PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 2nd 2003 - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 2nd 2003 ==

    Another fun-filled week in PostgreSQL land has passed. It was
relatively quit compared to the activity of the last few weeks, but the
steady progression toward 7.4 does continue. As always, lets start with
the bug squashing and other miscellaneous fixes. Tom Lane improved the
SET DEFAULT referential integrity triggers based on a bug report from
Adrian Pop. A bug report from Robert Bruccoleri led to a fix where
TestConfiguration to return bool instead of int. This bug was
interesting in the fact that it had been in since 7.1, however since it
is relatively harmless on signed-char machines, it had never been
reported until now. Tom also added some sanity checks to the page header
fields when it's read in. He added a new GUC variable
"zero_damaged_pages" based on Hiroshi Inoue's suggestion to leave a way
to get at the data. This work was based on some -hackers list
discussion. We also saw a bug fix for SSL support in libpq thanks to
Sergey N. Yatskevich.
    Everyones favorite console program, psql, saw several enhancements put
in this week. I'd like to give a personal thanks to Ian Barwick for his
work, part of which included enhanced tab completion for more of the
slash commands, like \dv.  He also took a crack at adding tab completion
for schemas, and tables with partial schema matches. Christopher
Kings-Lynne worked up a new formatting for the \d command which should
improve legibility for table information. Christopher also supplied a
patch for pg_dump to add ALTER TABLE CLUSTER ON capability to preserve
cluster settings.  Also pg_dump, Laurent Faillie has reworked the order
of language creation to make restore more consistent and Rod Taylor made
it skip START WITH in sequence definitions when it's the default value
and hasn't been called yet. This fixed a problem where it wasn't
supplied due to being NULL.
    A couple of interface and module developments worth mentioning; the
plpython regression tests were fixed to work around the fact that the
order of keys in a dictionary is non-deterministic, varying depending on
python build. Thanks to Mike Meyer for that work. Contrib/ltree saw the
additions of function index(ltree,ltree,offset) text2ltree(text), and
ltree2text(ltree), and DBD:PG releases version 1.22 last week.
    Rounding things out this week, Alvaro Herrera did some work cleaning up
the deferred trigger mechanism, removing unneeded memory context and
variables that were no longer used. They weren't major changes, but some
early fruits from his exploration into adding nested transactions. Last
but not least, Neil Conway has knocked of yet another TODO item, "Allow
cursors outside transactions".  Essentially it implements holdable
cursors based on materialization into a tuple store. Along with this he
added NO SCROLL keyword to DECLARE CURSOR, and adjusted SCROLL's
behavior as discussed on the -hackers mailing list.



== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PHP Nuke 6.5 released
http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?category=software&id=9966

dbdpg 1.22 released
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-interfaces/2003-03/msg00163.php



== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Tool Automatically Converts SQL Queries
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,990210,00.asp



== Upcoming Events ==

Novell BrainShare: Salt Lake City, Utah: April 13-18
A PostgreSQL session including install, configure, administration, and
interfacing with PHP
http://www.novell.com/brainshare

Open Source Conference: Portland, Oregon: July 7-11
A PostgreSQL track will be available at this years conference.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2003



== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 2nd 2003 ==

Don't forget to read Elein Mustain's Weekly Summary of the PostgreSQL
General Mailing List http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

On the Web:
http://www.postgresql.org
http://advocacy.postgresql.org