== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 25th 2004 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 25th 2004 ==

Another week, another slew of changes as we march on toward 7.5. This
week saw a swing back toward enhancements to existing systems rather
than new functionality, although given that some of these changes will
make old functions now usable for new people I guess that is in the eye
of the beholder.

We saw a switch to the use of wide-character library routines (when
available) for upper/lower/initcap functions. This allows these
functions to work correctly with Unicode and other multi-byte encodings
that have had trouble in the past. The new timezone libraries,
originally looked at for win32 use, were committed for all other
platforms as well this week. This will solve a number of timezone
related issues that people have had and gives all platforms equal
footing for this functionality. In other parts, the lock taken by NOTIFY
and friends by pg_listener was reduced from AcessExclusiveLock to
ExclusiveLock. While these operations will still be serialized, they
won't conflict with concurrent ANALYZE operations. And speaking of
ANALYZE, a new two-stage sampling method for ANALYZE was put in which
should give significantly better results when the density of live tuples
is not uniform throughout a table. Rounding out the weeks changes, some
time was spent cleaning up and documenting the new relative install
functionality, and markers were added for "end-of-dump" into pg_dump and
pg_dumpall.

One last change worth mentioning was a modification of the CVS notices
sent to the pgsql-committers mailing list. Now whenever a commit is
made, the email sent to the list will contain a direct link to the
CVS-Web interfaces diff of the file being checked in and the previous
revision. The hope is that this will make code review a bit more
accessible for those interested in seeing the nitty-gritty code changes.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Oracle and MySQL Connectivity Packs now available
http://www.postgresql.org/news/184.html

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Latest MySQL Fails to Quiet Licensing Critics
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3358061

Nigerian Nursing & Midwifery Council Migrates to PostgreSQL.
http://www.postgresql.org/news/185.html

PostgreSQL Check Constraint Supports Regular Expressions (blog)
http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2004/05/24/postgresql-check-constraint-supports-regular-expressions/

== Upcoming Events ==

NLUUG Open Source for Business: Ede, Netherlands: May 27
Elein Mustain will be speaking on PostgreSQL Extensibility
http://www.nluug.nl/events/vj04/

European Regional Open Source Conference: Yerevan, Armenia: June 28-30
Bruce Momjian will be speaking at the Conferance
http://www.opensourcearmenia.com/osconference

OSCon: Portland, OR. USA: July 26-30
There is a PostgreSQL Track with many community members participating.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2004/

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 25th 2004 ==
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