PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 14th 2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 14th 2003 ==

The decision has been made to push back the 7.4 release schedule by 1
month. This means feature freeze will occur on June 16th, with Beta
starting July 1st. The move has been made mainly to accommodate the
win32 & PITR developers, with a nod to giving client developers enough
time to implement some of the new front-end/back-end protocol changes.
There should be a release before then for 7.3.3, as always stay tuned
for official details.

With win32 now "on the hot seat", there were several updates over the
past week. Bruce Momjian added crypt() and rint() functions to /port,
which ended up allowing for a lot of cleanup for some of the other
platforms like HPUX 9 and qnx. He also added opendir(), readdir(), and
closedir() functions, thanks to some code from SRA. There were also some
changes made for interacting with child backends, allowing them to
attach to specified shared memory addresses, passing
canAcceptConnections to exec'ed backends, writing non-defaults file
before signaling the children to reread it.

The FE/BE protocol revisions are coming closer to completion. Tom Lane
has done a number of updates to the revised protocol documentation,
stating he now feels the information can be considered non-draft. Other
work done includes binary send/receive routines for several datatypes,
update of the COPY BINARY file format spec, an update in handling
multiple formats for data I/O, restructuring of CommandDest and
DestReceiver, an update of the typsend and typreceive columns in
pg_type, check for strict functions for fastpath, modify RowDescription
messages to report columns of domain datatypes as having the type OID
and typmod of the underlying base type (per discussion with Andreas
Pflug and others), and perhaps most noteworthy, marking the server and
libpq as now speaking the true 3.0 protocol.

Even with the attention to win32 and FE/BE, there were still a good
number of miscellaneous fixes committed this week, some related to those
other projects, some not. Changes included adjusting CreateCheckpoint so
that buffer dumping activities and cleanup of dead xlog segments are not
considered part of a critical section (based on recent trouble reports),
identifying a checkpoint process as such instead of as a "server
process" in child-crashed log messages, finish removing of HPUXMATHLIB,
and we now avoid unnecessary copying of parameter values in BIND,
allowing efficient insertion of large bytea values through the BIND
interface. We're now making use of the new error context stack
mechanism to allow random errors detected during buffer dump to be
labeled with buffer location, which should make it a lot easier to find
trashed pages. There were also fixes put in place for problems with
dropped columns whose types have also been dropped and a change to
pg_amop's index on (amopclaid,amopopr) to index (amopopr,amopclaid).
This makes no difference for existing uses, but allows
SelectSortFunction() and pred_test_simple_clause() to use indexscans
instead of seqscans to locate entries for a particular operator in
pg_amop. Better yet, they can use the SearchSysCacheList() API to cache
the search results.

One final note from the web team; we are currently in the process of
several server upgrades, so you might see the occasional burp in service
over the next week or so. These changes involve ftp and cvs services as
well, though should be transparent to end users. Please report any
problem or outages you come across to either the -general or -hackers
mailing lists, or webmaster(at)postgresql(dot)org(dot)

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Postgresql AutoDoc 1.10 beta 1
http://www.rbt.ca/autodoc/

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Progress redefines corporate IT architectures with PeerDirect
http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/enterprise/2003/0305140802.asp?A=HOME&O=FPIN

== Upcoming Events ==

PostgreSQL Conference 2003: Tokyo, Japan: May 17
Japan PostgreSQL Users Group will have a technical conference focusing
on PostgreSQL performance tuning and enterprise use.
http://www.postgresql.jp/

Fenasoft Brasil Software Week: Sao Paulo, Brazil: May 27-30
dbExperts will have a PostgreSQL demonstration
http://www.dbexperts.com.br/noticias/mostraNoticia?id=55

Open Source Conference: Portland, Oregon: July 7-11
A PostgreSQL track is available this year
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 14th 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