== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 09 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 09 2006 ==

WARNING: do not turn off full_page_writes in PG 8.1.*

Recent analysis has shown that turning off full_page_writes is not
safe under *any* circumstances, even if you have infrastructure such
as a battery-backed disk cache that should prevent partial page
writes. We have seen two recent reports of full_page_writes = off
causing failure to restart after a database crash, even though no OS-
or hardware-level problem occurred. If you are running on 8.1.0 -
8.1.3, however, you need to make sure that full_page_writes is ON.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-03/msg01168.php

We need students and mentors who want to work on PostgreSQL projects
for Google's next Summer Of Code. One of last year's winners was
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/qbe/ Query By Example. If you are a
professor or a college/gradute student interested in doing a
database-oriented Summer of Code project, especially if you already
have your own project which relates to PostgreSQL, please contact Josh
Berkus (josh(at)postgresql(dot)org) as soon as possible.

Qingqing Zhou introduced a plan to add parallel sequential scan to the
query execution. By splitting the sequential scan into two processes,
a reader and a processor, he expects to make major performance gains
for queries that involve sequential scans.

Teodor Sigaev and Oleg Bartunov introduced a patch to add Generalized
Inverted Indexes (GIN). This is a specialized kind of index which
supports searching multi-value fields, such as array fields and
TSearch fields. GIN is the first piece of the next version of
TSearch, a full-text indexing system.

Several developers discussed ways of making pg_hba.conf modifiable
through SQL, even the possibility of keeping it in a table.

We had a false alarm of red flags across the pgBuildFarm this last
week which was caused by a regression test which was not
daylight-savings-time aware. This test has been revised.

Peter Brant presented an analysis of why statistics collection on
Windows is crash-prone. The development team discussed it at length,
but the Windows hackers do not yet have a solution.

Tom Lane checked in a patch set that fixes a long-standing bug in
PostgreSQL's domain implementation. You can now have sub-domains (and
sub-sub-domains, and ...)

EnterpriseDB has hired Bruce Momjian and Simon Riggs. Kudos to all.
http://www.enterprisedb.com/news_events/press_releases/04_04_06.do

Registration for the PostgreSQL Anniversary is open
http://conference.postgresql.org/Registration

The PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit is brought to you by Afilias,
EnterpriseDB, GreenPlum, Pervasive and Sun Microsystems.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

dbVisualizer 5.0 is out.
http://www.minq.se/

EMS SQLManager 3.5 is out
http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/manager/

pgEdit 1.2 is out
http://pgedit.com/

DBD::Pg 1.48 bug fix release is out. Really, this time :)
http://search.cpan.org/~dbdpg/DBD-Pg-1.48/

Bizgres 0.9 is out.
http://www.bizgres.org/

MicroOLAP Database Designer 1.0.6 for PostgreSQL is out.
http://microolap.com/products/database/postgresql-designer/

== PostgreSQL Local ==

David Fetter will be speaking at FISL in Porto Alegre, Brazil. FISL
is happening April 19-22
http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/7.0/www/?q=en

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, published on Mondays (PST/PDT):
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
and Josh Berkus