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

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

The weekly news is back after a one week, OSCon induced, hiatus. The
14 second run down on OSCon is that PostgreSQL had a very successful
conference, with a noticeable presence. The tutorials were all pretty full
(some were standing room only) and the booth stayed pretty busy at all times.
I was also stopped by a number of people in the halls who either asked me
about PostgreSQL or wanted to tell me that they were using PostgreSQL. Kudos
for everyone who participated in the event!

Of course with all of this activity out in Portland, we still had
folks back at home cleaning things up for the beta release planned for
sometime this week. Most of the features are not new, but as they have just
been committed in the last two weeks, it is a good time to review what was
added.

Modifications were made to allow for Borland compiles. The updated plperl
code was officially added, along with a slew of documentation to explain how
to use the new functionality. WAL timelines have been added to make PITR more
manageable. A file size check was also added to prevent recovery attempts
from corrupted WAL files. A draft of the 7.5 release notes has been committed
and is available in the developers documentation. The pginstaller project
continued to round out some rough edges. This project creates a simple
executable that installs PostgreSQL on Windows machines. Additional logging
for diagnosing IDENT authentication problems was added in. Unique and Primary
Key indexes can now be created in seperate tablespaces.

The rest of the nested transactions implementation was committed in,
so this feature is looking pretty solid. The implementation uses the
spec-complient SAVEPOINT/RELEASE/ROLLBACK-TO syntax rather than several other
ideas that were suggested. Along with this, plpgsql was given the ability to
trap errors inside of a function. The syntax is based on try/catch, and
should be reproducable in the other pl langs in the future.

Further work was done on the timezone matching system, which sets
default server timezones within a new installation. Non-Windows machines were
given a couple of tiebreak scenarios, while Windows machines were given a
direct mapping table for the known Windows time zones. A C based of version
of pg_config was created, the last of the admin tools that needed conversion.
DECLARE CUSOR can now take parameters from the portal in which it is
executed. A makefile framework for building PostgreSQL extensions was put
in. This is basically a generalization of the existing contrib makefiles,
which should help external projects build easier outside of the contrib
directory.

One last note, for those interested we have begun collecting tutorials and
code examples from OSCon up on the techdocs site. So far we have entries from
Bruce Momjian, Joe Conway, and myself, and should add more in the next few
days. Please check them out at http://techdocs.postgresql.org/oscon2004/



== PostgreSQL Product News ==

CONNX Solutions & Martin Group Provide High-Performance AdHoc Reporting
Solutionhttp://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/7/emw144556.htm

Cross-platform packaging facility OpenPKG 2.1 released
http://www.linuxpr.com/releases/7053.html

SCO ups Java performance up to 60%
http://www.integratedmar.com/ECLbriefs.cfm?item=BRI072704-3

AdventNet Forms Alliance With Sybase Middle & Central East And Europe
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/20040723020636634

Pginstaller beta release
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller/



== PostgreSQL In The News ==

Creating Custom Email Queries
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/07/22/datamining_email.html

PostgreSQL: The Other Open-Source Database
http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=23902346



== PostgreSQL Events ==

Linux World Expo: San Francisco, CA, USA: August 3-5
PostgreSQL will have a booth and B.O.F with OSDL.
http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/events/12SFO04A

Linux Expo Shanghai: Shanghai, China : Sep 9-10
Bruce Momjian will present a speech
http://www.linuxexposhanghai.com/en/index.html

LinuxWorld Conferance: Frankfurt, Germany: October 26-28
PostgreSQL will once again have a booth at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.
http://www.linuxworldexpo.de/



== PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 1st 2004 ==
On the Web:
http://www.postgresql.org