PostgreSQL Weekly News October 23, 2011

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 <language>en</language>
 
 <item>
+<title>PostgreSQL Weekly News October 23rd 2011</title>
+<description>
+PGDay.SoCal is scheduled at this year&#x27;s Southern California Linux
+Exposition (SCALE10X) held in the LAX Hilton Hotel in the city of Los
+Angeles, California, on Friday January 20th, 2012.  Please send your
+talk submissions to pgday-submissions AT googlegroups DOT com.
+&#x3C;a href=&#x22;https://sites.google.com/site/pgdayla/&#x22;&#x3E;https://sites.google.com/site/pgdayla/&#x3C;/a&#x3E;
+
+
+</description>
+<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20111023</guid>
+<pubDate>Sun, 23 Oct 2011 00:00:00 PST</pubDate>
+</item>
+<item>
 <title>PostgreSQL Weekly News October 16th 2011</title>
 <description>
 MyJSQLView 3.31, a GUI tool that can be used with PostgreSQL, released.
@@ -117,16 +131,5 @@ pgpool-II 3.1.0 beta1, a connection pooler and more, released.
 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20110821</guid>
 <pubDate>Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:00:00 PST</pubDate>
 </item>
-<item>
-<title>PostgreSQL Weekly News August 14th 2011</title>
-<description>
-pgpool-II 3.1.0 beta1, a connection pooler and more, released.
-&#x3C;a href=&#x22;http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/&#x22;&#x3E;http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgpool/&#x3C;/a&#x3E;
-
-
-</description>
-<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20110814</guid>
-<pubDate>Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:00:00 PST</pubDate>
-</item>
 </channel>
 </rss>
\ No newline at end of file
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--- a/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews.html
+++ b/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews.html
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ Weekly News
 <p>Here is the <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/files/weeklynews.xml">RSS feed</a>.</p>
 
 <ul>
+    <li><a href="/community/weeklynews/pwn20111023">October 23rd 2011</a></li>
     <li><a href="/community/weeklynews/pwn20111016">October 16th 2011</a></li>
     <li><a href="/community/weeklynews/pwn20111009">October 9th 2011</a></li>
     <li><a href="/community/weeklynews/pwn20111002">October 2nd 2011</a></li>
diff --git a/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews/pwn20111023.html b/portal/template/en/community/weeklynews/pwn20111023.html
new file mode 100644
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@@ -0,0 +1,401 @@
+<!-- BEGIN page_title_block -->
+Weekly News - October 23 2011
+<!-- END page_title_block -->
+
+<h1>PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 23 2011</h1>
+
+<p>
+PGDay.SoCal is scheduled at this year's Southern California Linux
+Exposition (SCALE10X) held in the LAX Hilton Hotel in the city of Los
+Angeles, California, on Friday January 20th, 2012.  Please send your
+talk submissions to pgday-submissions AT googlegroups DOT com.
+<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/pgdayla/">https://sites.google.com/site/pgdayla/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The schedule for Postgres Brazil 2011 is out:
+<a href="http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/2011/programacao.en.php">http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/2011/programacao.en.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jim Mlodgenski presents "Visualizing PostgreSQL Data with Google Web Toolkit"
+at NYCPUG October 25, 2011 at 6:30pm.  Details an RSVP below.
+<a href="http://www.nycpug.org/events/36991582/">http://www.nycpug.org/events/36991582/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The CfP for PostgreSQL Italy has been extended to October 23, 2011.
+<a href="http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/en/2011/10/call-for-papers-extended-pgday-italy-2011.html">http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/en/2011/10/call-for-papers-extended-pgday-italy-2011.html</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Product News</h2>
+<p>
+Version 1.21.0 of tail_n_mail, a Postgres log watcher program, released.
+<a href="http://bucardo.org/wiki/Tail_n_mail">http://bucardo.org/wiki/Tail_n_mail</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Jobs for October</h2>
+<p>
+<a href="http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2011-10/threads.php">http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2011-10/threads.php</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL Local</h2>
+<p>
+pgbr will be in Sao Paulo, Brazil November 3-4, 2011.
+<a href="http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/">http://pgbr.postgresql.org.br/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PGConf.DE 2011, the German-speaking PostgreSQL Conference, will
+take place on November 11th in the Rheinisches Industriemuseum in
+Oberhausen, Germany.  The schedule is now available, and registration
+is open.
+<a href="http://2011.pgconf.de/">http://2011.pgconf.de/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fifth edition of the Italian PostgreSQL Day (PGDay.IT 2011) will
+be held on November 25, 2011 in Prato, Italy.
