== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 16th 2004 == - Mailing list pgsql-announce

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 16th 2004 ==

    While the initial response to PostgreSQL 8.0 beta has been very positive,
that wasn't the biggest news of this past weeks development. What really
shook things up was the discovery of a long standing bug in PostgreSQL's XLOG
COMMIT code. Even though there have never been any known reports of this bug
on any released version of PostgreSQL, the nature of the bug is one where,
given the right amount of bad luck, it is possible to incur some data loss,
so the PostgreSQL core team decided that the only responsible course of
action was to backpatch the fix in too as many versions as realistically
feasible. This means over the next few weeks you should see releases of a
7.4.4, 7.3.7, and 7.2.5. Upgrading is strongly recommended, especially for
those running with increased commit_delay settings. Here is the link to the
original intent to release, which itself contains a link to a detailed
technical description of the problem, which also includes a link to how the
bug was discovered in 8.0beta testing. Many thanks go to Satoshi Okada and
Tom Lane for their work on this problem.
(http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2004-08/msg00708.php)

    On the 8.0 front we had a number of bug reports, fixes, and successful build
reports on several platforms. Since the bug fixes are the most pertanint to
beta testing, let's run through that list shall we? A bug where hashed
crosstab died with an SPI_finish error when the source SQL produced no rows
was fixed. A compilation error in OpenBSD when CODESET was not defined was
fixed. A work-around was added for broken strtod() that's present in many
Solaris releases. There was also some clean up of the win32 COPY code, COPY
support in psql can now deal with \r\n line endings, the -s and -L flags were
fixed in initdbr, dbsize was brought up to speed on tablespaces, and the
allowing of commas in BEGIN, START TRANSACTION, and SET TRANSACTION, as per
the SQL standard, was added in. Finally, for those reviewing doc changes,
several areas were beefed up including information on supported timezones,
caching of prepared query plans, returning conventions for trigger functions,
mvcc and serializable transactions,



== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PostgreSQL 8 Beta Released
http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=187313

Slony-I 1.0.2 includes PostgreSQL 8.0 Support
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/slony1/news/newsfull.php?news_id=187



== PostgreSQL In The News ==

E! Dives Into Online Data To Better Target Ads
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=28700181

The unwelcome gift of Java
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/13/33OPcurve_1.html

Implementing Full Text Indexing with PostgreSQL
http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/21674

PostgreSQL Wins Linux Journal Editors Choice Award
http://www.postgresql.org/news/212.html



== PostgreSQL Events ==

Linux Expo Shanghai: Shanghai, China : Sep 9-10
Bruce Momjian will present a speech
http://www.linuxexposhanghai.com/en/index.html

LinuxWorld Conferance: Frankfurt, Germany: October 26-28
PostgreSQL will once again have a booth at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.
http://www.linuxworldexpo.de/



== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 16th 2004 ==
On the Web:
http://www.postgresql.org