== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 30 2006 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 30 2006 ==

Darcy Buskermolen has started work at Commandprompt.  Kudos to both.

== Applied Patches ==

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Zdenek Kotala's patch to the sample postgresql.conf which marks
  entries that need a server restart to take effect.

- Robert Lor's Dtrace support, with some initial dtrace probes.

- A change in effective_cache size to integer for integration with the
  upcoming units feature.

- His change that modified the server to return an empty string from
  SHOW etc. rather than "unset" if a GUC variable is not set.

Tom Lane committed:

- Joachim Wieland's patch that replaces the "australian_timezones" GUC
  setting with a more general "timezone_abbreviations" setting which
  uses lists of timezone abbreviations in configuration files that a DBA
  can alter.

- Junji Teramoto that modifies btree to delete known-dead index
  entries without an actual VACUUM.

- Sergey Koposov's Summer of Code project, Multiple Argument
  Aggregates, per SQL:2003.  Tom only committed the FLOAT8 versions,
  deeming the NUMERIC ones too slow.

- A change he made to add a fudge factor to
  genericcostestimate() to prevent the planner from thinking that
  indexes of different sizes are equally attractive.

- A change he made that reorganised the PostmasterMain function.

- Yet Another Patch From Tom (YAPFT): Modify btree to delete
  known-dead index entries without an actual VACUUM.  When we are
  about to split an index page to do an insertion, first look to see if
  any entries marked LP_DELETE exist on the page, and if so remove them
  to try to make enough space for the desired insert.  This should
  reduce index bloat in heavily-updated tables, although of course you
  still need VACUUM eventually to clean up the heap.

Tatsuo Ishii committed:

- New features for pg_bench contributed by Tomoaki Sato, including
  predefined variable "tps", a -D option for setting variables on the
  command line, and extended \set to allow arithmetic calculations.
  It also replaces the delta_value range of (0,10000) with the
  slightly more realistic (-5000,5000) range.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Dhanaraj M's patch which changes LIMIT/OFFSET to use int8, which
  allows for row sets larger than 2 billion.

- Joshua Reich's patches to contrib/cube which update its functions to
  V1 calling convention and new functionality.

- Albe Laurenz's patch to allow LDAP lookups from pg_service.conf.

- William Zhang's workaround for a bug in strxfrm() under Visual C++
  2005.  See URL below for details.
  http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=99694

- His changes which made the WIN32 wait() return value macros be
  accurate, particularly because they are used for testing the return
  value from system(). (WIN32 doesn't overlay the return code with
  other failure conditions like Unix does, so they are just simple
  macros).

- His fixes to the regression checks to properly handle diff failures
  on Win32 using the new macros.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- His fix to prevent multiplexing Windows kernel event objects we
  listen for across various sockets - should fix the occasional stats
  test regression failures we see.

Alvaro Herrera comitted:

- A  patch orginally from Hannu Krosing, then rewritten by Tom Lane
  and later updated by Alvaro himself to modify snapshot definition so
  that lazy vacuums are ignored by other vacuums.  This allows an
  OLTP-like system with big tables to continue regular vacuuming on
  small-but-frequently-updated tables while the big tables are being
  vacuumed.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Joe Conway submitted new changes to the INSERT ... VALUES (...),
(...), ... functionality.

Bernd Helmle sent in the latest incarnation of his patch that allows
people to create updateable VIEWs per the SQL:2003 spec.  Yay!

Peter Eisentraut made it possible to use units where appropriate in
postgresql.conf and to display the appropriate units when SHOWing
them.

Joe Conway posted Kai Londerberg's patch that enables asynchronous
query execution in dblink.

Korry Douglas submitted a patch that adds support for loadable
instrumentation plugins for procedural languages and plugin support
for the PL/PgSQL language handler.

Chris Mair sent in a patch that lets you choose to use cursors for
large result sets in psql.

Greg Sabino Mullane sent in a patch that adds a new variable
server_version_num to pg_settings which is easy to compare
numerically.

Tzahi Fadida sent in his full disjunction patch from Summer of Code in
for inclusion in contrib.

Pavel Stehule sent around a patch to fix a misfeature of OUT
parameters in general and PL/Perl's in particular.

David Fetter sent in a patch which allows psql to report errors in
files specified with -f which are longer than 2^32 lines.

ITAGAKI Takahiro submitted a patch which collects statistics for
light-weight lock acquisitions.

Simon Riggs posted a draft patch implementing an SQL function to allow
DBAs to maually trigger an XLOG switch.

Joachim Wieland reworked an idea of Zdenek Kotala's and submitted a
patch implementing a new regression test for SET/SET LOCAL within
transactions and sub transactions.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Devrim Gunduz has pushed postgresql_autodoc, psycopg2, pgpool and
phpPgAdmin into Fedora Core Extras.

MicroOLAP Database Designer for PostgreSQL ver.1.1.1 released.
http://www.microolap.com/

MicroOLAP PostgresDAC 2.3.4 released.
http://microolap.com/products/connectivity/postgresdac/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for July ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2006-07/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Everything this week was global.

== 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 and
Dave Page.