== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 15 2012 ==

From: David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org>
To: PostgreSQL Announce <pgsql-announce(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: == PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 15 2012 ==
Date: 2012-07-16 05:04:04
Message-ID: 20120716050404.GD11243@fetter.org
Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox | Resend email
Thread:
Lists: pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 15 2012 ==

In anticipation of possible future misuse of a very old and now
expired domain for the PostgreSQL YUM repository, please make sure to
change mentions of that domain to the current ones.
http://yum.postgresql.org/repopackages.php

The new, correct GPG key for these is:
https://www.postgresql.org/download/keys/RPM-GPG-KEY-PGDG

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Barman 1.0.0, an administration tool for disaster recovery of
PostgreSQL servers written in Python, is now available under the
GPLv3.
http://www.pgbarman.org/

Bucardo 4.5.0, a Postgres multi-master replication system, released.
http://bucardo.org/wiki/Bucardo

Npgsql2 2.0.12 beta4, a .NET connector for PostgreSQL, released.
http://www.npgsql.org

PGXN Client 1.1.0 released.
http://pgxnclient.projects.postgresql.org/

Version 1.26.0 of tail_n_mail, a Postgres log watcher program, released:
http://bucardo.org/wiki/Tail_n_mail

== PostgreSQL Jobs for July ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2012-07/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

The CfP for Postgres Open 2012 September 17-19 in Chicago is open.
Submissions are due by 11:59pm, June 26, 2012.
http://postgresopen.org/2012/speaker/

PostgreSQL Session will be held on October 4th, 2012, in Paris,
France. More information at:
http://www.postgresql-sessions.org/en/4/

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012 will be in Prague, Czech Republic
on October 23-26. The call for papers is open.
http://2012.pgconf.eu/

PostgreSQL Day Argentina 2012 will be held on November 13th in Bernal,
Buenos Aires, at the National University of Quilmes. It will cover
topics for PostgreSQL users, developers and contributors, as well as
decision and policy makers. For more information about the
conference, please see the website at
http://www.pgday.com.ar/quilmes2012?lang=en

== 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)

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane pushed:

- Refactor pattern_fixed_prefix() to avoid dealing in incomplete
patterns. Previously, pattern_fixed_prefix() was defined to return
whatever fixed prefix it could extract from the pattern, plus the
"rest" of the pattern. That definition was sensible for LIKE
patterns, but not so much for regexes, where reconstituting a valid
pattern minus the prefix could be quite tricky (certainly the
existing code wasn't doing that correctly). Since the only thing
that callers ever did with the "rest" of the pattern was to pass it
to like_selectivity() or regex_selectivity(), let's cut out the
middle-man and just have pattern_fixed_prefix's subroutines do this
directly. Then pattern_fixed_prefix can return a simple selectivity
number, and the question of how to cope with partial patterns is
removed from its API specification. While at it, adjust the API
spec so that callers who don't actually care about the pattern's
selectivity (which is a lot of them) can pass NULL for the
selectivity pointer to skip doing the work of computing a
selectivity estimate. This patch is only an API refactoring that
doesn't actually change any processing, other than allowing a little
bit of useless work to be skipped. However, it's necessary
infrastructure for my upcoming fix to regex prefix extraction,
because after that change there won't be any simple way to identify
the "rest" of the regex, not even to the low level of fidelity
needed by regex_selectivity. We can cope with that if
regex_fixed_prefix and regex_selectivity communicate directly, but
not if we have to work within the old API. Hence, back-patch to all
active branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/00dac6000d422033c3e8d191f01ee0e6525794c2

- Re-implement extraction of fixed prefixes from regular expressions.
To generate btree-indexable conditions from regex WHERE conditions
(such as WHERE indexed_col ~ '^foo'), we need to be able to identify
any fixed prefix that a regex might have; that is, find any string
that must be a prefix of all strings satisfying the regex. We used
to do that with entirely ad-hoc code that looked at the source text
of the regex. It didn't know very much about regex syntax, which
mostly meant that it would fail to identify some optimizable cases;
but Viktor Rosenfeld reported that it would produce actively wrong
answers for quantified parenthesized subexpressions, such as
'^(foo)?bar'. Rather than trying to extend the ad-hoc code to cover
this, let's get rid of it altogether in favor of identifying
prefixes by examining the compiled form of a regex. To do this,
I've added a new entry point "pg_regprefix" to the regex library;
hopefully it is defined in a sufficiently general fashion that it
can remain in the library when/if that code gets split out as a
standalone project. Since this bug has been there for a very long
time, this fix needs to get back-patched. However it depends on
some other recent commits (particularly the addition of
wchar-to-database-encoding conversion), so I'll commit this
separately and then go to work on back-porting the necessary fixes.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/628cbb50ba80c83917b07a7609ddec12cda172d0

