ads' corner | Entries from February 2007

Fünf Dinge, die ich schon immer mal ausplaudern wollte

Wöchentlicher PostgreSQL Newsletter - 25. Februar 2007

Deutsche Ordnung und Aufbewahrungsfristen

The real difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL

Evening in Brussels

Endlich wirkungsvolle Überwachungsmaßnahmen

Pictures from FOSDEM

Wöchentlicher PostgreSQL Newsletter - 18. Februar 2007

Arbeiten bei Freunden

PostgreSQL booth at FOSDEM 2007

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Wednesday, February 28. 2007

depesz hat mir da ein Stöckchen zugeworfen, auch wenn er es auf Polnisch verfasst hat. Also hier sind 5 Neuigkeiten über mich, sollte hoffentlich noch niemand so genau wissen:

Eis ist nicht alles im Leben. Aber es macht trotzdem glücklich.
Keyboard wollte ich immer spielen können, aber leider bin ich total unmusikalisch.
Ich war jahrelang sauer, das mir damals in der Schule der Computerclub weggenommen wurde. *Grummel* Wann hat man als Schüler schon mal die Chance, eine Arbeitsgemeinschaft zu leiten?
Bin viel zu faul, eine weitere Fremdsprache zu lernen, weil eigentlich sollte ich mir das mal antun.
Ich mag zwar Auto fahren, aber irgendeine passende Beschäftigung braucht man dabei, das wird sonst viel zu langweilig.

Dann werfen wir das ganze mal weiter zu: Haribo, alita, formorer, kilzi bekommt einen Grund, sein Blog besser zu pflegen und wer sich sonst noch angesprochen fühlt, darf auch fangen.

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Monday, February 26. 2007

Der Originalartikel befindet sich unter:
http://people.planetpostgresql.org/dfetter/

== Wöchentlicher PostgreSQL Newsletter - 25. Februar 2007 ==

Der PostgreSQL Fond bei SPI sponsorte diesen Monat David Fetters Reise zur Consili in Brasilien, wo er eine Konferenz Keynote überbrachte und Neil Conways nächste zwei Monate der Patch Review Arbeiten für PostgreSQL 8.3.

Eine lebhafte Diskussion über Sourcecode Management ist auf -hackers in gange.

Das Seventh Framework Programm (FP7) ist offen für Vorschläge. EU PostgreSQL Organisationen, erwägt das Einsenden von Vorschlägen.
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html

Du kannst nun search-postgresql.org mit einem Plugin für die Firefox Suche nutzen-
http://www.gunduz.org/postgresql/searchpostgresqlorg.html

== PostgreSQL Produkt Neuigkeiten ==

Cybertek in Österreich hat eine synchrone Multi-Master Replikation als Produkt für PostgreSQL vorgestellt.
http://www.cybertec.at/en/ctools.html

PGCluster-1.5.0rc15 und 1.7.0rc4 erschienen.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgcluster/

== PostgreSQL Jobs im Februar ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-02/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Lokal ==

Es wird einen PostgreSQL Stand auf dem CLT am 3.-4. März in Chemnitz/Deutschland geben. Einige der üblichen Verdächtigen der deutschsprachigen PostgreSQl Community werden dort sein. Kontaktiere info@pgug.de für mehr Informationen.
http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2007/info/

Die italienische PostgreSQL Community ist auf der Suche nach Sponsoren für ihren PostgreSQL Tag in Prato, Italien im Sommer. Mehr Informationen unter untenstehendem Link.
http://www.pgday.it

== PostgreSQL in den News ==

Microsoft Technet veröffentlicht ein PostgreSQL HOWTO:
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2007/02/22/postgresql-on-windows-a-primer.aspx

OmniTI Fallstudien veröffentlicht:
http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php/id;413111662;fp;4194304;fpid;1

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

General Bits, Archive und gelegentliche News Artikel:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

Dieser wöchentliche PostgreSQL Newsletter wurde erstellt von David Fetter,
Josh Berkus und Devrim GUNDUZ.

