PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 21st 2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 21st 2003 ==

The big news this week is the impending release of 7.3.3, currently
scheduled for Friday. A bunch of back-patching took place in
preparation; it's amazing what gets done under the gun ;-). Some of the
back-patched fixes include some small changes to use the absolute path
to system catalogs (Greg Sabino Mullane), a fix to force ISO datestyle
in dumps, allow createuser to exit on control-C (both from Oliver
Elphick), the use of -fPIC on Sparc (per Tom Callaway), a bump up of the
JDBC build number (Barry Lind), and some quoting repair and schema
awareness fixes for reindexdb (Tom Lane). There was also a back-patch
to avoid 0(N^2) behavior with lots differed triggers by making
deferredTriggerInvokeEvents only scan events added since it last ran.
There could well be one or two other things added in before release, so
be sure to look for a more complete list of changes included with the
release.

There was some pretty big news on the 7.4 front this week as well,
namely that it is now possible to compile PostgreSQL on a windows
machine using MinGW. Here's a partial laundry list of changes committed
in to make this happen: Win32 port is now called 'win32' rather than
'win', add -lwsock32 on Win32, make gethostname() be only used when
kerberos4 is enabled, use /port/getopt.c, new /port/opendir.c routines,
disable GUC unix_socket_group on Win32, convert some keywords.c symbols
to KEYWORD_P to prevent conflict, create new FCNTL_NONBLOCK macro to
turn off socket blocking, create new /include/port.h file that has /port
prototypes, new directories under /include/port/win32_include dir
including arpa, netinet, and sys, work around ERROR being defined in
Win32 includes, add missing win32 file, add copydir() function because
xcopy doesn't work in XP without a window, reorganize Win32 includes to
only include <port.h> after system includes under Win32, remove use of
geteuid under Win32, and allow interfaces to compile under MingGW/Win32
by adding _P to symbols in ecpg. Of course there is still more to do,
but that is quite a list.

Of course that's not the only work being done, there's a nice list of
miscellaneous fixes to run through as well. Joe Conway helped fix some
recent build and regression-test problems in contrib/, a text(cidr) cast
function was added, an oversight where ignore-till-SYNC was ignoring EOF
was fixed, we now check calling context for connectby_text(), and
indexing support for pattern matching operations via separate operator
class when lc_collate is not C was put in by Peter Eisentraut. Michael
Meskes added several changes in ecpg, including more compatibility
functions, the ability to accept CPP defines for type definitions, no
longer parsing system include files automatically for Informix mode, and
a fix for the sql ifdef command. Tom Lane added in some code to add code
to test for unknown timezone names (following some ideas from Ross
Reedstrom a couple months back) and to detect timezones that are using
leap-second timekeeping. Along with this he also made
DecodePosixTimezone() a tad more robust. Tom also finished removing the
support for autocommit from the back end based on recent discussions,
though there is still a need to support this on the client side in
lippq. On the documentation front, error message style guidelines were
added in as well as more documentation for information schema and some
corrections on views.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PostgreSQL Cocoa Framework 0.5d1
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11233

FootPrints for Linux Delivers High-Performance Solution
http://www.unipress.com/pr/052103pr.html

Bloki: The Painless, Powerful, Writable Web for Individuals and Groups
http://www.bloki.com/blog/

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Postgres is cool [blog]
http://www.cs-ed.org/blogs/mjadud/

== Upcoming Events ==

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 21st 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