+<a href="http://2011.pgday.it/">http://2011.pgday.it/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+<a href="http://www.flossuk.org/Events/Spring2012">http://www.flossuk.org/Events/Spring2012</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>PostgreSQL in the News</h2>
+<p>
+Planet PostgreSQL: <a href="http://planet.postgresql.org/">http://planet.postgresql.org/</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Reviews</h2>
+<h2>Applied Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Magnus Hagander pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Exclude postmaster.opts from base backups.  Noted by Fujii Masao
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d1e25b78f9988b9917de2818febcbf6c845c6ceb">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d1e25b78f9988b9917de2818febcbf6c845c6ceb</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tom Lane pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix pg_dump to dump casts between auto-generated types.  The
+  heuristic for when to dump a cast failed for a cast between table
+  rowtypes, as reported by Frédéric Rejol.  Fix it by setting the
+  "dump" flag for such a type the same way as the flag is set for the
+  underlying table or base type.  This won't result in the
+  auto-generated type appearing in the output, since setting its
+  objType to DO_DUMMY_TYPE unconditionally suppresses that.  But it
+  will result in dumpCast doing what was intended.  Back-patch to 8.3.
+  The 8.2 code is rather different in this area, and it doesn't seem
+  worth any risk to fix a corner case that nobody has stumbled on
+  before.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b246207bd7b553317fd90d7aefd9520eed27609a">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b246207bd7b553317fd90d7aefd9520eed27609a</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Remove unnecessary AssertMacro() to suppress gcc 4.6 compiler
+  warning.  There's no particular value in doing AssertMacro((tup) !=
+  NULL) in front of code that's certain to crash anyway if tup is
+  NULL.  And if "tup" is actually the address of a local variable, gcc
+  4.6 whinges about it.  That's arguably pretty broken on gcc's part,
+  but we might as well remove the useless test to silence the
+  warnings.  This gets rid of all the -Waddress warnings in the
+  backend; there are some in libpq and psql that are a bit harder to
+  avoid.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7c19e0446c049dd41aed62fa398cd809017adf5e">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7c19e0446c049dd41aed62fa398cd809017adf5e</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Reject empty pg_hba.conf files.  An empty HBA file is surely an
+  error, since it means there is no way to connect to the server.
+  We've not heard identifiable reports of people actually doing that,
+  but this will also close off the case Thom Brown just complained of,
+  namely pointing hba_file at a directory.  (On at least some
+  platforms with some directories, it will read as an empty file.)
+  Perhaps this should be back-patched, but given the lack of previous
+  complaints, I won't add extra work for the translators.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e27f52f3a1814e646733f51b8c24547371bef3eb">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e27f52f3a1814e646733f51b8c24547371bef3eb</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Suppress -Wunused-result warnings about write() and fwrite().  This
+  is merely an exercise in satisfying pedants, not a bug fix, because
+  in every case we were checking for failure later with ferror(), or
+  else there was nothing useful to be done about a failure anyway.
+  Document the latter cases.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/aa90e148ca70a235897b1227f1a7cd1c66bc5368">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/aa90e148ca70a235897b1227f1a7cd1c66bc5368</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Suppress remaining -Waddress warnings from recent gcc versions.
+  Still an exercise in satisfying pedants.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e331c60ea727f998eb1023e8a2c468692d10032e">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e331c60ea727f998eb1023e8a2c468692d10032e</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix memory leak in tab completion.  This was introduced in commit
+  e49ad77ff958b380ea6fa08c72e2dce97ac56c6b.  Fixed in another, more
+  future-proof way in HEAD.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/790fa1fdd8bb32e2e9055dd47d76c2382c51c84a">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/790fa1fdd8bb32e2e9055dd47d76c2382c51c84a</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Rewrite tab completion's previous-word fetching for more sanity.
+  Make it return empty strings when there are no more words to the
+  left of the current position, instead of sometimes returning NULL
+  and other times returning copies of the leftmost word.  Also, fetch
+  the words in one scan, rather than the previous wasteful approach of
+  starting from scratch for each word.  Make the code a bit harder to
+  break when someone decides we need more words of context, too.
+  (There was actually a memory leak here, because whoever added
+  prev6_wd neglected to free it.)
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/dce92c6d6abe302c58fd4e4221efed54913aefdb">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/dce92c6d6abe302c58fd4e4221efed54913aefdb</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Simplify and improve ProcessStandbyHSFeedbackMessage logic.  There's
+  no need to clamp the standby's xmin to be greater than
+  GetOldestXmin's result; if there were any such need this logic would
+  be hopelessly inadequate anyway, because it fails to account for
+  within-database versus cluster-wide values of GetOldestXmin.  So get
+  rid of that, and just rely on sanity-checking that the xmin is not
+  wrapped around relative to the nextXid counter.  Also, don't reset
+  the walsender's xmin if the current feedback xmin is indeed out of
+  range; that just creates more problems than we already had.  Lastly,
+  don't bother to take the ProcArrayLock; there's no need to do that
+  to set xmin.  Also improve the comments about this in GetOldestXmin
+  itself.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b4a0223d008d7c2c9824d846e22b664b2f09cf6e">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b4a0223d008d7c2c9824d846e22b664b2f09cf6e</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- More cleanup after failed reduced-lock-levels-for-DDL feature.
