== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 12th 2004 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 12th 2004 ==

     Things started cranking back up this week now that folks have returned from
the holidays. One area where especially good progress has been made is on the
win32 port. This week saw the committing of a pipe implementation and most of
the fork/exec issues being worked out. I asked Claudio Natoli, one of the
driving programmers on the win32 port, for his thoughts on it, and he felt
pretty good that the bulk of fork/exec had been taken care of. Of course in
true programmer fashion, he qualified that comment by saying "there are still
some bits around the edges that will go in over the next few weeks". Still,
this is a significant step toward a working win32 port, and those hacking
things out should take pride in that.

    In other development news this week, there were a number of improvements made
to the optimizers IQ. Improvements were made to extract OR indexscan
conditions from OR-of-AND join conditions where each OR subclause includes a
constraint on the same relation. It also now better detects cases when input
(such as a subquery using SELECT DISTINCT) is already unique to prevent
redundant unique-ification. The intelligence of the partial-index predicate
tester was also improved to handle commuted clauses (4<x implies x>3),
subclauses more complicated than a simple var (upper(x) = 't' implies
upper(x)>'a'), and <> operators (x<3 implies x<>4).

    A couple of improvements to psql got done including having psql \dn show only
visible temp schemas using current_schemas() and haveing psql '\i
~/<tab><tab>' actually load files it displays from the home dir. Some initial
pieces from Dennis Bjorklund's patch to allow function parameters to be
declared with names was committed. There are still some parts regarding
documentation, interaction with psql, and pl's other than plpgsql that need
work, but this lays the groundwork for it. A bug with the createuser program
generating improper sql when the -E flag was used without -P was fixed,
thanks to Martin Pitt for the report and fix. WITH/WITHOUT OIDS was
implemented in the CREATE TABLE AS command. This feature is intended to allow
application authors to insulate themselves from changes to the default value
of 'default_with_oids' in future releases of PostgreSQL. Last, but not least,
CREATE TRIGGER, CREATE INDEX, and CREATE SEQUENCE were added to the list of
expressions supported by CREATE SCHEMA.

    One final note, after much discussion on several of the mailing lists, a
newly minted version of pljava was released on gborg this past week. On the
project page (http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pljava/projdisplay.php) you
will find links to technology explanations and how to get started.



== PostgreSQL Product News ==

The FreeGIS Team announces release 1.0.0 of Thuban Geographic Information Tool
http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/dailynews/2004/jan/09/news5.html

pgExpress Driver v2.20 released
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2004-01/msg00008.php

Updated Cygwin Package: postgresql-7.4.1-2
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2004-01/msg00007.php

Callisto Small Buisness Management Software Released
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2004-01/msg00004.php

PostgreSQL Hierarchical Queries 0.5-Pg7.3
http://freshmeat.net/projects/hier_pg/?branch_id=35539&release_id=147293&topic_id=66



== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Choosing An Open Source Database
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1433738,00.asp

Cross - platform client - server backups .
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/01/09/bacula.html

Database Wars: Oracle vs. Microsoft
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=22767&category=databases

Interview with the MAASK Team discussing shared distributed memory
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7341&mode=&order=0



== Upcoming Events ==

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

LinuxWorld: New York, New York: January 21
Bruce Momjian will host a PostgreSQL BoF
http://www.postgresql.org/event.php?EventID=180

New York PHP Meeting: New York, New York: January 27
Bruce Momjian will be presenting an introduction to PostgreSQL
http://nyphp.org/content/calendar/view_entry.php?id=50&date=20040127

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 3-5
Bruce Momjian will be presenting
http://www.solutionslinux.fr/en/index.php


== PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 12th 2004 ==
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