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On 4th of September Tom Lane committed another great patch. This one is very large, and even after applying - it’s has some rough edges. There will be need for additional patches to make the functionality fully robust, but the fact that it got committed means that it will be available in final 8.4.

What does it do?

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You might be familiar with hstore datatype in PostgreSQL - if you’re not - check it out, as it is really cool.

Basically it’s hash in database, which you can search in.

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On 30th of September, Heikki Linnakangas committed his patch that changes FSM:

Rewrite the FSM. Instead of relying on a fixed-size shared memory segment, the
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).
 
This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.
 
Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.

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miałem urlop. to zdanie jest istotne, bo urlopy biorę rzadko. nie lubię. i jak się okazuje - są po etmu istotne powody.

w lipcu pojechałem z moją panią i dziećmi samochodem do bułgarii. razem z nami pojechali znajomi - ale już innym samochodem.

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On 23rd of September, Heikki Linnakangas committed patch that was written by Radek Strnad (actually committed patch is a stripped-down version of original).

What it does? It adds ability to have (finally!) different collation order and character categories for different databases.

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Tak się złożyło, że jestem klientem CitiBanku.

Mam u nich konto biznesowe, i z tej okazji muszę co jakiś czas korzystać z ich systemu webowego.

Już parę razy do nich pisałem, że system jest wolny, nie zawsze wyświetla wszystkie informacje, ma problemy z transakcjami w niestandardowych walutach, ale to co zobaczyłem dziś mnie po prostu powaliło.

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Let’s assume we have a simple table:

CREATE TABLE objects (
id serial primary key,
category INT4 NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
object_type INT4 NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
entered_on TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT now()
);

(This is simplification, but it contains all necessary columns).

What should I do to be able to quickly get 50 newest objects in given category/object_type (or in many categories/many object_types, or in all categories/object_types), optionally with limiting entered_on “older than …”.

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Takahiro Itagaki wrote, and Tom Lane committed nice patch, which I personally find really helpful:

Add a duration option to pgbench, so that test length can be specified in seconds instead of by number of transactions to run. Takahiro Itagaki

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Changes:

• normalize BEGIN/START … statements
• normalize END/COMMIT … statements
• normalize ROLLBACK/ABORT … statements

SVN repo at: http://svn.depesz.com/svn/pgsql-tools/trunk

Great (and admittedly long overdue) patch by Tom Lane:

Make pg_dump --data-only try to order the table dumps so that foreign keys'
referenced tables are dumped before the referencing tables. This avoids
failures when the data is loaded with the FK constraints already active.
If no such ordering is possible because of circular or self-referential
constraints, print a NOTICE to warn the user about it.

What it exactly means?

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