> * -Allow ORDER BY ... LIMIT # to select high/low value without sort or
<
<   Right now, if no index exists, ORDER BY ... LIMIT # requires we sort
<   all values to return the high/low value.  Instead The idea is to do a
<   sequential scan to find the high/low value, thus avoiding the sort.
<   MIN/MAX already does this, but not for LIMIT > 1.
<

actual sort strategy and amount of space used.  By popular demand.

Make clearer how arguments and return values in pl/perl are escaped. This is to clarify the situation that Theo Schlossnagle recently reported on -bugs.

and for other compilers, insert a dummy exit() call so that they understand
PG_RE_THROW() doesn't return.  Insert fflush(stderr) in ExceptionalCondition,
per recent buildfarm evidence that that might not happen automatically on some
platforms.  And const-ify ExceptionalCondition's declaration while at it.

need be returned.  We keep a heap of the current best N tuples and sift-up
new tuples into it as we scan the input.  For M input tuples this means
only about M*log(N) comparisons instead of M*log(M), not to mention a lot
less workspace when N is small --- avoiding spill-to-disk for large M
is actually the most attractive thing about it.  Patch includes planner
and executor support for invoking this facility in ORDER BY ... LIMIT
queries.  Greg Stark, with some editorialization by moi.

pages it intends to zero immediately.  Just to show there is some use for that
function besides WAL recovery :-).
Along the way, fold _hash_checkpage and _hash_pageinit calls into _hash_getbuf
and friends, instead of expecting callers to do that separately.

the relevant fixes to 8.2 as well.

for local symbols, that shouldn't be exported. This patch excludes them,
cutting down about 10,000 exported symbols and decreasing the binary size
by 20%.

ReadOrZeroBuffer to fetch pages from beyond physical EOF.  This would
usually work, but would cause problems for md.c if writes occurred
beyond a segment boundary when the previous segment file hadn't been
fully extended.

from the WAL data, don't bother to physically read it; just have bufmgr.c
return a zeroed-out buffer instead.  This speeds recovery significantly,
and also avoids unnecessary failures when a page-to-be-overwritten has corrupt
page headers on disk.  This replaces a former kluge that accomplished the
latter by pretending zero_damaged_pages was always ON during WAL recovery;
which was OK when the kluge was put in, but is unsafe when restoring a WAL
log that was written with full_page_writes off.

Heikki Linnakangas

true at the very end of its processing, the update is broadcast via a
shared-cache-inval message for the index; without this, existing backends that
already have relcache entries for the index might never see it become valid.
Also, force a relcache inval on the index's parent table at the same time,
so that any cached plans for that table are re-planned; this ensures that
the newly valid index will be used if appropriate.  Aside from making
C.I.C. behave more reasonably, this is necessary infrastructure for some
aspects of the HOT patch.  Pavan Deolasee, with a little further stuff from
me.

and TimestampDifference, to make coding clearer.  I think this should also fix
the failure to start workers in platforms with low resolution timers, as
reported by Itagaki Takahiro.

could happen when a worker took to long to start and was thus "aborted" by the
launcher.  Noticed by lionfish buildfarm member.

isn't any place to throw the error to.  If so, we should treat the error
as FATAL, just as we would have if it'd been thrown outside the PG_TRY
block to begin with.

Although this is clearly a *potential* source of bugs, it is not clear
at the moment whether it is an *actual* source of bugs; there may not
presently be any PG_TRY blocks in code that can be reached with no outer
longjmp catcher.  So for the moment I'm going to be conservative and not
back-patch this.  The change breaks ABI for users of PG_RE_THROW and hence
might create compatibility problems for loadable modules, so we should not
put it into released branches without proof that it's needed.

the install.

Dave Page

wrong thing when inlining polymorphic SQL functions, because it was using the
function's declared return type where it should have used the actual result
type of the current call.  In 8.1 and 8.2 this causes obvious failures even if
you don't have assertions turned on; in 8.0 and 7.4 it would only be a problem
if the inlined expression were used as an input to a function that did
run-time type determination on its inputs.  Add a regression test, since this
is evidently an under-tested area.

from time_t to TimestampTz representation.  This provides full gettimeofday()
resolution of the timestamps, which might be useful when attempting to
do point-in-time recovery --- previously it was not possible to specify
the stop point with sub-second resolution.  But mostly this is to get
rid of TimestampTz-to-time_t conversion overhead during commit.  Per my
proposal of a day or two back.

still be forced out at backend exit.

messages to the stats collector.  This avoids the problem that enabling
stats_row_level for autovacuum has a significant overhead for short
read-only transactions, as noted by Arjen van der Meijden.  We can avoid
an extra gettimeofday call by piggybacking on the one done for WAL-logging
xact commit or abort (although that doesn't help read-only transactions,
since they don't WAL-log anything).

