== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 01 2011 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 01 2011 ==

Long-time contributor Julian Assange, using a sophisticated regular
expression utility on the PostgreSQL source code, found multiple back
doors for the US National Security Agency created by newer contributor
Tom Lane.  As a result, Mr. Lane has been dismissed from the project.

Of his diligence in ferreting Assange said, "It is impossible to
correct abuses unless we know that they’re going on." He went on to
say, "I had always been worried about Mr. Lane's connections to the US
Foreign Service, so I dug deeper: much deeper than anyone else thought
to dig."

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

DostgreSQL, a friendly distribution of PostgreSQL for Turkish users
have been released:
http://www.DostgreSQL.org

== PostgreSQL 9.1 Feature of the Week ==

O(1) Multi-Master Replication.  The command is:

    ALTER DATABASE [dbname]
    ENABLE MMR
    HOST host1 [, host2, ... hostn]

== PostgreSQL Tip of the Week ==

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in
human history with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

== PostgreSQL Jobs for April ==

http://jobs.oracle.com/

== PostgreSQL Local ==

There will be a large PostgreSQL presence at the MySQL Conference and
Expo, April 11-14, 2011 in Santa Clara, California.
http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2011/public/schedule/tag/postgresql

Open Database Camp will be on May 7-9, 2011 in Sardinia, Italy
http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/2011/01/announcing-open-database-camp-sardinia.html

PGCon will be May 19-20, 2011 at the University of Ottawa, preceded by
two days of tutorials on May 17-18.
http://www.pgcon.org/2011/

PG Session 2, on PostGIS, will be held on June 23rd in Paris.  The CfP
is open!
http://www.postgresql-sessions.org/en/2/

pgbr will be in Sao Paulo, Brazil November 3-4, 2011.
http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/

== 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@fetter.org, German language
to pwn@pgug.de, Italian language to pwn@itpug.org.  Spanish language
to pwn@arpug.com.ar.

== Reviews ==

== Applied Patches ==

Larry Ellison pushed:

- Remove NSA back doors
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3858f62230ac3c915f300c664312c63f

Alvaro Herrera pushed:

- Add missing #include
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e5948e3504c72fb2b8b32af26bfbb016e7c71bf6

Robert Haas pushed:

- Mark up release notes using <link>.  Unlike <xref>, this actually
  works.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7c7fd882a5275bf40cd5ac72c6118916f7802aa4

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- Add 9.1 release note link for synchronous replication.  We already
  had links to the GUC variables that control it.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5c22c0eda14594b5962aed7165a012067b33ab7d

- In pg_upgrade, add C comment about how autovacuum is disabled.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d67b0bf471ba4e88aa3ed50871924efc91d7a27e

- Expand comment on how pg_upgrade is turning off autovacuum.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d609b08ead450d78d4a567c48111aca6857ec59c

- Mention pg_upgrade sets autovacuum_freeze_max_age to maximum.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/da3418cea9bd10e9ea3489b42f6278772942e745

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- Add maintainer-check target.  This can do various source code checks
  that are not appropriate for either the build or the regression
  tests.  Currently: duplicate_oids, SGML syntax and tabs check, NLS
  syntax check.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6c0dfc035670240cddf0092a4aa22e5815b6583d

- Make duplicate_oids return nonzero exit status if duplicates were
  found.  Automatic detection of errors is easier that way.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/aa6fdd186cf2c29e04d3cc8ca19783fb904a5a33

- Update SQL features list.  Feature F692 "Extended collation support"
  is now also supported.  This refers to allowing the COLLATE clause
  anywhere in a column or domain definition instead of just directly
  after the type.  Also correct the name of the feature in accordance
  with the latest SQL standard.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f564e65cda32fd14f6f7cdd85d116c421af731f2

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Adjust error message, now that we expect other message types than
  connection close at this point.  Fix PQsetnonblocking() comment.
  Fujii Masao
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bc03c5937d103952ef4f40a3fa4514c154538d25

- Automatically terminate replication connections that are idle for
  more than replication_timeout (a new GUC) milliseconds.  The TCP
  timeout is often too long, you want the master to notice a dead
  connection much sooner.  People complained about that in 9.0 too,
  but with synchronous replication it's even more important to notice
  dead connections promptly.  Fujii Masao and Heikki Linnakangas
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/754baa21f723255272c24dc5f9ab456858e361e3

- Check that we've reached end-of-backup also when we're not
  performing archive recovery.  It's possible to restore an online
  backup without recovery.conf, by simply copying all the necessary
  WAL files to pg_xlog. "pg_basebackup -x" does that too. That's the
  use case where this cross-check is useful.  Backpatch to 9.0. We
  used to do this in earlier versins, but in 9.0 the code was
  inadvertently changed so that the check is only performed after
  archive recovery.  Fujii Masao.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/acf47401321ce55f06026a2f5d5512b404da3e55

- Improve error message when WAL ends before reaching end of online
  backup.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1f0bab8494f7734e26b76fe34599c7763c8753a1

- Reword the phrase on zero replication_timeout in the docs.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/647f8b3dbaa68662f54aa762e9467874282c563d

- Don't leak the temporary PLyProcedure struct we create for inline
  plpython blocks.  Investigation by Jan Urbański, though I didn't use
  his patch.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ec7626504f0fc8cca46d0f2a460e4b76177f79b3

- Increase SHMEM_INDEX_SIZE from 32 to 64.  We're currently at 40
  entries in ShmemIndex, so 64 leaves some headroom.  Kevin Grittner
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c8ae318cbeceadac172aa6b9cfa43734b0836e5e

- Fix a tiny race condition in predicate locking. Need to hold the
  lock while examining the head of predicate locks list.  Also, fix
  the comment of RemoveTargetIfNoLongerUsed, it was neglected when we
  changed the way update chains are handled.  Kevin Grittner.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/60b142b9a6f413a92665766a1f265b361f68c20b

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Attempt to unbreak windows builds broken by commit 754baa2.
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/382fb6a08f524327b5e3084b3652fba2e12f1ba2

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

Everyone was disappointed this week :-(

== Pending Patches ==

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a variant patch to prevent memory leaks in
DO blocks.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of the patch to add a
replication server timeout.

Bernd Helmle sent in another revision of the patch to use a more
reasonable size for \dt in psql.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch which adds 5 more levels of durability to
sync rep.

Joseph Adams sent in five more revisions of the patch to add JSON as
a data type.