== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 5th 2004 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 5th 2004 ==

This late night edition of the weekly news is brought to you by my son
Dylan, who turned 3 today :-) He found the changes inside the optimizer to be
especially interesting, so let's get to it.

The optimizer was tweaked a little bit to institute what is being
referred to as a new "fuzzy comparison" logic. The purpose of the new code
is to mark paths with the same path keys and nearly equivalent costs as
redundant. While the exact amount of fuzziness may still need to be adjusted,
so far it has shown good performance increases in the relevant cases with no
drawbacks (ie. the results of the plans picked are the same, we just
eliminate paths to get to those results a bit faster.) The GIST code saw a
bit of clean up, resulting in the elimination of a problem with 64-bit
strict-aligned boxes and the switch from using bytea structs to special
GistEntryVector structure. Win32 also received some code cleanup that should
allow it to build with VC++. Some bugs in the to_char function for handeling
BC dates were fixed. On the documentation front, some information on using
\df to find functions using/returning specific datatypes was included. And
last, but not least, some code was put into place to lay the groundwork for
allowing composite types as table columns (and potentially some other useful
features as well).

Finally in more international community news, our Spanish speaking
friends have announced the moving of the Spanish general help list to
pgsql-es-ayuda(at)postgresql(dot)org(dot) Also we're proud to announce our first mirror
available in Singapore, thanks to Matthew Feinberg and Feratech.com.


== PostgreSQL Product News ==

XpSQL version 0.9.3 is released.
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/xpsql/news/newsfull.php?news_id=163

Version 1.0.0.4 of OLE DB released
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/oledb/news/newsfull.php?news_id=164

PL/R 0.6.0-alpha released
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/plr/news/newsfull.php?news_id=165

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Could open source elections close out hanging chads?
http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/04/01/1530219.shtml

Best of Show Award Winners Named at Bio-IT World Conference + Expo
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2004/Apr/1028008.htm

Aberdeen Finds Open Source Databases Show Widest Adoption in New Development
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/03-31-2004/0002138195

PostgreSQL and MySQL Connection Times, Round 2 (blog)
http://www.randomnetworks.com/joseph/blog/?eid=101

== Upcoming Events ==

An Evening With Bruce Momjian: New York, NY: April 13
SRA America is sponsoring a get-together with Bruce Momjian
http://www.postgresql.org/events/194.html

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

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 5th 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