Um deine Beiträge für die nächste Ausgabe zu übermitteln, sende diese an david@fetter.org bis Sonntag, 15:00 Uhr Pazifischer Zeit.

== Angewandte Patches ==

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- Allow pltcl args to spi_prepare and plpython args to plpy.prepare to
be standard type aliases as well as those known in pg_type. Similar
to recent change in plperl.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Bernd Helmle's patch which identifies the schema of inherited tables
in psql \d when necessary.

- Add missing OIDs from xml support to pg_proc, bump catversion.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Move test for BLCKSZ < 1024 to guc.c.

- Spelling fix in Solaris FAQ.

- Update Solaris FAQ per Peter Eisentraut.

- Updated FAQ on upgrading.

- Zdenek Kotala's patch to the Solaris FAQ.

- Chad Wagner's patch to psql which adds \prompt capability.

- Remove extra tab from pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml.

- Remove tabs from SGML reference files so their addition can be
detected in the future.

- Update message wording in FAQ.

- Update new optional VACUUM FULL hint for translations, per Alvaro
Herrera.

- Simon Riggs's patch which moves increase FSM warning to after
lazy_truncate_heap() because the function might reduce the number of
free pages in the table. Recommend VACUUM FULL only if 20% free.

- Heikki Linnakangas's patch to clean up the btree source code.

- Update FAQ about minor updates.

- Jun Kuwamura's update to the Japanese FAQ.

- Update URL in German FAQ for bug form, per Schima, Fabian

- Daojing Zhou's update of the Chinese FAQs to have two versions, a
traditional Chinese version (Taiwan) and a Simplified version (China
(PRC)). Backpatch to 8.2.X.

- Update minor release text in FAQ.

- Add configure --enable-profiling to enable GCC profiling. Patches
from Korry Douglas and Nikhil S

- Update upgrade text in FAQ.

- Update URL for set-returning functions in FAQ.

- Add URL for "Allow row and record variables to be set to NULL
constants, and allow NULL tests on such variables" in the TODO list.

- Prevent BLCKSZ < 1024, and have initdb test shared buffers based on
the BLCKSZ value.

- Add to TODO: "Consider decreasing the amount of memory used by
PrivateRefCount."

- Fix markup in pgsql/doc/src/sgml/information_schema.sgml.

- Change $(CC) to $(COMPILER) on Solaris gcc so -m64 is passed into
the shared link line.

- Add to TODO: "Increase locking when DROPing objects so dependent
objects cannot get dropped while the DROP operation is happening."

- Add URL for "Allow UPDATE/DELETE WHERE CURRENT OF cursor" in TODO
list.

- Add to TODO: "Add missing operators for geometric data types. Some
geometric types do not have the full suite of geometric operators,
e.g. box @> point."

- Update "encode" documentation to mention that 'escape' only changes
null bytes and backslashes, remove "ASCII" mention. Backpatch to
8.2.X.

- Update pgpass Win32 wording.

- Update information_schema documentation to match system tables.
Backpatch to 8.2.X.

- Improve wording on Julian dates in pgsql/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml.

- More clearly document that most PostgreSQL utilities support libpq
environment variables. Backpatch to 8.2.X.

- Remove from TODO for Win32: "Check .pgpass file permissions." It is
not needed.

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c, add comment that on
Win32, we don't need to check the .pgpass file permission, per
Magnus Hagander.

- Add to TODO for Win32: "Check .pgpass file permissions."

- Update array slice documentation to be clearer.

- Add to TODO: "Fix IS OF so it matches the ISO specification, and add
documentation."

- Comment-out documentation for IS OF because it doesn't conform to
the ISO SQL behavior. Backpatch removal to 8.2.X.

- Remove TODO item: "ARRAY[[1,2],[3,4]])[1] should return the same
values as ARRAY[[1,2],[3,4]])[1:1]." It actually shouldn't.

- Add text about Makefile.custom to FAQ_DEV.

- Document that to_char('J'/Julian) is midnight-based, per report that
Julian technically is noon to noon.

- Improve wording in isodow documentation.

