Hectic autumn

Wow, this autumn is turning out really hectic. Which can also be read as very interesting /mha/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /

Apart from helping out with the final touches of PostgreSQL 8.1 (now in beta! Download and test!) and finishing off the 8.1 installer, I'm also involved in the Slony on win32 project Dave has been referring to.

Apart from coding up the win32 port of Slony, this also means I'll be going to Tokyo to deliver a talk on it /mha/templates/default/img/emoticons/laugh.png alt=":-D" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" / Which is going to be really interesting - a big thanks to Hiroshi for setting this up!

And finally, I'm also a co-speaker with Simon Riggs on Euro OSCON in Amsterdam, on the topic of PostgreSQL in the Enterprise. My part of the talk will deal with win32 issues, such as Active Directory integration. If you're a PostgreSQL user or developer, I'll look forward to meeting you there!

Oh, and on top of this, all the normal stuff at work of course /mha/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" / So there will certainly not be many boring moments.

dblink-ldap on win32

Just a quick note that I now have dblink-ldap running fine on win32. I have some performance issues in my lab environment, but I think I've tracked them down to a broken DNS setup. Will need to try it again in a better environment in the next couple of days.

Let me know if you want to test it and I can send you a binary of what I have now.

Not caught up

I'm back for my around-two-weeks of vacation - much needed, and turned out very well.

Meanwhile, Dave has done a lot of work on the installer, and even put out a beta release.

Still leaves the break-out-account-creation part for me to do, but a lot of the other TODO items have been ticked off. Great work Dave!

Dave Page joins core

Dave Page has been added to PostgreSQL core, so now the win32 team has a representative there! Not to mention the website team. For these reasons and others I believe Dave is a great choice for the core team.

Congratulations, Dave!

pginstaller for 8.1

Got together with Dave this monday as I was visiting the UK. Didn't have much time to do anything productive, but we did get some discussion going on what to do about pginstaller for 8.1. Some highlights:

• User creation has to be moved to the execute sequence. This probably shouldn't be too hard now. It was when we first added it, but things have changed since. This would also mean it could easily be exposed to silent installs, which is a much requested feature.
• We need to move libpq.dll out of SYSTEM32. The current working model for this is to just remove the ability to move binaries between different directories, and force them into the same directory. Then we just stick libpq.dll there, and the problem is solved. We still need to do some testing on how this will effect the ODBC driver (the new one uses libpq), especially if you have 8.0 installed with libpq.dll in SYSTEM32.
• Slony will definitly be included, assuming the win32 version is stable and released. But that's the hope.

Of course, we're going to try to tick off anything else that is on the feature tracker on pgfoundry. If anybody wants to help out, now's a great time to start feeding patches :-)

And Dave - nice meeting you! Looking forward to the next time - most likely in Tokyo for the Slony talk!

Slony-win32 service

I have submitted a patch that runs Slony as a service on Win32. It supports multiple parallell engines (if you need to replicate more than one database) if needed.

Still needs a few things polished up (installation/uninstallation, registration of multiple engines etc) but I'd say win32 Slony is progressing very nicely. (Much of these things will probably be available in the installer and pgAdmin as well, but we'll need commandline interfaces as well)

Unicode on win32

As many PostgreSQL users are aware, PostgreSQL 8.0 does not fully support Unicode on win32 due to limitations in the API. Hopefully this will be fixed in 8.1, as we now have two different patches that solves this problem in different ways. The patches were posted a little over a week ago, but due to me sending it to the wrong list it didn't go through because of size. It has now been sent to -patches as well, and is available.

People interested in this are encouraged to apply one or both patches (the native patch is a whole lot easier than the ICU one, as it has much fewer dependencies) and test, test, test! You can grab the patches from the list archive. Let us know your results by a mail to -hackers-win32 or plain -hackers.

Slony on win32 progressing nicely

As of a couple of days ago, the Slony replication engine now runs on Windows.

First of all, this is far from finished work. It's just the initial part that has it up and running and doing simple replication. There are many details still left to iron out. The most noticable ones being support for running as a service and logging to eventlog, but there are others as well.

The changes so far have been smaller than I anticipated. Dave has done a bunch of work on the build system, and the slonik utility has also seen a couple of win32 specific patches not too long ago. But the slon engine is the toughest part, and so far things are looking promising for a patch that's not very disturbing to the rest of the code.

While far from being ready to put in production, if you are looking into deploying Slony on win32 in the future, now is a good time to start playing around with it. Get the latest cvs snapshot, build, and test. And the most important part, give us some feedback on how things are working...

GiST concurrency

Wow. This was pretty fast. On top of the WAL fixes, GiST concurrency fixes are now in, courtesy of Teodor and Oleg (and possibly others? Those are just the ones I know of..) With time to spare before 8.1. Great job guys!

I know at least one of my projects where this feature alone will make me upgrade to 8.1 the day it is released.

Midsummer

Midsummer coming up tomorrow, which means no PostgreSQL hacking for me for a couple of days. (Don't know what midsummer actually means? Visit Sweden for it once, and you'll know..) Once it's over, it's just a couple of days left to the feature freeze...

I got hold of Palle regarding the ICU patch, and it looks like it'll be ready in time for the freeze. Minor things left, and then I'll have to fix up the win32 build issues (which can be done, as I've done it hackishly before).

The issues of SIGTERM-to-a-backend are back up for discussion. Unsurprisingly, my very hackish idea for a pg_terminate_backend() function based on a flag in shared memory is not going in. Let's just hope that Tom (or someone else, but I'll bet it's going to be Tom eventually) figures out what's bad with the current behaviour (as lock table corruption has been reported) and can get a proper fix in before 8.1.

And I'll not even get into the discussion about the server instrumentation functions at this time...

As for the rest of the open items, I have no idea.. There's a lot of good stuff there, I hope it all gets in.

Happy Midsummer!