- Fix ASCII case in pg_wchar2mule_with_len. Also some cosmetic
improvements for wchar-to-mblen patch.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/60e9c224a197aa37abb1aa3aefa3aad42da61f7f

- Back-patch addition of pg_wchar-to-multibyte conversion
functionality. Back-patch of commits
72dd6291f216440f6bb61a8733729a37c7e3b2d2,
f6a05fd973a102f7e66c491d3f854864b8d24844, and
60e9c224a197aa37abb1aa3aefa3aad42da61f7f. This is needed to support
fixing the regex prefix extraction bug in back branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f12960d8c9ce454a37c2082549b7766ce36627d2

- Back-patch fix for extraction of fixed prefixes from regular
expressions. Back-patch of commits
628cbb50ba80c83917b07a7609ddec12cda172d0 and
c6aae3042be5249e672b731ebeb21875b5343010. This has been broken
since 7.3, so back-patch to all supported branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/18c8dc32ce6759a8837f01e3dd0036cd19ee8683

- Fix bogus macro definition. Per buildfarm complaints.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/01215d61a7b162ca441c5bc0312550f2d88fddb2

- Add array_remove() and array_replace() functions. These functions
support removing or replacing array element value(s) matching a
given search value. Although intended mainly to support a future
array-foreign-key feature, they seem useful in their own right.
Marco Nenciarini and Gabriele Bartolini, reviewed by Alex Hunsaker
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/84a42560c82aeb9f3690d93a0d03cf544f53b89b

- Fix walsender processes to establish a SIGALRM handler. Walsenders
must have working SIGALRM handling during InitPostgres, but they set
the handler to SIG_IGN so that nothing would happen if a timeout was
reached. This could result in two failure modes: 1. If a walsender
participated in a deadlock during its authentication transaction,
and was the last to wait in the deadly embrace, the deadlock would
not get cleared automatically. This would require somebody to be
trying to take out AccessExclusiveLock on multiple system catalogs,
so it's not very probable. 2. If a client failed to respond to a
walsender's authentication challenge, the intended disconnect after
AuthenticationTimeout wouldn't happen, and the walsender would wait
indefinitely for the client. For the moment, fix in back branches
only, since this is fixed in a different way in the
timeout-infrastructure patch that's awaiting application to HEAD.
If we choose not to apply that, then we'll need to do this in HEAD
as well.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0bf8eb2a15875bc3f4d5638da73cb34ee9ca868e

- Skip text->binary conversion of unnecessary columns in
contrib/file_fdw. When reading from a text- or CSV-format file in
file_fdw, the datatype input routines can consume a significant
fraction of the runtime. Often, the query does not need all the
columns, so we can get a useful speed boost by skipping I/O
conversion for unnecessary columns. To support this, add a
"convert_selectively" option to the core COPY code. This is
undocumented and not accessible from SQL (for now, anyway). Etsuro
Fujita, reviewed by KaiGai Kohei
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a36088bcfae85eeeb55e85c3f06c61cb2f0621c6

- Cosmetic cleanup of ginInsertValue(). Make it clearer that the
passed stack mustn't be empty, and that we are not supposed to fall
off the end of the stack in the main loop. Tighten the loop that
extracts the root block number, too. Markus Wanner and Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1a9405d26537c6d95269bf48f5ea80fbf7967260

- Add fsync capability to initdb, and use sync_file_range() if
available. Historically we have not worried about fsync'ing
anything during initdb (in fact, initdb intentionally passes -F to
each backend launch to prevent it from fsync'ing). But with
filesystems getting more aggressive about caching data, that's not
such a good plan anymore. Make initdb do a pass over the finished
data directory tree to fsync everything. For testing purposes, the
-N/--nosync flag can be used to restore the old behavior. Also,
testing shows that on Linux, sync_file_range() is much faster than
posix_fadvise() for hinting to the kernel that an fsync is coming,
apparently because the latter blocks on a rather small request queue
while the former doesn't. So use this function if available in
initdb, and also in the backend's pg_flush_data() (where it
currently will affect only the speed of CREATE DATABASE's cloning
step). We will later make pg_regress invoke initdb with the
--nosync flag to avoid slowing down cases such as "make check" in
contrib. But let's not do so until we've shaken out any portability
issues in this patch. Jeff Davis, reviewed by Andres Freund
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b966dd6c4228d696b291c1cdcb5ab8c8475fefa8