- Update PQfree() documentation to be clearer, backpatch to 8.2.X.

- Add to TODO: "Allow user configuration of TOAST thresholds."

- Add newlines to TODO.

- Add to TODO: "Allow UPDATEs on only non-referential integrity
columns not to conflict with referential integrity locks."

- Add to TODO: "Allow INSERT/UPDATE ... RETURNING inside a SELECT
'FROM' clause."

- Clarify documentation that initdb -A or editing pg_hba.conf is
required if you do not trust local users.

- Clarify documentation for "day of the week" handling for to_char()
and EXTRACT().

- Mark TODO as done: "Add ISO day of week format 'ID' to to_char()
where Monday = 1."

- Add "isodow" option to EXTRACT() and date_part() where Sunday = 7.

- Mark TODO as done: "Add a field 'isoyear' to extract(), based on the
ISO week."

- Mark TODO as done: "Add long file support for binary pg_dump
output."

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/tools/msvc/Solution.pm, revert changes to process
pg_proc.h entries without OIDs. We're not supposed to have such
entries, and want to be notified when we do... Leave the plain
bug fix in genbki.

- Fix pg_dump on Win32 so that it properly dumps files larger than 2GB
when using binary dump formats.

- Parse pg_proc.h with entries without OIDs for the MSVC build.

Tom Lane committed:

- Update 7.x variant horology files to match the new US DST rules. It
seems likely that anyone wanting to run the regression tests in the
future will have up-to-date system timezone files, so this is more
likely to work than the old contents.

- Put back copyObject() call I removed in a fit of brain fade. This
one is still needed despite cleanups in setrefs.c, because the point
is to let the inserted Result node compute a different tlist than
its input node does. Per example from Jeremy Drake.

- Now that plans have flat rangetable lists, it's a lot easier to get
EXPLAIN to drill down into subplan targetlists to print the referent
expression for an OUTER or INNER var in an upper plan node. Hence,
make it do that always, and banish the old hack of showing
"?columnN?" when things got too complicated. Along the way, fix an
EXPLAIN bug I introduced by suppressing subqueries from
execution-time range tables: get_name_for_var_field() assumed it
could look at rte->subquery to find out the real type of a RECORD
var. That doesn't work anymore, but instead we can look at the
input plan of the SubqueryScan plan node.

- Change Agg and Group nodes so that Vars contained in their
targetlists and quals have varno OUTER, rather than zero, to
indicate a reference to an output of their lefttree subplan. This
is consistent with the way that every other upper-level node type
does it, and allows some simplifications in setrefs.c and EXPLAIN.

- Fix bug I introduced in recent patch to make hash joins discard null
tuples immediately: ExecHashGetHashValue failed to restore the
caller's memory context before taking the failure exit.

- Turn the rangetable used by the executor into a flat list, and avoid
storing useless substructure for its RangeTblEntry nodes. (I chose
to keep using the same struct node type and just zero out the link
fields for unneeded info, rather than making a separate
ExecRangeTblEntry type --- it seemed too fragile to have two
different rangetable representations.) Along the way, put subplans
into a list in the toplevel PlannedStmt node, and have SubPlan nodes
refer to them by list index instead of direct pointers. Vadim
wanted to do that years ago, but I never understood what he was on
about until now. It makes things a whole lot more robust, because
we can stop worrying about duplicate processing of subplans during
expression tree traversals. That's been a constant source of bugs,
and it's finally gone. There are some consequent simplifications
yet to be made, like not using a separate EState for subplans in the
executor, but I'll tackle that later.

- Adjust user-facing documentation to explain why we don't check
pgpass file permissions on Windows.

- Remove the Query structure from the executor's API. This allows us
to stop storing mostly-redundant Query trees in prepared statements,
portals, etc. To replace Query, a new node type called PlannedStmt
is inserted by the planner at the top of a completed plan tree; this
carries just the fields of Query that are still needed at runtime.
The statement lists kept in portals etc. now consist of intermixed
PlannedStmt and bare utility-statement nodes --- no Query. This
incidentally allows us to remove some fields from Query and Plan
nodes that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Still to
do: simplify the execution-time range table; at the moment the range
table passed to the executor still contains Query trees for
subqueries. initdb forced due to change of stored rules.

