== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 1st 2004 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 1st 2004 ==

Well after much rumor and speculation, the core team announced that
July 1st would be the official freeze date for PostgreSQL 7.5. The main
reasoning seemed to stem from a desire to allow for a little more development
time on some of the major features like PITR that are currently being
reviewed and tested. Anyone who is working on another feature that they feel
can be wrapped in in the next few weeks is encouraged to supply a patch as
soon as possible.

Several outstanding patches were committed this week. One came from Euler
Taveira de Oliveira who implemented ALTER DATABASE foo OWNER TO bar, knocking
off a TODO item. The function is supported in ECPG and is limited to
superusers. Thomas Hallgren also supplied a patch based on a TODO item; this
one implemented the allowing of external interfaces to extend the GUC
variable set. Plug in modules like the pllang modules will now be able to
declare a class of variables and then use them as placeholders for different
information.

Neil Conway was able to submit his linked list data structure rewrite patch
before disappearing for the summer. The patch, based on many discussions on
the mailing lists, changed the list implementation from being merely pointers
to the head nodes of the list to a pointer to a structure containing some
meta-data about each list. Those intrested in the even more nitty-gritty
details are encouraged to look in the mail archives. In other code
refactoring news, the background writer code was logically separated out into
its own module and given responsibility for all checkpoint activity and
fsync(2) was replaced in favor of explicit fsync on non-temp files.

The identify_system_timezone() function was modified to scan through all the
known timezones rather than the previous supplied list of timezones. This
should make things a little more thorough while adding just a minimal amount
of overhead to postmaster startup. A binary version of pg_ctl was committed,
which replaces the last shell script needed for the win32 port. Other win32
oriented work included locale fixes, cleanup of the code used for starting
new backends, and changes in the EXEC_BACKEND process.

And finally for the week, a new version of the btree_gist code was committed
in with added support for several new datatypes. We also added a new contrib
module pg_trgm, which provides functions and index classes for determining
the similarity of text based on trigram matching.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

DSPAM v3.0 RC1 Spam Filter Released
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/05/31/1729234.shtml?tid=111&tid=126

pgin.tcl-2.1.0 released
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pgintcl/news/newsfull.php?news_id=173

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

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

Cross Platform Open Source more successful?
http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=171700

== Upcoming Events ==

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 will be a PostgreSQL Track with many community members participating.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2004/

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 1st 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