== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 26th 2003 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 26th 2003 ==

    7.4 Beta testing rolls on this week. Beta4 is still a bit off, so if
you haven't downloaded beta3 yet there's no need to hesitate. There
weren't as many code changes this week in the core code, with most of
the action taking place in the areas of JDBC and ecpg. Hopefully  that
is a good thing :-)

    JDBC fixes this week include a fix to correctly report that constraints
are supported, some fixes for better handling of boolean values, proper
handling of empty queries with V3 protocol, some clean up for incorrect
type reporting by PREPARE, a fix to handle timezone offsets that are in
partial hours, and an update for the regression tests. Thanks to Kim Ho,
Oliver Jowett, and Barry Lind for all their efforts.

    On the ecpg front we saw a change to remove a superfluous return
statement in get_data, a typo in the preprocessor was fixed, strndup()
function was renamed to avoid name clashes, and the parser was synced
up.  It will now Accept output variables for FETCH in DECLARE
statements, and some Informix handling of datatype conversion errors was
put in. Struct definition handling was changed so that "struct foo {}"
is always defined, an order mismatch in processing "using" arguments was
fixed, and some test case issues were worked out.

    More general fixes this week included a change in compiler flags for
compiling with newer versions of gcc on Apple,  applying ranlib(1) after
installing a static (.a) library on Darwin, disallowing foreign-key
references from temp tables to permanent tables (based on recent
discussions), reworking of some ifdefs in pgtypeslib, ensuring
_SPI_cursor_operation checks for failure return from _SPI_begin_call,
fixing HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum() to be more careful about the
difference between INSERT_IN_PROGRESS and DELETE_IN_PROGRESS for tuples
inserted and then deleted by a concurrent transaction, tweaking the
generic_type_consistency routines to avoid loss of functionality in
'select array_dims(histogram_bounds) from pg_stats' case, vaccumlo was
given some better defenses against dropped columns, and a couple of
schema-awareness issues it had were also fixed. The pg_dump program got
a couple of fixes including ensuring survival of comments attached to a
primary key or unique constraint within pg_dump, consistently using SET
SESSION AUTHORIZATION rather than the old \connect method, and having
CREATE SCHEMA now issued as the originally connecting user, but with an
AUZTHORIZATION clause to specify the desired owner. Finally, an
interesting patch from Manfred Spraul was committed this week that
arranges things to align shared disk buffers on at least 32-byte
boundaries, not just MAXALIGN boundaries.  This makes a noticeable
difference in the speed of transfers to and from kernel space, at least
on recent Pentiums, and hopefully will help other CPUs too.

    Rounding out things as usual is our volley of doc changes. Areas
Modifications this week were adding some more details for postmaster and
postgres signal handling, documenting that TRUNCATE ignores user-defined
ON DELETE triggers, rearranging the SQL command synopses to appear less
random, some copy editing on the plpgsql chapter, and a bunch of
spelling mistakes were fixed.



== PostgreSQL Product News ==

GNU BIS launches open source CRM app
http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/03/09/19/1251221.shtml?tid=3



== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Put Apache to the Stress Test
http://www.phparch.com/news/609

Practical RDF
http://books.slashdot.org/books/03/09/18/0410238.shtml

Thoughts on RedSheriff using PostgreSQL (blog)
http://blogtronika.blogspot.com/



== Upcoming Events ==

PHP-Con West: Santa Clara, California: October 21-24
Josh Berkus & Erez Ascher, and Steve Lane are giving two presentations
on PHP + PostgreSQL
http://www.php-con.com

LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2003: Frankfurt, Germany : October 27-29
PostgreSQL will have a booth at the LinuxWorld Conference
http://www.linuxworldexpo.de/

International PHP Conference: Frankfurt, Germany: November 2-5
Bruce Momjian will be presenting several PostgreSQL talks at this year's
International PHP Conference.
http://www.phpconference.de/2003/



== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 26th 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