== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 01 2012 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 01 2012 ==

Happy New Year from the PostgreSQL Weekly News!

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

AnyDAC for Delphi v 5.0.5 released.
http://www.da-soft.com/anydac/anydac-for-delphi-v-5.0.5.2073-released.html

psqlODBC 09.01.0100 released.
http://psqlodbc.projects.postgresql.org/release.html

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The fifth annual "Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day" conference,
organized by CSPUG (Czech and Slovak PostgreSQL Users Group), will be
held on February 9, 2012 in Prague. The Call for Papers is open.
Please send proposals including contact information, topic, and
expected length of session to info AT p2d2 DOT cz.

The Call for Papers for is open for FLOSS UK, which will be held in
Edinburgh from the 20th to the 22nd March 2012. The deadline for
proposals is the 18th November 2011 and selected speakers will be
notified by the 25th November 2011. Proposals should be submitted to
postgresql2012 AT flossuk DOT org. More information at:
http://www.flossuk.org/Events/Spring2012

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://planet.postgresql.org/

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

Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
Please send English language ones to david(at)fetter(dot)org, German language
to pwn(at)pgug(dot)de, Italian language to pwn(at)itpug(dot)org(dot) Spanish language
to pwn(at)arpug(dot)com(dot)ar(dot)

== Reviews ==

== Applied Patches ==

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- Minor enhancements to MVCC chapter. Author: Erik Rijkers
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7db101c36ef7c998cfcf3f4a324c58c23f88927c

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Sort file list when creating gettext-files. That way, the created
.pot file is more deterministic and not dependent on the order in
which the files are found.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9099d84374eb71860dc881c7a158f8f1262b5734

- Sort compendium lists for msgmerge. That way, the result of a
msgmerge is more deterministic and not dependent on the order in
which the files are found.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/54d792f3e5a31d993aeee420e98adab0a0419e43

- Run "make all" as a prerequisite of "make check". This is the
standard behavior but was forgotten in some places.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c317a3ac167d36244e8dd5add679b4e9ff36ea16

- Remove support for on_exit(). All supported platforms support the
C89 standard function atexit() (SunOS 4 probably being the last one
not to), and supporting both makes the code clumsy.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d383c23f6fbc4a79dae66483cf4f7051121008ad

- Standardize treatment of strcmp() return value. Always compare the
return value to 0, don't use cute tricks like if (!strcmp(...)).
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/037a82704ce644e2b1c3946345b54444caddb1a5

- Indicate default format in --help output of pg_dump and
pg_basebackup
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/66843265eed40d181066f408f0d35e7ac639eb96

- pg_dump: Dump user mappings ordered by user name This is to get a
deterministic dump order independent of the order in which the user
mappings were created.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a671d9409bfeac9ec5a622d74519fd1142a47274

- PL/Python: Add argument names to function declarations. For easier
source reading
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f9de1e9a96a8e63bd4d3b9e615abd9cf6d8de703

Tom Lane pushed:

- Adjust SP-GiST regression tests to be less locale-sensitive. The
original test cases gave varying results depending on whether the
locale sorts digits before or after letters. Since that's not
really what we wish to test here, adjust the test data to not
contain any strings beginning with digits. Per report from Pavel
Stehule.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/15ba590792045a6bbde538c407a34d83f46b496f

- Revert "Remove troublesome Asserts in cost_mergejoin()." This
reverts commit ff68b256a533b398e3420750f34d161aeee4e099. The recent
change to use -fexcess-precision=standard should make those Asserts
safe, and does fix a test case that formerly crashed for me, so I
think there's no need to have a cross-version difference in the code
here.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2ae2e9c00798685cd75ea0cc5120466bf2027b90

- Use mutex hint bit in PPC LWARX instructions, where possible. The
hint bit makes for a small but measurable performance improvement in
access to contended spinlocks. On the other hand, some PPC chips
give an illegal-instruction failure. There doesn't seem to be a
completely bulletproof way to tell whether the hint bit will cause
an illegal-instruction failure other than by trying it; but most if
not all 64-bit PPC machines should accept it, so follow the Linux
kernel's lead and assume it's okay to use it in 64-bit builds. Of
course we must also check whether the assembler accepts the command,
since even with a recent CPU the toolchain could be old. Patch by
Manabu Ori, significantly modified by me.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5cfa8dd3007d7e953c6a03b0fa2215d97c581b0c

