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PostgreSQL Weekly News – March 19, 2003

[ Thanks to Robert Treat for this
link. ]

== PostgreSQL Weekly News – Mar 19th 2003 ==

Wow what a busy week! A lot of discussion still taking place on
the front end/ back end protocol change, much around better support
for ODBC and JDBC needs. There was also a good amount of discussion
on SQL99 Array support and the proposed patch. In fact, there are a
lot of good patches being reviewed right now so you can expect a
lot more changes in the coming weeks. For now, lets jump into some
miscellaneous fixes from this week. We start with a fix for GROUP
BY getting confused when there were multiple equal() GROUP BY
items. This issue has actually been around since 7.0, and maybe
even further back, but hadn’t been exposed until some recent
changes in the query parser. A patch was committed from Dave Marin
to prevent infinite loops in ln_var() due to roundoff errors; one
from Bruno Wolf III correcting a typo that was breaking ident
authentication in certain cases; a reorder of the crypt.h include
for SunOS compile problems from Fred Houweling; and
eval_const_expressions now simplifies FieldSelect from a whole-row
Var into an ordinary one-field Var. This work was done based on an
example from Chris Mungall. Tom also repaired an incorrect
prorettype entry for timestamptz_izone, back-patching it with the
caveat that only those who install 7.3.3 from scratch will be able
to benefit (since initdb would be required). A bug report from Nick
Eskelinen lead to a fix for pg_dumpall, which failed on groups that
had no members. There was also an enhancement to now print the
relevant key values when reporting a foreign-key violation. This
fix, along with some factoring out of duplicate code in the
referential integrity triggers, was submitted by Dmitry Tkach, with
help from Stephan Szabo and Tom Lane. In the interface library
department, Michael Meskes has started work on a separate pgtypes
library. Initial testing looks positive, with successful compile
reports coming from several different platforms. A couple of JDBC
updates came through as well; one fixed the parsing to handle n
for updateable result sets (based on a bug report from Rich
Cullingford). The other improved some error messages and added some
log messages in the batch update functionality. I want to make a
special note of some work from Peter Eisentraut committed this
week. Peter reimplemented the createdb and dropdb scripts in C,
with vacuumdb and clusterdb to follow. There were a number of
advantages in doing this, such as reducing repetitive connections,
increasing robustness, and adding NLS. However I think a nod has to
be given to the efforts of those working on the native windows port
of PostgreSQL. Since they have to have these scripts working to run
successfully on windows, the urgency was finally there to get it
done. One last section to cover were the number of doc fixes done
this week. A fair bit of it came in the form of cleanup, making
things look more consistent in regards to terminology used
throughout the docs. The FAQ also received some updates including
the fact that we now have confirmed a 4 TB PostgreSQL database. As
always, you can check out the latest version of the FAQ at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PostgreSQL Manager 1.4 released http://www.ems-hitech.com/news.phtml?id=336

Mioga 1.2.2 Released. http://freshmeat.net/projects/mioga/

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Free Software behind Indian telephone directory http://lwn.net/Articles/25694/

PlatinumSolutions, Inc. with PostgreSQL, Inc. http://www.pgsql.com/press/CAP_PSI.html

== Upcoming Events ==

Novell BrainShare: Salt Lake City, Utah: April 13-18 A
PostgreSQL session including install, configure, administration,
and interfacing with PHP http://www.novell.com/brainshare

Open Source Conference: Portland, Oregon: July 7-11 A PostgreSQL
track will be available at this years conference. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News – March 19th 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

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