PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 16th 2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 16th 2003 ==

A round of congratulations are in order as PostgreSQL has won the 2003
Linux Journal Editors Choice Award for best database! Not that we didn't
already know it was the best database ;-), but it is always nice to see
outside validation.

Feature freeze continues this week, with the plan to start packaging
the first beta release on Monday July 21st. Lamar Owen, the communities
rpm maintainer, has said that he does plan to release beta rpm's for
7.4, which you should expect to see shortly after the first beta tar
ball is made available. My recommendation right now is to wait until
next Tuesday or Wednesday, then check you local mirror to see if your
preferred download package is available.

Thats said, we do have some updates on code changes during feature
freeze; obviously nothing earth shattering, but worth some spending some
time on. Kim Ho supplied a patch for JDBC to make support for
setObject() more spec compliant with regards to various
data/time/timestamp objects, we now support pthreads on OSF (per Philip
Yarra), we now avoid use of int64_t which seems to have portability
issues, the padding logic for struct sockaddr_storage was simplified,
SHOW DATESTYLE now produces a string that can be accepted by SET
DATESTYLE and SHOW TRANSACTION_ISOLATION is now consistent with SET
TRANSACTION_ISOLATION, a buffer overrun bug in to_ascii() was fixed, and
cost estimates for SubqueryScan were adjusted to be a little more
realistic (charge cpu_tuple_cost for each row processed, and don't
forget the evaluation cost of any restriction clauses attached to the
node). Changes to allow initdb to set shared_buffers and max_connections
dynamically, with defaults set to 1000 and 100 respectively, if the
platform allows it. If it will not, initdb steps down until it finds a
workable setting. On the ECPG front, preproc.y and gram.y were synced,
we now init sqlca in ECPGprepare(), CLOSE DATABASE was added for
Informix compatibility, and some initial work on different back end
error codes for different back end messages has been done.

And that pretty much covers it for this week. There are a couple of
"OSCon Round-ups" available on the General Bits website (see link at
bottom) for those interested in what transpired at the conference. I'd
also like to mention that a Hungarian version of advocacy.postgresql.org
is now available, thanks to the efforts of Laszlo Hornyak. If you have
any interest in translating the advocacy site to a new language, or are
interested in hacking on any of the other back end sites, the web team
could always use a few more hands, just send an email to either
webmaster(at)postgresql(dot)org or post a message to pgsql-www(at)postgresql(dot)org(dot)

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PGVote poll/voting script now available
http://pgvote.unixathome.org/

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Phorum v3.4 -installation and configuration
http://www.freebsddiary.org/phorum-upgrade-3.4.3a.php

Linux Journal Announces Winners of 2003 Editors' Choice Awards
http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6995

== Upcoming Events ==

PostgreSQL training at Big Nerd Ranch : Atlanta, Georgia: August 18-22
Bruce Momjian will provide a one week training class.
http://www.bignerdranch.com/Classes/Postgresql.html

Gnu/Linux Congress: Veracruz, Mexico: September 17-19
Bruce Momjian has been asked to give a keynote address and he will also
be presenting various tutorials.
http://congreso.gulev.org.mx

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 16th 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