- Prevent corner-case core dump in rfree(). rfree() failed to cope
with the case that pg_regcomp() had initialized the regex_t struct
but then failed to allocate any memory for re->re_guts (ie, the
first malloc call in pg_regcomp() failed). It would try to touch
the guts struct anyway, and thus dump core. This is a sufficiently
narrow corner case that it's not surprising it's never been seen in
the field; but still a bug is a bug, so patch all active branches.
Noted while investigating whether we need to call pg_regfree after a
failure return from pg_regcomp. Other than this bug, it turns out
we don't, so adjust comments appropriately.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/54fd196ffc6432b62fe075e564f457db64fb288c

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- perltidy adjustments to new file
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/fc4a8a6d748ee213f49deb2d090febbdae3121c7

- plperl: Skip setting UTF8 flag when in SQL_ASCII encoding. When in
SQL_ASCII encoding, strings passed around are not necessarily
UTF8-safe. We had already fixed this in some places, but it looks
like we missed some. I had to backpatch Peter Eisentraut's a8b92b60
to 9.1 in order for this patch to cherry-pick more cleanly. Patch
from Alex Hunsaker, tweaked by Kyotaro HORIGUCHI and myself. Some
desultory cleanup and comment addition by me, during patch review.
Per bug report from Christoph Berg in
20120209102116(dot)GA14429(at)msgid(dot)df7cb(dot)de
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/379607c9e83dcfaccf6ccda47615e7f90c3c0b0c

Tatsuo Ishii pushed:

- Add comments about additional mule-internal charsets from emacs's
source code(lisp/international/mule-conf.el). These charsets have
not been supported up to now anyway, so this is just for adding
commentary. Also add mention that we follow emacs's implementation,
not xemacs's.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1c7a7faa5b74042dc3b3726296a17ff913dcd84c

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Document that Log-Shipping Standby Servers cannot be upgraded by
pg_upgrade. Backpatch to 9.2.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f9951252dbd86391ab3a9bcba99f4e9f13e311a6

- Remove 'x =- 1' check for pgindent, not needed, per report from
Andrew Dunstan.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/76720bdf1a817d999b9a8c3478a136793e5abec6

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Fix memory and file descriptor leaks in pg_receivexlog/pg_basebackup.
When the internal loop mode was added, freeing memory and closing
filedescriptors before returning became important, and a few cases
in the code missed that. Fujii Masao
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/058a050ec769fb1431220d822f00b0a442293514

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Avoid extra newlines in XML mapping in table forest mode. Found by
P. Broennimann
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a84bf4922e566f047536112a2aaf488559ee62dd

- Add link to PEP 394 regarding python2 vs python3 naming
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8e708e5e36d8a0295780a9aa1d99f01f5acb6182

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Print the name of the WAL file containing latest REDO ptr in
pg_controldata. This makes it easier to determine how far back you
need to keep archived WAL files, to restore from a backup. Fujii
Masao
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6c349a565abf1e5ddf68971c62afff14947bcfa2

- Don't initialize TLI variable to -1, as TimeLineID is unsigned.
This was causing a compiler warning with Solaris compiler. Use 0
instead. The variable is initialized just for the sake of tidyness
and/or debugging, it's not used for anything before setting it to a
real value. Per report and suggestion from Peter Eisentraut.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2686da9db2aec19763ff2dfe5c034da8fb5eb382

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Alexander Korotkov sent in another revision of the patch to use a 2-D
map for range indexing.

Dimitri Fontaine sent in three more revisions of the patch to add
event triggers.

Honza Horak sent in another revision of the patch to allow listening
on more than one UNIX domain socket.

Alexander Korotkov sent in three more revisions of a patch to add
2-D mapping and quad-tree SP-GiST indexing.

Etsuro Fujita sent in another revision of the patch to add a pgsql_fdw
to contrib.

Ryan Kelly sent in another revision of the patch to allow breaking out
of hung connection attempts.

Peter Eisentraut sent in another revision of the elog/ereport noreturn
decoration patch.

Jan Urbanski sent in a patch which fixes encoding translation between
PostgreSQL and PL/PythonU encoding always to encode Python unicode
objects using UTF-8 and then use Postgres's internal functions to
produce bytes in the server encoding.

Jeff Janes sent in a patch to fix an issue where TRUNCATE was taking
more time than the equivalent DELETE.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to get rid of pre-assignment of index names
in CREATE TABLE LIKE, which can cause a race condition in pg_catalog.

KaiGai Kohei sent in another revision of the patch to implement
row-level access control.

Browse pgsql-announce by date

  From Date Subject
Next Message Marko Kreen 2012-07-19 13:04:30 SkyTools 3.1
Previous Message Devrim GÜNDÜZ 2012-07-12 14:25:32 PostgreSQL RPM Repository: Security announcement