Really cool news. Thanks to sponsoring from AWeber.com, and code by Brian Dunavant OmniPITR has now support for additional tablespaces in backup creation.
This works on both master and slave, and happens automatically without any kind of user interaction or changing options – OmniPITR simply detects if you have additional tablespaces and backs them up to data tarball.
More details are places in TABLESPACES part of omnipitr-backup-* docs.
On 29th of December, Robert Haas committed interesting patch, which does:
Support unlogged tables. The contents of an unlogged table aren't WAL-logged; thus, they are not available on standby servers and are truncated whenever the database system enters recovery. Indexes on unlogged tables are also unlogged. Unlogged GiST indexes are not currently supported.
(edited commit message, due to this mail.
First of all – just today I committed patch for Pg::Explain – which is the workhorse behind explain.depesz.com.
This patch fixes calculation of exclusive time for explain nodes, and the best thing about it is – I didn't write it. It's full patch provided by someone else – Filip Rembiałkowski – my former colleague, friend, and PostgreSQL DBA (not olny PG!).
This is (as far as I recall) first patch that was provided to me for this library, and I'm really grateful for the contribution.
New version of Pg::Explain will hit CPAN mirrors shortly (it's already uploaded, now we're waiting for CPAN mirrors to get it).
When I was updating it, I checked state of database. And I learned that explain.depesz.com is over 2 years now! Some stats follow.
On 4th of December, Tom Lane committed really cool patch:
KNNGIST, otherwise known as order-by-operator support for GIST.
This commit represents a rather heavily editorialized version of Teodor's builtin_knngist_itself-0.8.2 and builtin_knngist_proc-0.8.1 patches. I redid the opclass API to add a separate Distance method instead of turning the Consistent method into an illogical mess, fixed some bit-rot in the rbtree interfaces, and generally worked over the code style and comments. There's still no non-code documentation to speak of, but I'll work on that separately. Some contrib-module changes are also yet to come (right now, point <-> point is the only KNN-ified operator). Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
As you perhaps know I'm fan of pgbouncer – connection pooling solution for PostgreSQL.
It can do many really cool things, but has one slight issue.
Since it can reuse connections – it has to provide a way to check if user supplied password is correct without consulting database. And it lately (since 9.0 to be exact) became somewhat of a problem.
Continue reading Auto refreshing password file for pgbouncer
On 27th of November, Robert Haas committed patch which adds new, interesting contrib module:
New contrib module, auth_delay. KaiGai Kohei, with a few changes by me.
On 21st of November Robert Haas committed new patch, which adds new function:
Add new SQL function, format(text).
Currently, three conversion format specifiers are supported: %s for a string, %L for an SQL literal, and %I for an SQL identifier. The latter two are deliberately designed not to overlap with what sprintf() already supports, in case we want to add more of sprintf()'s functionality here later. Patch by Pavel Stehule, heavily revised by me. Reviewed by Jeff Janes and, in earlier versions, by Itagaki Takahiro and Tom Lane.
On 8th of November, Tom Lane committed patch, which doesn't provide any new features, but removes one of the more annoying footguns in PostgreSQL:
Prevent invoking I/O conversion casts via functional/attribute notation. PG 8.4 added a built-in feature for casting pretty much any data type to string types (text, varchar, etc). We allowed this to work in any of the historically-allowed syntaxes: CAST(x AS text), x::text, text(x), or x.text. However, multiple complaints have shown that it's too easy to invoke such casts unintentionally in the latter two styles, particularly field selection. To cure the problem with the narrowest possible change of behavior, disallow use of I/O conversion casts from composite types to string types via functional/attribute syntax. The new functionality is still available via cast syntax. In passing, document the equivalence of functional and attribute syntax in a more visible place.
Starting new blog series – explanation of various configuration parameters.
I will of course follow no schedule or order – if I'd had to – it would be my job, and in this way – it's fun.
First configuration parameter to write about is checkpoint_completion_target.
Continue reading Understanding postgresql.conf : checkpoint_completion_target
Finally, on 25th of October, Tom Lane committed patch which does:
Allow new values to be added to an existing enum type. After much expenditure of effort, we've got this to the point where the performance penalty is pretty minimal in typical cases. Andrew Dunstan, reviewed by Brendan Jurd, Dean Rasheed, and Tom Lane