== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 6th 2004 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 6th 2004 ==

        Having passed the July 1st deadline, we are now officially in feature
freeze. That means that any patches that introduce new features will be held
off until the next development cycle. What type of patches will be accepted?
Bugfixes, clean up of loose ends on new features, and documentation
improvements are all welcome. The core team is currently targetting July 15th
for the first official beta release, but we'll keep you posted as development
progresses.

        Several outstanding patches were committed this week as the
patch-queue was cleared out. The fuzzymatch module in contrib added double
metaphone code, and metaphone was changed so that an empty input string
causes an empty output string to be returned rather than toss an ERROR.
Operators for interval-plus-datetime were fleshed out for better SQL
compliance. Two procedural languages received updates this week as well. The
first involved a changing in the parsing of FOR loops in plpgsql so that the
integer-loop-vs-query-loop decision is driven off the presence of '..'
between IN and LOOP, rather than the presence of a matching record/row
variable name. This means that the general error for mistyped record
variables will now give a more meaningful error message than one referencing
'..'. The other involved several upgrades to the plperl module thanks to the
folks at Command Prompt and several developers who organized themselves on
www.pgfoundry.org.  New functionality includes shared data and namespace
support, trigger support, support for returning records, spi_exec
functionality, and the ability to return "record" and "setof record".

        So what else will be in this next release?  With the caveat that these
features could be removed during the beta cycle, most of the big name
features made it in under the wire including nested transactions, PITR, and
integrated pg_autovacuum. It is also worth reminding folks about win32
support, tablespace support, and the ARC buffer code, which is making this
release one of the most significant in several years. Stay tuned as beta
progress for updates on these features and a complete list of changes due in
the next version of PostgreSQL.



== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Slony 1.0.0 Released
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/slony1/news/newsfull.php?news_id=182

shadonet.com introduces free PostgreSQL hosting
http://www.postgresql.org/news/205.html



== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Fujitsu foots the bill for new PostgreSQL database features
http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/07/01/0721222.shtml?tid=72&tid=82

FAQ on when to use "for update" in a query
http://techdocs.postgresql.org/guides/Forupdate

Relational Databases Rule the Roost
http://sdtimes.com/news/105/story15.htm

Connect Computing Gives User a Linux Option
http://www.linuxpr.com/releases/7013.html

Why Write PostgreSQL Extension Functions?
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/06/28/postgresql_extensions.html



== Upcoming Events ==

OSCon: Portland, OR, USA: July 26-30
There will be a PostgreSQL Track with many community members participating.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2004/

Linux World Expo: San Francisco, CA, USA: August 3-5
PostgreSQL will have a booth and B.O.F with OSDL.



== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 6th 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