Thursday, June 20, 2013

A literate client comments on Postgres

Some clients are more fun than others. Today, after I told one client of a long standing feature of Postgres that he was unaware of, he channelled his inner bard and sent me this email:

Steve:
How beauteous this software is!
O brave new database
That has such commands in't!

Andrew:
'Tis new to thee. 
 (To save you looking it up, he's adapting a well known passage in The Tempest).

Things like this make my day.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Release 4.11 of PostgreSQL Buildfarm client

Version 4.11 of the PostgreSQL Buildfarm client has been released. It can be downloaded from http://www.pgbuildfarm.org/downloads/releases/build-farm-4_11.tgz

Changes since 4.10:

  • Turn down module cleanup verbosity
  • Add check for rogue postmasters.
  • Add pseudo-branch targets HEAD_PLUS_LATEST and HEAD_PLUS_LATEST2.
  • Use Digest::SHA instead of Digest::SHA1.
  • Make directory handling more robust in git code.
  • Move web transaction into a module procedure.
  • Switch to using the porcelain format of git status.
  • Provide parameter for core file patterns.
  • Use a command file for gdb instead of the -ex option

The web transaction and Digest::SHA changes have allowed the removal of a couple of long-standing uglinesses on the system. In almost all cases, the config parameter "aux_path" and the separate run_web_transaction.pl script are now redundant (the exception is older Msys systems).


Enjoy

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

This is what beta is for

Today on IRC someone who has been testing out the new JSON stuff complained about a case I hadn't catered for, namely someone representing a Unicode character outside the Basic Multilingual Plane as a surrogate pair of characters constructed with the '\u' JSON escape. This is explicitly allowed in the JSON spec, so it needs to be handled. It's going to be a bit ugly to fix this, I suspect, but I'm glad to find out about it now rather than later. Thank goodness for beta testers.