== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 28th 2003 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 28th 2003 ==

I think most of the weeks action took place outside of the code, as
beta testing seems to be running fairly smooth. One item was an
interesting thread on several of the mailing lists about ways to improve
vacuum efficiency, and how pg_autovacuum might be improved upon.

The other interesting piece of news was the announcement from
PostgreSQL, Inc.regarding the release of eRServer(c) v1.0+ to the open
source community. This is an enterprise level replication solution that
has been used by the customers of PostgreSQL, Inc. For more details
check out the announcement at http://www.postgresql.org/news/147.html

So with those items out of the way, let us make a quick run through
some of the code changes this week. The processing of
multiple-index-scan plans was tweaked to reduce overhead when handling
many-way scans. The parser was changed to use FastAppend rather than
lappend when constructing expr_lists (which appeared to be the only
remaining O(N^2) bottleneck in processing many-way 'x IN (a,b,c,...)'
conditions). A number of changes to clean up the uninstall process were
done thanks to Peter Eisentraut. A fix for the GB18030 conversion script
and UTF-8 mapping was put in. Macros for error result fields were added
to libpq. to_date() no longer calls to_timestamp() followed by a
timestamp-to-date coercion. Instead both routines share a subroutine
that delivers the parsing result as a struct tm which avoids problems
with timezone dependency of to_date's result, and should be at least
marginally faster too.

Abbreviations for Brazilian time zones (BRT,BRST,FNT,FNST) were added.
Verbose analyze output was tweaked to show information about pages, rows
per block, and rows of the analyzed relation. Some clean up for the auto
default shared_buffer and max_connections changes in initdb. We now
share PG_DIAG_* macros between client and server and use them
internally. A regression test for the UPDATE command was added.
We now use seperate SQLSTATE codes for file not found/file exists,
rather than lumping them into
ERRCODE_UNDEFINED_OBJECT/ERRCODE_DUPLICATE_OBJECT. Warnings for
non-existing and pre-existing cursors were changed to errors. And one
final change from the if it doesn't itch it doesn't get scratched
department, a fix for parsing of time and timetz inputs to accept the
documented input syntax '040506' for '04:05:06', as well as '0405'for
'04:05:00' was put in. This had been broken since 7.2 but as it was only
reported recently, it had gone unfixed.

JDBC saw several contributions from Oliver Jowett and Kim Ho; fixes
included adding a finalizer method to AbstractJdbc1Statement to clean
up in the case of poor user code which fails to close the statement
object, fix ant build file to correctly detect dependencies across
jdbc1/jdbc2/jdbc3, fix a couple of server prepared statement bugs and
added regression test for them, adds support for get/setMaxFieldSize(),
and fixing build.xml to provide a better error message in the event
that an older version of the driver exists in the classpath when trying
to build.

Of course we still had a number of translation updates come in,
and several updates to the documentation as well, but that pretty much
wraps up this weeks development. We will see what next week brings, as
beta2 was packaged last night so a fresh round of testing should be
happening again this week. If you have not done so yet please give beta2
a try.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

FileMaker to SQL Migration Tool Released
http://www.fmp2sql.com/

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

PostgreSQL, Inc. donates database replication software
http://lwn.net/Articles/46576/

Postgres or Mysql (blog)
http://www.xclu.com/blojsom/blog/db/?permalink=postgresvsmysql.html

== 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 - August 28th 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