
post-feature-freeze period.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PgBouncer 1.0.6 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgbouncer/

PostgreSQL PHP Generator released.
http://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/postgresql/phpgenerator/

Skytools 2.1.3 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/skytools/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for April ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-04/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Get on the Road to PgDay!
http://www.pgday.it/en/node/95

Registration is open for PGCon 2007
http://www.pgcon.org/2007/registration.php

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter

To get your submission into the upcoming issue, make sure it arrives
at david(at)fetter(dot)org or in German at pwn(at)pgug(dot)de by Sunday at 3:00pm
Pacific Time.

== Applied Patches ==

Tatsuo Ishii committed:

- Make JOHAB a client-only encoding per discussions in pgsql-hackers
"Server-side support of all encodings" around 2007/3/26. initdb
required.

- Fix description how to create conversion function.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- Add --with-libxslt configure option.

- Revert change to build xml2 until a better fix is found

- Enable building contrib/xml2 if configured using --with-libxml. If
this breaks things due to missing libxslt, then I'll have to revert
it, but let's see if it breaks the buildfarm.

Neil Conway committed:

- Minor fixes for the EXPLAIN reference page. Mention the fact that
EXPLAIN ANALYZE can sometimes be significantly slower than running
the same query normally, and make some minor markup improvements.

- Fixes for RESET SESSION patch, per Alvaro. Fix a typo in the RESET
ref page (sorry, my fault!), and simplify the coding of
ResetTempTableNamespace().

- RESET SESSION, plus related new DDL commands. Patch from Marko
Kreen, reviewed by Neil Conway. This patch adds the following DDL
command variants: RESET SESSION, RESET TEMP, RESET PLANS, CLOSE ALL,
and DEALLOCATE ALL. RESET SESSION is intended for use by connection
pool software and the like, in order to reset a client session to
something close to its initial state. Note that while most of these
command variants can be executed inside a transaction block (but are
not transaction-aware!), RESET SESSION cannot. While this is
inconsistent, it is intended to catch programmer mistakes: RESET
SESSION in an open transaction block is probably unintended.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- ITAGAKI Takahiro's patch to allow \timing in psql to have a better
resolution than ~15ms on Windows.

- ITAGAKI Takahiro's patch to Add O_DIRECT support on Windows.

- Install debugger symbols (in their own directory)

- Enable IPV6 when building with MSVC.

- Add cancel handlers so it's possible to Ctrl-C clusterdb, reindexdb
and vacuumdb. ITAGAKI Takahiro, with minor fixes from me.

Tom Lane committed:

- Avoid running build_index_pathkeys() in situations where there
cannot possibly be any useful pathkeys --- to wit, queries with
neither any join clauses nor any ORDER BY request. It's nearly free
to check for this case and it saves a useful fraction of the
planning time for simple queries.

- Rearrange mdsync() looping logic to avoid the problem that a
sufficiently fast flow of new fsync requests can prevent mdsync()
from ever completing. This was an unforeseen consequence of a patch
added in Mar 2006 to prevent the fsync request queue from
overflowing. Problem identified by Heikki Linnakangas and
independently by ITAGAKI Takahiro; fix based on ideas from
Takahiro-san, Heikki, and Tom. Back-patch as far as 8.1 because a
previous back-patch introduced the problem into 8.1 ...

- Code review for btree page split WAL reduction patch. Make it
actually work (original code *always* created a full-page image for
the left page, thus leaving the intended savings unrealized), avoid
risk of not having enough room on the page during xlog restore,
squeeze out another couple bytes in the xlog record, clean up
neglected comments.

- Minor tweaking of index special-space definitions so that the
various index types can be reliably distinguished by examining the
special space on an index page. Per my earlier proposal, plus the
realization that there's no need for btree's vacuum cycle ID to
cycle through every possible 16-bit value. Restricting its range a
little costs nearly nothing and eliminates the possibility of
collisions. Memo to self: remember to make bitmap indexes play
along with this scheme, assuming that patch ever gets accepted.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Update TODO: "Consider reducing on-disk varlena length from four
bytes to two because a heap row cannot be more than 64k in length."

- Update Win32 FAQ HTML version to match corrected text version.

- Mark TODO as done "Add RESET SESSION command to reset all session
state."

- Update TODO text, per Gregory Stark: "Allow single-byte header
storage for array elements."

- Add to TODO: "Allow single-byte header storage for arrays."

- Add to TODO: "Have WITH CONSTRAINTS also create constraint indexes."

- Add URL for TODO: "Simplify ability to create partitioned tables."

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Fix spelling: SYMETRIC -> SYMMETRIC in 8.1 docs.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Nikolay Samokhvalov sent in a new revision of his patch to implement
xpath_array with namespaces.

Tom Lane sent in a patch intended to fix the mdsync never-ending loop
problem.

Alvaro Herrera sent in version 6 of his autovacuum multiworkers patch.

Pavan Deolasee sent in a new version of his CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY
patch.

Nikhils sent in a patch to allow UPDATE to use subselects.

Merlin Moncure sent in a patch to suppress psql timing output in quiet
mode.

Alvaro Herrera sent in version 9 of his autovacuum multiworkers patch.

Tom Lane sent in a patch intended to fix the choose_bitmap_and problem
reported by Steve Conley.