- Get rid of some old and crufty global variables in the planner.
When this code was last gone over, there wasn't really any
alternative to globals because we didn't have the PlannerInfo struct
being passed all through the planner code. Now that we do, we can
restructure things to avoid non-reentrancy. I'm fooling with this
because otherwise I'd have had to add another global variable for
the planned compact range table list.

== Abgelehnte Patches (bis jetzt) ==

Mateo Beccati's patch which gets PostgreSQL to compile on Irix 6.5,
but the patch would break most Linux machines.

== Eingesandte Patches ==

Zoltan Boszormenyi sent in two more iterations of his
IDENTITY/GENERATED patch.

Pavan Deolasee sent in two more versions of his work-in-progress HOT
patch.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch to shorten varlena headers.

Guillaume Smet sent in a first implementation of GIN for pg_trgm.

Nikolay Samokhvalov sent in a patch to implement xpath_array with
namespaces support.

Darcy Buskermolen sent in a patch which provides for logging in the
event that -k is unable to clean up an old WAL file and makes the
"failed to remove file" error message consistent for the trigger file.

Greg Sabino Mullane sent in a documentation patch which warns about
some strange behavior in LISTEN/NOTIFY.

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch to add timestamp support for XSD-type
timestamps.

Simon Riggs sent in another version of his patch to avoid deadlocks in
pg_dump.

Joachim Wieland sent in a patch which makes GUC values fall back to
their default values when they got removed (or commented) from the
configuration file.

Kris Jurka sent in a patch which implements lo_truncate for truncating
large objects to a given length. This is required for implementing
Blob.truncate in the JDBC driver and rounds out filesystem like
functionality for large objects.

Simon Riggs sent a bug fix for his recent optimization of
COPY-after-truncate.

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Monday, February 26. 2007

Heute bekam ich den üblichen Monatlichen Infobrief von meinem Steuerberater. Enthalten waren unter anderem drei engbeschriebene Blätter mit Aufbewahrungsfristen für Schriftstücke. Dabei ist aber auch wirklich alles geregelt ...

Würde es nicht einfach reichen, alles Geschäftsrelevante so und so viele Jahre aufzuheben? Muss das wieder mal bis in das kleinste Detail durchgeregelt, in Gesetze gepresst und bürokratisiert sein?

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Sunday, February 25. 2007

Just at FOSDEM, i was talking to a visitor and Susanne was talking to Lenz Grimmer from MySQL, who just visited our booth. The visitor i was talking to asked me, what the difference between both databases is, i pointed behind and told him: She (pointing to Susanne) is from PostgreSQL, he (pointing to Lenz) is from MySQL. Just ask for yourself.

The visitor looked right, looked left, back right and told me with a smile: "Yes, i can see the difference" ;-)

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Sunday, February 25. 2007

You are in Brussels, it's evening and you decide to go into the city and find a nice restaurant. You enter the "Chez Leon" and oh surprise, you find half of the FOSDEM people there ;-)

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Sunday, February 25. 2007

Hunz hat eine wundervolle und sicherlich wirkungsvolle Idee, wie man die bösen Terroristen wirkungsvoll überwachen kann, aber schaut selbst:

http://hunz.geekheim.de/?p=44

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Saturday, February 24. 2007

Pictures from the FOSDEM in Brussels are available here:

http://andreas.scherbaum.la/pictures/v/events/fosdem_2007/

Especially you should take a look at "Slony" ;-)

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Monday, February 19. 2007

Der Originalartikel befindet sich unter:
http://people.planetpostgresql.org/dfetter/

== Wöchentlicher PostgreSQL Newsletter - 18. Februar 2007 ==

Version 3.4 des Open Source SYMBOL Australian Accountingprogramms enthält erweiterte Skalierbarkeit für PostgreSQL.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1504289875

