Today small, but (at least for me) really useful patch. Committed on 15th of December by Robert Haas, and written by Itagaki Takahiro, this patch does:
Log Message: ----------- Add an EXPLAIN (BUFFERS) option to show buffer-usage statistics. This patch also removes buffer-usage statistics from the track_counts output, since this (or the global server statistics) is deemed to be a better interface to this information. Itagaki Takahiro, reviewed by Euler Taveira de Oliveira.
On 7th of December, Tom Lane committed patch by Jeff Davis that adds general exclusion constraints:
Log Message: ----------- Add exclusion constraints, which generalize the concept of uniqueness to support any indexable commutative operator, not just equality. Two rows violate the exclusion constraint if "row1.col OP row2.col" is TRUE for each of the columns in the constraint. Jeff Davis, reviewed by Robert Haas
Just recently I wrote about DO command in PostgreSQL 8.5, and now (since 29th of November) we have DO with PL/Perl support.
Written by Joshua Tolley and committed by Tom Lane, the patch:
Log Message: ----------- Add support for anonymous code blocks (DO blocks) to PL/Perl. Joshua Tolley, reviewed by Brendan Jurd and Tim Bunce
On 28th of November Tom Lane committed patch by Dave Page, which adds new capability to system monitoring and logging:
Log Message: ----------- Add support for an application_name parameter, which is displayed in pg_stat_activity and recorded in log entries. Dave Page, reviewed by Andres Freund
Continue reading Waiting for 8.5 – Application name reporting
On 22nd of November Tom Lane committed patch by Roger Leigh which fixes my pet peeve:
Log Message: ----------- Improve psql's tabular display of wrapped-around data by inserting markers in the formerly-always-blank columns just to left and right of the data. Different marking is used for a line break caused by a newline in the data than for a straight wraparound. A newline break is signaled by a "+" in the right margin column in ASCII mode, or a carriage return arrow in UNICODE mode. Wraparound is signaled by a dot in the right margin as well as the following left margin in ASCII mode, or an ellipsis symbol in the same places in UNICODE mode. "\pset linestyle old-ascii" is added to make the previous behavior available if anyone really wants it. In passing, this commit also cleans up a few regression test files that had unintended spacing differences from the current actual output. Roger Leigh, reviewed by Gabrielle Roth and other members of PDXPUG.
Continue reading Waiting for 8.5 – better wrapped output in psql
On 20th of November Tom Lane committed patch by Takahiro Itagaki which adds interesting functionality:
ADD a WHEN clause TO CREATE TRIGGER, allowing a BOOLEAN expression TO be checked TO determine whether the TRIGGER should be fired. FOR BEFORE triggers this IS mostly a matter OF spec compliance; but FOR AFTER triggers it can provide a noticeable performance improvement, since queuing OF a DEFERRED TRIGGER event AND re-fetching OF the ROW(s) at END OF statement can be short-circuited IF the TRIGGER does NOT need TO be fired. Takahiro Itagaki, reviewed BY KaiGai Kohei.
On 18th of November Tom Lane committed patch by Laurenz Albe which adds very interesting capability:
ADD a hook TO CREATE/ALTER ROLE TO allow an external module TO CHECK the strength OF DATABASE passwords, AND CREATE a sample implementation OF such a hook AS a NEW contrib module "passwordcheck". Laurenz Albe, reviewed BY Takahiro Itagaki
Continue reading Waiting for 8.5 – checking password strength
On 13th of November (I know, backlog again), Tom Lane committed patch which make PostgreSQL more strict about what happens in stored procedures in PL/pgSQL:
ADD control knobs FOR plpgsql's variable resolution behavior, and make the default be "throw error on conflict", as per discussions. The GUC variable is plpgsql.variable_conflict, with values "error", "use_variable", "use_column". The behavior can also be specified per-function by inserting one of #variable_conflict error #variable_conflict use_variable #variable_conflict use_column at the start of the function body. The 8.5 release notes will need to mention using "use_variable" to retain backward-compatible behavior, although we should encourage people to migrate to the much less mistake-prone "error" setting. Update the plpgsql documentation to match this and other recent changes.
Continue reading Waiting for 8.5 – PL/pgSQL variable resolution
On 14th of October Tome Lane committed new patch from Itagaki Tahahiro:
Log Message: ----------- Support SQL-compliant triggers ON COLUMNS, ie fire ONLY IF certain COLUMNS are named IN the UPDATE's SET list. Note: the schema of pg_trigger has not actually changed; we've just started TO USE a COLUMN that was there ALL along. catversion bumped anyway so that this commit IS included IN the history OF potentially interesting changes TO system catalog contents. Itagaki Takahiro
Pavel Stehule – hero for everybody writing stored procedures, wrote, and later Tom Lane committed patch which adds named arguments for functions:
Log Message: ----------- Support use of function argument names to identify which actual arguments match which function parameters. The syntax uses AS, for example funcname(value AS arg1, anothervalue AS arg2) Pavel Stehule