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
Tag: waiting
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.
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
Waiting for 8.4 – remove system objects from \dX
On 6th of January Bruce Momjian committed patch by Greg Sabino Mulane, which fixes one of a very long standing annoyances in PostgreSQL – removes system objects from \dX commands in psql.
Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – remove system objects from \dX
Waiting for 8.4 – Window Functions – teaser
Yesterday Tom Lane committed enormous patch, which had commit log:
Support window functions a la SQL:2008. Hitoshi Harada, with some kibitzing from Heikki and Tom.
… and that would be all. I will write more about it, its use cases, and some detailed examples but now I'm on vacation, and will stay here for some time. You can expect to get the post mid next-week.
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.
Waiting for 8.4 – TABLE
On Thursday, 20th of November, Peter Eisentraut committed his own patch, which adds new command to PostgreSQL: TABLE.
While this command doesn't do anything that wasn't available earlier, it's worth mentioning, as it's one of patches that make PostgreSQL compatible with SQL:2008.
Basically new command “TABLE" acts like an alias to ‘SELECT * FROM':
Waiting for 8.4 – auto-explain
On 19th of November Tom Lane committed patch by Takahiro Itagaki which does:
Add auto-explain contrib module for automatic logging of the plans of slow-running queries.
Waiting for 8.4 – array aggregate and array unpacker
Finally, we got very important addons to PostgreSQL, which help with dealing with arrays.
It solves a lot of problems, which were usually solved with standard cookbook code, which was in faqs, blog posts and number of examples on irc.
Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – array aggregate and array unpacker