IGN, das Französische Nationale Geografie Institut, hat PostgreSQL und PostGIS aufgrund der Skalierbarkeit, der Geschwindugkeit und der Transaktionssicherheit gewählt.
http://postgis.refractions.net/documentation/casestudies/ign/

== PostgreSQL Produkt Neuigkeiten ==

pgmemcache 1.1 erschienen. Fortlaufende Entwicklung wird von der Opten Technology Group, Inc. gesponsert.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgmemcache/

pgchem::tigress 7.0 erschienen.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgchem/

pgpool-II 1.0.2 erschienen.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/

PL/PgPSM 0.2.0 erschienen, jetzt mit voller SQL/PSM Unterstützung. Es ist wie jedes andere contrib Paket mit PGXS installierbar.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/plpsm/

== PostgreSQL Jobs im Februar ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-02/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Lokal ==

Es wird einen PostgreSQL Stand auf dem CLT am 3.-4. März in Chemnitz/Deutschland geben. Einige der üblichen Verdächtigen der deutschsprachigen PostgreSQl Community werden dort sein. Kontaktiere info@pgug.de für mehr Informationen.
http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2007/info/

Es wird einen PostgreSQL Stand auf der FOSDEM am 24. und 25. Februar in Brüssel, Belgien sein. Viele der üblichen Verdächtigen von den EU PostgreSQL Communities werden dort sein. Kontaktiere de@postgresql.org für mehr Informationen.
http://www.fosdem.org/2007/

Die italienische PostgreSQL Community ist auf der Suche nach Sponsoren für ihren PostgreSQL Tag in Prato, Italien im Sommer. Mehr Informationen unter untenstehendem Link.
http://www.pgday.it

== PostgreSQL in den News ==

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

General Bits, Archive und gelegentliche News Artikel:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

Dieser wöchentliche PostgreSQL Newsletter wurde erstellt von David Fetter, Jean-Paul Argudo and Josh Berkus.

Um deine Beiträge für die nächste Ausgabe zu übermitteln, sende diese an david@fetter.org bis Sonntag, 15:00 Uhr Pazifischer Zeit.

== Angewandte Patches ==

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- Install a more correct fix in the timestamp and timestamptz
regression tests: remove duplicated tests in timestamp, and complete
timestamptz with the tests that were missing to more closely mirror
timestamp.

- Fix the timestamptz test problem, by moving the tests that use the
timestamp_tbl table into the timestamp test. Also, restore a test
that used to exist as a valid test in the timestamptz test.

- Remove useless database name from bootstrap argument processing
(including startup and bgwriter processes), and the -y flag. It's
not used anywhere.

- Restructure autovacuum in two processes: a dummy process, which runs
continuously, and requests vacuum runs of "autovacuum workers" to
postmaster. The workers do the actual vacuum work. This allows for
future improvements, like allowing multiple autovacuum jobs running
in parallel. For now, the code keeps the original behavior of
having a single autovac process at any time by sleeping until the
previous worker has finished.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Better fix for determining minimum and maximum int64 values that
doesn't require stdint.h and works for "busted" int64.

- Remove naughty // comment from pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/formatting.c

- Add stdint.h header to pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/xml.c

- Add functions for mapping table data and table schemas to XML
(a.k.a. XML export)

- Fix typo in pgsql/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml.

Neil Conway committed:

- Fix capitalization and punctuation of two more GUC description
strings.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Make it possible to build with integer datetimes in msvc, and enable
by default.

- Un-break build on ANSI compilers (like msvc) by moving Assert to
position after variable declarations.

- Add script to run regression tests under vc++ without mingw. Update
clean script to properly clean up the result of it.

- One more fix for makefile := to : change.

- Properly parse Makefile after change from := to =.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/spi.sgml, document that when sending multiple
commands in a single string to SPI_execute(), the later commands
cannot depend on the creation of objects earlier in the string.

- Update wording in TODO with some commas.

- Add to TODO: "Allow SQL-language functions to reference parameters
by parameter name." currently SQL-language functions can only refer
to parameters via $1, etc

- Update "Conflicting lock modes" to show as conflict, add
current/requested headings, add link to table from text.