+  Turns out that use of ShareUpdateExclusiveLock or
+  ShareRowExclusiveLock to protect DDL changes had gotten copied into
+  several places that were not touched by either of Simon's original
+  patches for the feature, and thus neither he nor I thought to revert
+  them.  (Indeed, it appears that two of these uses were committed
+  *after* the reversion, which just goes to show that git merging is
+  no panacea.)  Change these places to use AccessExclusiveLock again.
+  If we ever manage to resurrect that feature, we're going to have to
+  think a bit harder about how to keep lock level usage in sync for
+  DDL operations that aren't within the AlterTable infrastructure.
+  Two of these bugs are only in HEAD, but one is in the 9.1 branch
+  too.  Alvaro Herrera found one of them, I found the other two.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5ac5980744149f062ec599015ffe7a7689dd117b">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5ac5980744149f062ec599015ffe7a7689dd117b</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Code review for pgstat_get_crashed_backend_activity patch.  Avoid
+  possibly dumping core when pgstat_track_activity_query_size has a
+  less-than-default value; avoid uselessly searching for the query
+  string of a successfully-exited backend; don't bother putting out an
+  ERRDETAIL if we don't have a query to show; some other minor
+  stylistic improvements.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f9c92a5a3ead738c7de0dffa203a92b4d2fec413">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f9c92a5a3ead738c7de0dffa203a92b4d2fec413</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Support synchronization of snapshots through an export/import
+  procedure.  A transaction can export a snapshot with
+  pg_export_snapshot(), and then others can import it with SET
+  TRANSACTION SNAPSHOT.  The data does not leave the server so there
+  are not security issues.  A snapshot can only be imported while the
+  exporting transaction is still running, and there are some other
+  restrictions.  I'm not totally convinced that we've covered all the
+  bases for SSI (true serializable) mode, but it works fine for lesser
+  isolation modes.  Joachim Wieland, reviewed by Marko Tiikkaja, and
+  rather heavily modified by Tom Lane
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bb446b689b6681eb57a8a50605e119743190c4db">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/bb446b689b6681eb57a8a50605e119743190c4db</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Don't trust deferred-unique indexes for join removal.  The
+  uniqueness condition might fail to hold intra-transaction, and
+  assuming it does can give incorrect query results.  Per report from
+  Marti Raudsepp, though this is not his proposed patch.  Back-patch
+  to 9.0, where both these features were introduced.  In the released
+  branches, add the new IndexOptInfo field to the end of the struct,
+  to try to minimize ABI breakage for third-party code that may be
+  examining that struct.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0f39d5050dc0dce99258381f33f1832c437aff85">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0f39d5050dc0dce99258381f33f1832c437aff85</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Improve git_changelog's handling of inconsistent commit orderings.
+  Use the CommitDate not the AuthorDate, as the former is
+  representative of the order in which things went into the main
+  repository, and the latter isn't very; we now have instances where
+  the AuthorDate is as much as a month before the patch really went
+  in.  Also, get rid of the "commit order inversions" heuristic, which
+  turns out not to do anything very desirable.  Instead we just print
+  commits in strict timestamp order, interpreting the "timestamp" of a
+  merged commit as its timestamp on the newest branch it appears in.
+  This fixes some cases where very ancient commits were being printed
+  relatively early in the report.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7299778a958112b0339ab29365ba0d654bd5d21c">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7299778a958112b0339ab29365ba0d654bd5d21c</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Make psql support tab completion of EXECUTE
+  <prepared-statement-name>.  Andreas Karlsson, reviewed by Josh
+  Kupershmidt
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8140c1bcf355c4925114cc127de476384053dc96">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8140c1bcf355c4925114cc127de476384053dc96</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Haas pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Make the CHECKPOINT reference page more clear.  Josh Kupershmidt,
+  reviewed by Fujii Masao
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c53d3a9ee1b1c85c7d905fb8ca80d327a55f1dfb">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c53d3a9ee1b1c85c7d905fb8ca80d327a55f1dfb</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Document that postmaster.opts is excluded from base backups.  Fujii
+  Masao
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3716ab2c0c87e9a7c03ce86799006accb674ca6f">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3716ab2c0c87e9a7c03ce86799006accb674ca6f</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Add some more regression tests for DROP IF EXISTS.  KaiGai Kohei
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3301c83536e9da1e573e24ded2e610062dbf9cdc">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3301c83536e9da1e573e24ded2e610062dbf9cdc</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Consolidate DROP handling for some object types.  This gets rid of a
+  significant amount of duplicative code.  KaiGai Kohei, reviewed in
+  earlier versions by Dimitri Fontaine, with further review and
+  cleanup by me.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/82a4a777d94bec965ab2f1d04b6e6a3f0447b377">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/82a4a777d94bec965ab2f1d04b6e6a3f0447b377</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Remove a few of the new DROP-IF-EXISTS regression tests.  Commit
+  3301c83536e9da1e573e24ded2e610062dbf9cdc broke the build farm.