- Use 4-byte slock_t on both PPC and PPC64. Previously we defined
slock_t as 8 bytes on PPC64, but the TAS assembly code uses
word-wide operations regardless, so that the second word was just
wasted space. There doesn't appear to be any performance benefit in
adding the second word, so get rid of it to simplify the code.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8496c6cd77e2f5f105fc47315680174157d66647

- Use LWSYNC in place of SYNC/ISYNC in PPC spinlocks, where possible.
This is allegedly a win, at least on some PPC implementations,
according to the PPC ISA documents. However, as with LWARX hints,
some PPC platforms give an illegal-instruction failure. Use the
same trick as before of assuming that PPC64 platforms will accept
it; we might need to refine that based on experience, but there are
other projects doing likewise according to google. I did not add an
assembler compatibility test because LWSYNC has been around much
longer than hint bits, and it seems unlikely that any toolchains
currently in use don't recognize it.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/631beeac3598a73dee2c2afa38fa2e734148031b

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Modify tools/pgtest to run the 'make' command from a variable, and
default to 'make' rather than 'gmake' for the binary name.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/dca0a54717a8372cc88b0c187965a1add19ec7e3

- Fix Perl copyright script to skip .git subdirectory; running it on
those files corrupts the index.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9f60880207c6c7d00a2e4e4d904ef720de58f45b

- Don't use tabs in Perl scripts, for consistency.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6ba139dc5a8a5cce42f0508c14a8b42f4fb6b1cc

- Update copyright notices for year 2012.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e126958c2efdfc2d60b978d1fc7a780ff647e8ad

- Skip 'ico' and 'bin' extensions in copyright changes.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f4cd747a4d760600ec9791a95957e993c320ba63

- Revert binary change in copyright year adjustment.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1358801b7a7afed840b780d7c52e20921a483ed1

- Skip any .git directory for copyright changes, not just top-level
.git directories. Per suggestion from Andrew Dunstan.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bed762c81e6a7f62695d6c8acb78f15c8e85342e

- Update copyright git skip comment.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6b6137e4efebcd767a349099b3e048fbc7755cca

Simon Riggs pushed:

- Send new protocol keepalive messages to standby servers. Allows
streaming replication users to calculate transfer latency and apply
delay via internal functions. No external functions yet.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/64233902d22ba42846397cb7551894217522fad4

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Simon Riggs sent in two more revisions of the patch to add page checksums.

Alexander Björnhagen sent in two more revisions of the patch to tune
synchronous replication.

Brar Piening sent in two more revisions of the patches to support VS
2010.

Andrew Dunstan sent in another revision of the patch to make
pretty-printing view definitions actually print them in a pretty way.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to fix an infelicity in CREATE TABLE
... LIKE.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to make the dumping of FOREIGN
... OPTIONS more legible.

Simon Riggs sent in another revision of the patch to pause at the end
of recovery.

Peter Geoghegan sent in another revision of the fast path sorting
patch, along with some benchmarks demonstrating its usefulness.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to implement DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY.

Noah Misch sent in a patch to add protransform functions to the length
coercions for numeric, varbit, timestamp, timestamptz, time, timetz
and interval. This prevents whole-table rewrites in some ALTER
TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... TYPE ... statements involving the
aforementioned types.

Noah Misch sent in another revision of the patch to collect frequency
statistics for arrays.

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in another revision of the patch to fix ECPG
cursor readahead.

Pavel Stehule sent in another revision of the CHECK FUNCTION patch.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a WIP patch intended to inform the
information schema about default privileges.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a WIP patch to relax the requirement that
PL/pgsql trigger functions return a value when called in AFTER
triggers.

Peter Eisentraut sent in a patch to fix the sorting of operators in
pg_dump.