- Remove rint() for to_char MS and US output. We can't us rint()
because we can't overflow to the next higher units, and we might
print the lower units for MS.

- Add to TODO: "Allow holdable cursors in SPI."

- Cleanup of Brendan Jurd's to_char() patch.

- Add to TODO: "Allow row and record variables to be set to NULL
constants, and allow NULL tests on such variables Because a row is
not scalar, do not allow assignment from NULL-valued scalars.

- Remove installation mention that integer timestamps is less stable
that floating point.

- Mark Kirkwood's patch to create AVG() aggregates for int8 and
NUMERIC which do not compute X^2, as a performance enhancement.

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

- Reduce the amount of memory "clobbered" for every process title
change, on platforms that need this. This is done by only writing
past the previously stored message, if it was longer.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ecpg.sgml, remove extra character erroneously
added.

- Remove tabs from SGML files to help tag alingment and improve
detection of tabs are added in the future.

- Brendan Jurd's patch which adds two new format fields for use with
to_char(), to_date() and to_timestamp() "ID" for day-of-week and
"IDDD" for day-of-year This makes it possible to convert ISO week
dates to and from text fully represented in either week
('IYYY-IW-ID') or day-of-year ('IYYY-IDDD') format. It also adds an
'isoyear' field for use with extract / date_part.

- Victor B. Wagner's SSL improvements which allow reading a global SSL
configuration file, add GUC "ssl_ciphers" to control allowed
ciphers, and add libpq environment variable PGSSLKEY to control SSL
hardware keys

- Add to TODO: "Use LC_TIME for localized weekday/month names, rather
than LC_MESSAGES."

- Fix to_date()/to_timestamp() 'D' field for day of week, was off by
one. Converting from char using 'D' doesn't make lots of sense, of
course. Report from Brendan Jurd.

- Move fsync method macro defines into /include/access/xlogdefs.h so
they can be used by src/tools/fsync/test_fsync.c.

- Add to TODO: "Clean up casting in /contrib/isn."

- Add to TODO: "Improve logging of prepared statements recovered
during startup."

- In TODO, add URL for, "Allow SQL-language functions to return
results from RETURNING queries."

- In TODO, add URL for, "Allow accurate statistics to be collected on
indexes with more than one column or expression indexes, perhaps
using per-index statistics."

- In TODO, add URL for, "Update Bonjour to work with newer
cross-platform SDK"

- Add to TODO: "Improve failure message when DROP DATABASE is used on
a database that has prepared transactions."

- In TODO, add URL for, "Update Bonjour to work with newer
cross-platform SDK."

- In clusterdb and reindexdb, add code so database scans are done in
an order consistent with pg_dumpall.

- Update /contrib/fuzzystrmatch error message to mention bytes, not
just 'length', which can be characters.

- Add ORDER BY to vacummdb so databases are scaned in the same order
as pg_dumpall.

- Add to TODO: "Update our code to handle 64-bit timezone files to
match the zic source code, which now uses them"

- In pgsql/src/port/open.c, add comment to explain why O_EXCL and
O_TRUNC can be ignored in openFlagsToCreateFileFlags() in certain
cases.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/formatting.c, add comment that
to_char() for broken glibc pt_BR might cause a problem.

Tom Lane committed:

- Improve plpgsql's error message when a datatype declaration is
omitted. Per example from Jeff Ross.

- Put function expressions and values lists into FunctionScan and
ValuesScan plan nodes, so that the executor does not need to get
these items from the range table at runtime. This will avoid
needing to include these fields in the compact range table I'm
expecting to make the executor use.

- Fix portal management code to support non-default command completion
tags for portals using PORTAL_UTIL_SELECT strategy. This is
currently significant only for FETCH queries, which are supposed to
include a count in the tag. Seems it's been broken since 7.4, but
nobody noticed before Knut Lehre.