In my proposal for this, I noted that we could change the WAL log entries
for commit/abort to record full TimestampTz precision, instead of only
time_t as at present.  That's not done in this patch, but will be committed
separately.

to copy nodes that are known to be Vars during plan reference adjustment.
Saves useless memzero operation as well as the big switch in copyObject.

We can just palloc, instead of using makeNode, when we are going to
overwrite the whole node anyway in the FLATCOPY macro.  Also, use
FLATCOPY instead of copyObject for common node types Var and Const.

look through a freelist for a chunk of adequate size.  For a long time
now, all elements of a given freelist have been exactly the same
allocated size, so we don't need a loop.  Since the loop never iterated
more than once, you'd think this wouldn't matter much, but it makes a
noticeable savings in a simple test --- perhaps because the compiler
isn't optimizing on a mistaken assumption that the loop would repeat.
AllocSetAlloc is called often enough that saving even a couple of
instructions is worthwhile.

< * Make standard_conforming_strings the default in 8.3?
> * Make standard_conforming_strings the default in 8.4?

< 		o Add support for MOVE and SCROLL cursors
<
< 		  PL/pgSQL cursors should support the same syntax as
< 		  backend cursors.
<
> 		o -Add support for MOVE cursors
> 		o Add support for SCROLL cursors

by Pavel Stehule, and reviewed by Neil Conway.

for consistency with the backend's FETCH command. Patch from Pavel
Stehule, reviewed by Neil Conway.

types of unspecified parameters when submitted via extended query protocol.
This worked in 8.2 but I had broken it during plancache changes.  DECLARE
CURSOR is now treated almost exactly like a plain SELECT through parse
analysis, rewrite, and planning; only just before sending to the executor
do we divert it away to ProcessUtility.  This requires a special-case check
in a number of places, but practically all of them were already special-casing
SELECT INTO, so it's not too ugly.  (Maybe it would be a good idea to merge
the two by treating IntoClause as a form of utility statement?  Not going to
worry about that now, though.)  That approach doesn't work for EXPLAIN,
however, so for that I punted and used a klugy solution of running parse
analysis an extra time if under extended query protocol.

now enables row-level stats, the out of the box stats volume is no
longer particularly low.

on directory name. Fixes the generation of .sql files in contrib/spi.

Per complaint from Dave Page.

is in progress on the same hashtable.  This seems the least invasive way to
fix the recently-recognized problem that a split could cause the scan to
visit entries twice or (with much lower probability) miss them entirely.
The only field-reported problem caused by this is the "failed to re-find
shared lock object" PANIC in COMMIT PREPARED reported by Michel Dorochevsky,
which was caused by multiply visited entries.  However, it seems certain
that mdsync() is vulnerable to missing required fsync's due to missed
entries, and I am fearful that RelationCacheInitializePhase2() might be at
risk as well.  Because of that and the generalized hazard presented by this
bug, back-patch all the supported branches.

Along the way, fix pg_prepared_statement() and pg_cursor() to not assume
that the hashtables they are examining will stay static between calls.
This is risky regardless of the newly noted dynahash problem, because
hash_seq_search() has never promised to cope with deletion of table entries
other than the just-returned one.  There may be no bug here because the only
supported way to call these functions is via ExecMakeTableFunctionResult()
which will cycle them to completion before doing anything very interesting,
but it seems best to get rid of the assumption.  This affects 8.2 and HEAD
only, since those functions weren't there earlier.

completing CREATE { TEMP | TEMPORARY } TABLE, we should also suggest
VIEW and SEQUENCE. Per Greg Sabino Mullane.

table entries describing functions with periods.

we can complete "TABLE". The previous coding only looked for "CREATE TEMP".

Note that I didn't add TEMPORARY to the list of suggested completions
after we've seen "CREATE", since TEMP is equivalent and more concise. But
if the user has already manually typed TEMPORARY, we may as well
complete TABLE for them.

RESET SESSION, RESET PLANS, and RESET TEMP are now DISCARD ALL,
DISCARD PLANS, and DISCARD TEMP, respectively. This is to avoid
confusion with the pre-existing RESET variants: the DISCARD
commands are not actually similar to RESET. Patch from Marko
Kreen, with some minor editorialization.