== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 8th 2003 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 8th 2003 ==

        As mentioned in last weeks news, 7.3.5 was released last week, with
the official announcement going out on Thursday. This should be the last of
the 7.3.x series and is generally intended as a hold over for folks who can
not upgrade to 7.4.x right way. The changelog was made available in the
release announcement (see link below), and as usual for revision releases, a
dump/restore is NOT required.

        Speaking of 7.4.x, in an effort to coordinate between schedules, the
core team is tentatively planning for a 7.4.1 release on December 15th,
hopefully more details on that next week as things get nailed down. In the
mean time, here is a run down of the latest fixes to come through for 7.4.x:
A bug with views not properly showing their check constraints was fixed. A
number of issues with indexed bytea like operations where repaired. Both the
netmask() and hotmask() functions now return the maximum-length masklen now.
Brian Hirt sent in a patch that allows pg_autovacuum to work properly with
truncated tables. Craig Boston sent a fix for pg_autovacuum segfaulting on
some platforms when a logfile is not specified. A patch to allow contrib/cube
to build cleanly with Cygwin (again). Finally, a work around was put into
place for dealing with a bug in Solaris' bsearch() function.

        Of course 7.5 development is still going strong. Gavin Sherry
submitted a patch implementing a factorial() function that will return
numeric. Manfred Koizar spent some time cleaning up much of the lock manager
code. Markus Bertheau has added group display to the \du command in psql, and
a \dg command as well. Christopher Kings-Lynne finished up his work on making
views use pretty printing, including their index and rule definitions. He
also supplied a patch to add argument text to the help for \lo commands in
psql. Neil Conway pushed things one step closer to deprecating OIDs on user
tables by submitting a GUC for "default_with_oids". This GUC will control
whether user tables are created with OIDs. The default will be true in 7.5,
but will become false in a future release. Joe Conway added some GUCs as well
to expose some compile time information, including maximum number of function
arguments and maximum name length information among others. Last, but
certainly not least, was a good size overhaul of pg_dump object ordering,
based now on the dependency information in pg_depend, to determine a safe
dump order. Tom Lane was behind most of the work on this, and has asked those
for those interested in testing to build from cvs and then test various dump
scenarios, including dumps from older versions as well.



== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PostgreSQL 7.3.5 Update Released
http://www.postgresql.org/news/164.html

dbExperts Launches Replication System
http://www.postgresql.org/news/165.html

Positive Software Releases H-Sphere VPS 1.1
http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/pos120403.cfm

PostgreSQL Hierarchical Queries 0.4
http://gppl.terminal.ru/index.eng.html



== PostgreSQL In the News ==

PostgreSQL featured on cover of SQL Magazine
http://www.postgresql.org/news/166.html

Red Hat focuses enterprise efforts with Advanced Server 3.0
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/12/05/48TCredhat_1.html

Linux Lunch
http://www.linuxworld.com/story/34257.htm?DE=1



== Upcoming Events ==

Linux.Conf.Au: Adelaide, Australia: January 12-17
BOF and Tutorials presented by Gavin Sherry
http://lca2004.linux.org.au.

NordU Usenix 2004: Denmark: January 28 - February 1
Bruce Momjian will be giving PostgreSQL several tutorials
http://www.nordu.org/NordU2004/

Linux Solutions 2004: Paris, France: February 4-6
Bruce Momjian will be presenting
http://www.linuxsolutions.fr/EN/home/index.php?site=default



== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 8th 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