- Add code so that when COPY_PARSE_PLAN_TREES is defined, the copy and
equal functions are checked for raw parse trees as well as
post-analysis trees. This was never very important before, but the
upcoming plan cache control module will need to be able to do
copyObject() on raw parse trees.

- Teach find_nonnullable_rels to handle OR cases: if every arm of an
OR forces a particular relation nonnullable, then we can say that
the OR does. This is worth a little extra trouble since it may
allow reduction of outer joins to plain joins.

- Fix new RI operator selection code to do the right thing when
working with an opclass for a generic type such as ANYARRAY. The
original coding failed to check that PK and FK columns were of the
same array type. Per discussion with Tom Dunstan. Also, make the
code a shade more readable by not trying to economize on variables.

- Adjust the definition of is_pushed_down so that it's always true for
INNER JOIN quals, just like WHERE quals, even if they reference
every one of the join's relations. Now that we can reorder outer
and inner joins, it's possible for such a qual to end up being
assigned to an outer join plan node, and we mustn't have it treated
as a join qual rather than a filter qual for the node. (If it were,
the join could produce null-extended rows that it shouldn't.) Per
bug report from Pelle Johansson.

- Code review for SSLKEY patch.

- Fix markup, spelling, grammar, and explanations for SSLKEY patch.

- Fix another problem in 8.2 changes that allowed "one-time" qual
conditions to be checked at plan levels below the top; namely, we
have to allow for Result nodes inserted just above a nestloop inner
indexscan. Should think about using the general Param mechanism to
pass down outer-relation variables, but for the moment we need a
back-patchable solution. Per report from Phil Frost.

- Restructure code that is responsible for ensuring that clauseless
joins are considered when it is necessary to do so because of a
join-order restriction (that is, an outer-join or IN-subselect
construct). The former coding was a bit ad-hoc and inconsistent,
and it missed some cases, as exposed by Mario Weilguni's recent bug
report. His specific problem was that an IN could be turned into a
"clauseless" join due to constant-propagation removing the IN's
joinclause, and if the IN's subselect involved more than one
relation and there was more than one such IN linking to the same
upper relation, then the only valid join orders involve "bushy"
plans but we would fail to consider the specific paths needed to get
there. (See the example case added to the join regression test.)
On examining the code I wonder if there weren't some other problem
cases too; in particular it seems that GEQO was defending against a
different set of corner cases than the main planner was. There was
also an efficiency problem, in that when we did realize we needed a
clauseless join because of an IN, we'd consider clauseless joins
against every other relation whether this was sensible or not. It
seems a better design is to use the outer-join and in-clause lists
as a backup heuristic, just as the rule of joining only where there
are joinclauses is a heuristic: we'll join two relations if they
have a usable joinclause *or* this might be necessary to satisfy an
outer-join or IN-clause join order restriction. I refactored the
code to have just one place considering this instead of three, and
made sure that it covered all the cases that any of them had been
considering. Backpatch as far as 8.1 (which has only the IN-clause
form of the disease). By rights 8.0 and 7.4 should have the bug
too, but they accidentally fail to fail, because the joininfo
structure used in those releases preserves some memory of there
having once been a joinclause between the inner and outer sides of
an IN, and so it leads the code in the right direction anyway. I'll
be conservative and not touch them.

- Add ORDER BY to a query on information_schema.views, to avoid
possible platform-specific result ordering. Per buildfarm results.

- Repair oversight in 8.2 change that improved the handling of
"pseudoconstant" WHERE clauses. createplan.c is now willing to
stick a gating Result node almost anywhere in the plan tree, and in
particular one can wind up directly underneath a MergeJoin node.
This means it had better be willing to handle Mark/Restore.
Fortunately, that's trivial in such cases, since we can just pass
off the call to the input node (which the planner has previously
ensured can handle Mark/Restore). Per report from Phil Frost.

- Add some discussion of sort ordering to indices.sgml, which
curiously had never touched the subject before.

- Heikki Linnakangas's patch which throws an error if you try to
COMMIT/ROLLBACK PREPARED from a database other than the one where
the transaction was originally prepared.

