review/feedback if anyone is interested and can spend the time. But I'd
also love to get this committed and address changes as incremental
patches ;-), so if there are no objections, please apply.

Below I'll give a synopsis of the changes. More detailed descriptions
are now in a new doc directory under contrib/dblink. There is also a new

dblink.test.sql file which will give a pretty good overview of the
functions and their use.

Joe Conway

array header, and to compute sizing and alignment of array elements
the same way normal tuple access operations do --- viz, using the
tupmacs.h macros att_addlength and att_align.  This makes the world
safe for arrays of cstrings or intervals, and should make it much
easier to write array-type-polymorphic functions; as examples see
the cleanups of array_out and contrib/array_iterator.  By Joe Conway
and Tom Lane.

code review by Tom Lane.  Remaining issues: functions that take or
return tuple types are likely to break if one drops (or adds!)
a column in the table defining the type.  Need to think about what
to do here.

Along the way: some code review for recent COPY changes; mark system
columns attnotnull = true where appropriate, per discussion a month ago.

Steven Singer

From Joe Conway.

yesterday's proposal to pghackers.  Also remove unnecessary parameters
to heap_beginscan, heap_rescan.  I modified pg_proc.h to reflect the
new numbers of parameters for the AM interface routines, but did not
force an initdb because nothing actually looks at those fields.

objections.

Major changes:
   - removed cursor wrap around input sql to allow for remote
     execution of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE
   - dblink now returns a resource id instead of a real pointer
   - added several utility functions

I'm still hoping to add explicit cursor open/fetch/close support before
7.3 is released, but I need a bit more time on that.

On a somewhat unrelated topic, I never got any feedback on the
unknownin/out patch and the mb_substring patch. Is there anything else I
need to do to get those applied?

Joe Conway

>>to change the README in contrib/dblink?
>>
>
> No, I don't think that's a problem.  Send a patch.
>

Here's a (documentation only) patch for the contrib/dblink README.

Joe Conway

initdb/regression tests pass.

spacing.  Also adds space for one-line comments.

tests pass.

written a generic framework of rules that the contrib makefiles can
use instead of writing their own each time.  You only need to set a few
variables and off you go.

around.  I tested this patch under Cygwin and Linux.

Note that I only changed dblink's Makefile in the most minimal way
to fix the link problem under Cygwin (i.e., use the link rule from
Makefile.shlib instead).  dblink's Makefile should probably be further
patched to be consistent with the other PostgreSQL Makefiles.

Jason Tishler

Cygwin with the possible exception of mSQL-interface.  Since I don't
have mSQL installed, I skipped this tool.

Except for dealing with a missing getopt.h (oid2name) and HUGE (seg),
the bulk of the patch uses the standard PostgreSQL approach to deal with
Windows DLL issues.

I tested the build aspect of this patch under Cygwin and Linux without
any ill affects.  Note that I did not actually attempt to test the code
for functionality.

The procedure to apply the patch is as follows:

    $ # save the attachment as /tmp/contrib.patch
    $ # change directory to the top of the PostgreSQL source tree
    $ patch -p0 </tmp/contrib.patch

Jason

   - fixed dblink invalid pointer causing corrupt elog message
   - fixed dblink_tok improper handling of null results
   - fixed examples in README.dblink

Joe Conway

Joe Conway