== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 4th 2003 ==
Our first week of beta2 seemed to keep things moving along briskly.
There was some confusion as to what had been included in this beta2, so
some steps are being made to give everyone a better heads up when the
next beta build is tagged. For those concerned that a specific fix may
not be in yet, rest assured that the PostgreSQL development process will
usually have several betas to get everything in, and then usually
several release candidates before the code is deemed ready for
production. With that said lets review some of the changes made this
past week.
A lot of discussion took place regarding how best to support thread
safety on the variety of platforms that PostgreSQL supports. Some of the
changes that came out of that were add a test for thread-safeness of
libc functions and reporting of specific threading failure functions.
Unixware was marked as not requiring *_r functions and BSD/OS was
verified not needing reentrant function names. Also the casting of
function call pointers for threads was tightened.
Date/time input parsing code was adjusted to correctly distinguish the
four SQLSTATE error codes required by SQL99 (invalid format, datetime
field overflow, interval field overflow, invalid time zone displacement
value). Subplan clauses are now pushed to the back in qual lists for
join plans. We now ensure that FK constraints are dumped after
primary/unique constraints, rather than relying on OID order of
pg_constraint entries. The -r logic for pg_dump and pg_restore was
centralized to prevent any divergence in the future. A couple bugs in
ecpg pgtypes library were fixed. The last remnants of the old pygresql
code were cleaned out and some outdated CLI bits were removed. Work
around ENOTEMPTY being an alias for EEXIST on some platforms. Repair
problems with to_char() overrunning its input string (from Karel Zak).
Pass session_authorization to the client and make psql update its prompt
accordingly. Allow non-super users to set log_duration to true, then
false, when the administrator has not turned it on, and fix other
PGC_USERLIMIT variables. And last but not least standalone backends
(including bootstrap case) now read the GUC config file if it exists.
This was already discussed as being a good idea (and in fact knocks off
a listed TODO item), and now seems the cleanest way to deal with
initdb-time failures on machines with small SHMMAX.
A number of documentation updates went in again this week. Some, like
that addition of an for the JADEFLAGS make variable and setting of
LC_ALL=C when running collateindex.pl, affected the documentation build
process. Others changes were aimed at content including some major
cleanup of the SPI chapter, the addition and editing of a number of the
index entries, some improvement for pg_restore's docs regarding use of
the -N, -o, and -r options, some information regarding OID wraparound,
and a note for plpgsql to explain that a loop where the lower bound is
greater than the upper bound is valid but does nothing.
Last but not least, Tom Lane has been doing quite an overhaul in the
hash index code, addressing some serious issues recently raised on the
-hackers mailing list. Some of the work included rewriting
hashbulkdelete() to make it amenable to new bucket locking scheme (with
the pleasant side effect that it is *much* faster when deleting a large
fraction of the indexed tuples), widening hashm_ntuples to double so
that hash space management doesn't get confused by more than 4G entries,
enlarging the allowed number of free-space-bitmap pages, replacing the
useless bshift field with a useful bmshift field, eliminating 4 bytes of
wasted space in the per-page special area, and fixing a buffer reference
leak and incorrect computation of bit indexes when using multiple bitmap
pages. The changes do change the on-disk index layout, so a reindex
would be necessary for folks upgrading between beta releases. He also
fixed a few typos and added some more comments to the documentation.
Since this is a rather large change late in the development cycle, users
of hash indexes are strongly encourage to test their applications on the
latest beta release.
== PostgreSQL Product News ==
PolarLake Adds Support For Eclipse
http://www.ebizq.net/news/2678.html
== PostgreSQL In the News ==
PostgreSQL, Inc Releases Replication Product under BSD License
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4375
Random thoughts on GPL and BSD (blog)
http://ertw.com/blog/archives/000398.html#000398
No respect for the old Elephant ? (blog)
http://low.teacentral.net/index.php?p=4&c=1
== Upcoming Events ==
PHP/PostgreSQL Seminar: Instanbul, Turkey: September 6
Turkish Linux Users Group will present seminar on PHP/PostgreSQL
applications
http://seminer.linux.org.tr
Gnu/Linux Congress: Veracruz, Mexico: September 17-19
Bruce Momjian has been asked to give a keynote address and he will also
be presenting tutorials
http://congreso.gulev.org.mx
LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2003 : Frankfurt, Germany : October 27-29
PostgreSQL will have a booth at the LinuxWorld Conference
http://www.linuxworldexpo.de/
== PostgreSQL Weekly News - September 4th 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
