PostgreSQL Weekly News - Mar 19th 2003 - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - Mar 19th 2003 ==

        Wow what a busy week! A lot of discussion still taking place on the
front end/ back end protocol change, much around better support for ODBC and
JDBC needs. There was also a good amount of discussion on SQL99 Array support
and the proposed patch. In fact, there are a lot of good patches being
reviewed right now so you can expect a lot more changes in the coming weeks.
For now, lets jump into some miscellaneous fixes from this week.
         We start with a fix for GROUP BY getting confused when there were
multiple equal() GROUP BY items. This issue has actually been around since
7.0, and maybe even further back, but hadn't been exposed until some recent
changes in the query parser. A patch was committed from Dave Marin to prevent
infinite loops in ln_var() due to roundoff errors; one from Bruno Wolf III
correcting a typo that was breaking ident authentication in certain cases; a
reorder of the crypt.h include for SunOS compile problems from Fred
Houweling; and eval_const_expressions now simplifies FieldSelect from a
whole-row Var into an ordinary one-field Var. This work was done based on an
example from Chris Mungall. Tom also repaired an incorrect prorettype entry
for timestamptz_izone, back-patching it with the caveat that only those who
install 7.3.3 from scratch will be able to benefit (since initdb would be
required).
        A bug report from Nick Eskelinen lead to a fix for pg_dumpall, which
failed on groups that had no members. There was also an enhancement to
now print the relevant key values when reporting a foreign-key violation. This
fix, along with some factoring out of duplicate code in the referential
integrity triggers, was submitted by Dmitry Tkach, with help from Stephan
Szabo and Tom Lane.
        In the interface library department, Michael Meskes has started work
on a separate pgtypes library. Initial testing looks positive, with
successful compile reports coming from several different platforms. A
couple of JDBC updates came through as well; one fixed the parsing to
handle \n for updateable result sets (based on a bug report from Rich
Cullingford). The other improved some error messages and added some log
messages in the batch update functionality.
        I want to make a special note of some work from Peter Eisentraut
committed this week. Peter reimplemented the createdb and dropdb scripts
in C, with vacuumdb and clusterdb to follow. There were a number of
advantages in doing this, such as reducing repetitive connections,
increasing robustness, and adding NLS. However I think a nod has to be
given to the efforts of those working on the native windows port of
PostgreSQL. Since they have to have these scripts working to run
successfully on windows, the urgency was finally there to get it done.
        One last section to cover were the number of doc fixes done this week.
A fair bit of it came in the form of cleanup, making things look more
consistent in regards to terminology used throughout the docs.  The FAQ also
received some updates including the fact that we now have confirmed a 4 TB
PostgreSQL database.  As always, you can check out the latest version of the
FAQ at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html.



== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PostgreSQL Manager 1.4 released
http://www.ems-hitech.com/news.phtml?id=336

Mioga 1.2.2 Released.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/mioga/



== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Free Software behind Indian telephone directory
http://lwn.net/Articles/25694/

PlatinumSolutions, Inc. with PostgreSQL, Inc.
http://www.pgsql.com/press/CAP_PSI.html



== 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 - March 19th 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