- Minor editorialization on operator-family documentation: put some
copied-and-pasted text in a more useful location.

- Fix up foreign-key mechanism so that there is a sound semantic basis
for the equality checks it applies, instead of a random dependence
on whatever operators might be named "=". The equality operators
will now be selected from the opfamily of the unique index that the
FK constraint depends on to enforce uniqueness of the referenced
columns; therefore they are certain to be consistent with that
index's notion of equality. Among other things this should fix the
problem noted awhile back that pg_dump may fail for foreign-key
constraints on user-defined types when the required operators aren't
in the search path. This also means that the former warning
condition about "foreign key constraint will require costly
sequential scans" is gone: if the comparison condition isn't
indexable then we'll reject the constraint entirely. All per past
discussions. Along the way, make the RI triggers look into
pg_constraint for their information, instead of using
pg_trigger.tgargs; and get rid of the always error-prone fixed-size
string buffers in ri_triggers.c in favor of building up the RI
queries in StringInfo buffers. This forces initdb due to columns
added to pg_constraint and pg_trigger.

- Disallow committing a prepared transaction unless we are in the same
database it was executed in. Someday it might be nice to allow
cross-DB commits, but work would be needed in NOTIFY and perhaps
other places. Per Heikki Linnakangas.

- Improve postmaster's behavior if an accept() call fails. Because
the server socket is still read-ready, the code was a tight loop,
wasting lots of CPU. We can't do anything to clear the failure,
other than wait, but we should give other processes more chance to
finish and release FDs; so insert a small sleep. Also, avoid bogus
"close(-1)" in this case. Per report from Jim Nasby.

- Repair bug in 8.2's new logic for planning outer joins: we have to
allow joins that overlap an outer join's min_righthand but aren't
fully contained in it, to support joining within the RHS after
having performed an outer join that can commute with this one.
Aside from the direct fix in make_join_rel(), fix
has_join_restriction() and GEQO's desirable_join() to consider this
possibility. Per report from Ian Harding.

- Avoid infinite recursion when dumping new planner EquivalenceClass
trees.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- Fix backend crash in parsing incorrect tsquery. Per report from Jon
Rosebaugh.

== Abgelehnte Patches (bis jetzt) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Eingesandte Patches ==

Pavel Stehule sent in a patch which implements TABLE functions per
SQL:2003.

Greg Smith sent in a patch which adds two command-line switches to
pgbench: -x, which generates extended detail in the latency log, and
-X, which does extra cleanup work after the run.

Pavan Deolasee sent in another version of the HOT-update patch.

Gregory Stark sent in a patch to replace the VARATT_SIZEP with
SET_VARLENA_LEN. This is part of the implementation of the
variable-length varlena type per discussion on -hackers.

Tom Dunstan sent in an updated version of his enums patch.

Magnus Hagander sent in a patch to support MOVE for cursors in
PL/PgSQL.

Arul Shaji sent in a patch to implement the TODO item, "Allow server
log information to be output as INSERT statements
This would allow server log information to be easily loaded into a
database for analysis." Tom Lane suggested that he refactor this as
COPY statements.

Alvaro Herrera sent in two more patches to clean up the bootstrap
code.

Chad Wagner sent in a patch which allows psql's \pset to take an
argument for boolean variables. The old toggling behavior still works
when no argument is passed.

Bruce Momjian sent in a patch implementing isodow in date_part.

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Thursday, February 15. 2007

Sitze gerade bei Freunden und wir arbeiten an einem Projek: es sind 10 Personen hier, davon haben 8 einen Laptop an und einer sitzt an seinem Rechner ;-)

Das alles zusammen in einem Wohnzimmer, verkabelt per Netzwerk oder Siemens Luftleitung aka WLAN.

Dafür geht wenigstens etwas voran und die Bugs verschwinden am laufenden Band ...

February '07

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on Thursday, February 15. 2007

The PostgreSQL Usergroup Germany will have a booth at the FOSDEM 2007 in Brussel. Many of the usual suspects from the European Communities will be there.

And don't miss the pre-event at friday evening ;-)