+  Let's try to fix that.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0bf08994934d8e561c2cacc4fb4fc7e7eb602d2e">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0bf08994934d8e561c2cacc4fb4fc7e7eb602d2e</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Add "skipping" to the NOTICE produced by DROP OPERATOR CLASS IF
+  EXISTS.  This makes this message consistent with all the other
+  similar notices produced by other DROP IF EXISTS commands.  Noted by
+  KaiGai Kohei
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1d751018d881f415a61787424d900ae8a7126da3">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1d751018d881f415a61787424d900ae8a7126da3</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix get_object_namespace() not to think extensions are "in" a
+  schema.  extnamespace means something altogether different in this
+  context.  Mostly by accident, this coding error (introduced in my
+  commit 82a4a777d94bec965ab2f1d04b6e6a3f0447b377) broke the buildfarm
+  instead of just silently doing the wrong thing.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8f3362d4b7430079bb53a954e372955eb285cf52">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8f3362d4b7430079bb53a954e372955eb285cf52</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix DROP OPERATOR FAMILY IF EXISTS.  Essentially, the "IF EXISTS"
+  portion was being ignored, and an error thrown anyway if the
+  opfamily did not exist.  I broke this in commit
+  fd1843ff8979c0461fb3f1a9eab61140c977e32d; so backpatch to 9.1.X.
+  Report and diagnosis by KaiGai Kohei.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/980261929f2b8c40d6be1979ff81c943cad907b3">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/980261929f2b8c40d6be1979ff81c943cad907b3</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Try to log current the query string when a backend crashes.  To
+  avoid minimize risk inside the postmaster, we subject this feature
+  to a number of significant limitations.  We very much wish to avoid
+  doing any complex processing inside the postmaster, due to the
+  posssibility that the crashed backend has completely corrupted
+  shared memory.  To that end, no encoding conversion is done;
+  instead, we just replace anything that doesn't look like an ASCII
+  character with a question mark.  We limit the amount of data copied
+  to 1024 characters, and carefully sanity check the source of that
+  data.  While these restrictions would doubtless be unacceptable in a
+  general-purpose logging facility, even this limited facility seems
+  like an improvement over the status quo ante.  Marti Raudsepp,
+  reviewed by PDXPUG and myself.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c8e8b5a6e20bf471d83059aebe64bca16f184057">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c8e8b5a6e20bf471d83059aebe64bca16f184057</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heikki Linnakangas pushed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+- Fix overly-complicated usage of errcode_for_file_access().  No need
+  to do  "errcode(errcode_for_file_access())", just
+  "errcode_for_file_access()" is enough. The extra errcode() call is
+  useless but harmless, so there's no user-visible bug here.
+  Nevertheless, backpatch to 9.1 where this code were added.
+  <a href="http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b436c72f61adf5efab435c282bfb13a29508d475">http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b436c72f61adf5efab435c282bfb13a29508d475</a>
+</p>
+
+<h2>Rejected Patches (for now)</h2>
+<p>
+No one was disappointed this week :-)
+</p>
+
+<h2>Pending Patches</h2>
+<p>
+Kerem Kat sent in two more revisions of a patch to add CORRESPONDING
+set operations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jun Ishiduka sent in two more revisions of the patch to allow taking a
+base backup from a hot standby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+KaiGai Kohei sent in two more revisions of the patch to unite DROP
+into a single framework.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fujii Masao sent in another revision of the patch to fix an issue
+where it is possible to drop transactions in streaming replication.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Florian Pflug sent in a patch to document how to build the docs on
+OS/X with MacPorts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Etsuro Fujita sent in another revision of the patch to allow running
+ANALYZE on CSV files via the FDW supplied module interface.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wojciech Muła and Pavel Stehule traded new revisions of the patch to
+allow arrays of %TYPE in PL/pgsql.  
+
+</p>
+