Waiting for 8.4 – column level privileges.

On 22nd of January, Tom Lane committed patch by Stephen Frost, which adds column level privileges:

Log Message:
-----------
Support column-level privileges, as required by SQL standard.
 
Stephen Frost, with help from KaiGai Kohei and others

Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – column level privileges.

Waiting for 8.4 – window functions

A long overdue post about new functionality. At this moment it is no longer such new, as it was committed on 28th of December (yes, I know, I should have written it earlier, Sorry).

On this day Tom Lane committed patch by Hitoshi Harada which adds support for so called window functions:

Support window functions a la SQL:2008.
 
Hitoshi Harada, with some kibitzing from Heikki and Tom.

Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – window functions

Waiting for 8.4 – pg_stat_statements

On 4th of January, Tom Lane committed patch by Takahiro Itagaki, which adds new contrib module – pg_stat_statements:

Log Message:
-----------
Add contrib/pg_stat_statements for server-wide tracking of statement execution
statistics.
 
Takahiro Itagaki

Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – pg_stat_statements

Waiting for 8.4 – Default values for function arguments + integer in any base

On 4th of December Peter Eisentraut committed patch by Pavel Stehule (with Peters tweaks) which adds default values for function arguments:

Default values for function arguments
 
Pavel Stehule, with some tweaks by Peter Eisentraut

Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – Default values for function arguments + integer in any base

Waiting for 8.4 – Visibility maps

Yeah. This one patch alone is worth upgrading to 8.4.

On 3rd of December Heikki Linnakangas committed his patch. Commit message:

Introduce visibility map. The visibility map is a bitmap with one bit per
heap page, where a set bit indicates that all tuples on the page are
visible to all transactions, and the page therefore doesn't need
vacuuming. It is stored in a new relation fork.
 
Lazy vacuum uses the visibility map to skip pages that don't need
vacuuming. Vacuum is also responsible for setting the bits in the map.
In the future, this can hopefully be used to implement index-only-scans,
but we can't currently guarantee that the visibility map is always 100%
up-to-date.
 
In addition to the visibility map, there's a new PD_ALL_VISIBLE flag on
each heap page, also indicating that all tuples on the page are visible to
all transactions. It's important that this flag is kept up-to-date. It
is also used to skip visibility tests in sequential scans, which gives a
small performance gain on seqscans.

Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – Visibility maps

explain.depesz.com.

Long time ago I wrote small program to filter EXPLAIN ANALYZE output, and add summary of time.

A bit later (I guess, I don't recall exact time line, it could have been earlier) Michael Glaesemann started explain-analyze.info – cool tool for checking what might be wrong with given plan.

I'm not really happy with the emphasis Michael put on bad rowcount estimates, so I decided to write my own tool. Enter explain.depesz.com.

Basic idea is: paste your explain analyze plan, and see the output. You can click on column headers to let it know which parameter is the most important for you – exclusive node time, inclusive node time, or rowcount mis-estimate.

It is definitely not perfect. I know of at least 1 bug now, and will fix it in not-distant future.

But, as for now – you can test it, play it, or simply use it. If you'd like to change/fix something – sources are freely available. Just be warned – it's Perl ;-P