hosting product, on both shared and dedicated machines. We currently
offer Oracle and MySQL, and it would be a nice middle-ground.
However, as shipped, PostgreSQL lacks the following features we need
that MySQL has:
1. The ability to listen only on a particular IP address. Each
hosting customer has their own IP address, on which all of their
servers (http, ftp, real media, etc.) run.
2. The ability to place the Unix-domain socket in a mode 700 directory.
This allows us to automatically create an empty database, with an
empty DBA password, for new or upgrading customers without having
to interactively set a DBA password and communicate it to (or from)
the customer. This in turn cuts down our install and upgrade times.
3. The ability to connect to the Unix-domain socket from within a
change-rooted environment. We run CGI programs chrooted to the
user's home directory, which is another reason why we need to be
able to specify where the Unix-domain socket is, instead of /tmp.
4. The ability to, if run as root, open a pid file in /var/run as
root, and then setuid to the desired user. (mysqld -u can almost
do this; I had to patch it, too).
The patch below fixes problem 1-3. I plan to address #4, also, but
haven't done so yet. These diffs are big enough that they should give
the PG development team something to think about in the meantime :-)
Also, I'm about to leave for 2 weeks' vacation, so I thought I'd get
out what I have, which works (for the problems it tackles), now.
With these changes, we can set up and run PostgreSQL with scripts the
same way we can with apache or proftpd or mysql.
In summary, this patch makes the following enhancements:
1. Adds an environment variable PGUNIXSOCKET, analogous to MYSQL_UNIX_PORT,
and command line options -k --unix-socket to the relevant programs.
2. Adds a -h option to postmaster to set the hostname or IP address to
listen on instead of the default INADDR_ANY.
3. Extends some library interfaces to support the above.
4. Fixes a few memory leaks in PQconnectdb().
The default behavior is unchanged from stock 7.0.2; if you don't use
any of these new features, they don't change the operation.
David J. MacKenzie
backend functions via backend PQexec(). The SPI interface has long
been our only documented way to do this, and the backend pqexec/portal
code is unused and suffering bit-rot. I'm putting it out of its misery.
can be generated in a buffer and then sent to the frontend in a single
libpq call. This solves problems with NOTICE and ERROR messages generated
in the middle of a data message or COPY OUT operation.
Here's another patch for the libpq backend areas. This patch removes all
usage of "FILE *" on the communications channel. It also cleans up the
comments and headers in the pqcomm.c file - a lot of things were either
missing or incorrect. Finally, it removes a couple of unused functions
(leftovers from the time of shared code between the libpq backend and
frontend).
Here is a first patch to cleanup the backend side of libpq.
This patch removes all external dependencies on the "Pfin" and "Pfout" that
are declared in pqcomm.h. These variables are also changed to "static" to
make sure.
Almost all the change is in the handler of the "copy" command - most other
areas of the backend already used the correct functions.
This change will make the way for cleanup of the internal stuff there - now
that all the functions accessing the file descriptors are confined to a
single directory.
Making PQrequestCancel safe to call in a signal handler turned out to be
much easier than I feared. So here are the diffs.
Some notes:
* I modified the postmaster's packet "iodone" callback interface to allow
the callback routine to return a continue-or-drop-connection return
code; this was necessary to allow the connection to be closed after
receiving a Cancel, rather than proceeding to launch a new backend...
Being a neatnik, I also made the iodone proc have a typechecked
parameter list.
* I deleted all code I could find that had to do with OOB.
* I made some edits to ensure that all signals mentioned in the code
are referred to symbolically not by numbers ("SIGUSR2" not "2").
I think Bruce may have already done at least some of the same edits;
I hope that merging these patches is not too painful.
I have implemented a framework of encoding translation between the
backend and the frontend. Also I have added a new variable setting
command:
SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'encoding';
Other features include:
Latin1 support more 8 bit cleaness
See doc/README.mb for more details. Note that the pacthes are
against May 30 snapshot.
Tatsuo Ishii
I've completed the patch to fix the protocol and authentication issues I
was discussing a couple of weeks ago. The particular changes are:
- the protocol has a version number
- network byte order is used throughout
- the pg_hba.conf file is used to specify what method is used to
authenticate a frontend (either password, ident, trust, reject, krb4
or krb5)
- support for multiplexed backends is removed
- appropriate changes to man pages
- the -a switch to many programs to specify an authentication service
no longer has any effect
- the libpq.so version number has changed to 1.1
The new backend still supports the old protocol so old interfaces won't
break.
