PostgreSQL Weekly News - Feb 12th 2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - Feb 12th 2003 ==

On the off chance you haven't heard, PostgreSQL 7.3.2 has been
released. The original announcement can be viewed at
http://www.postgresql.org/news.php?NewsID=128 and the software is
available via ftp mirror (http://www.postgresql.org/mirrors-ftp.html)
In other development news, there was a lot of discussion on regexp
support last week which concluded with a fix for some regex slowness in
7.3.x (Tatsu Ishii, Wade Klaver) as well as a Tom Lane replacing the
current regular expression package with Henry Spencer's latest version.
This will solve some multibyte issues in 7.4, and upgrades PostgreSQL's
regexp support to match recent Tcl and nearly match Perl. His work
should also make it easier to try different regexp libraries in the
future.
Tom, working with several others, oversaw a core dump fix in pltcl (Ian
Harding), an enhancement to the optimizer for expanding a subquery alias
(Stefanos Harhalakis), another to detect cases where outer joins can be
reduced to plain inner joins (Craig Rhodes), and now showing join rules
for outer and in joins.
Another improvement to the back end was a change to the planner for
representation of relation sets. It now uses variable-length bitmap sets
instead of list of integers. This change should be faster and less
error-prone. This could improve other areas as well, already we've had a
change in the executor to use these changes.
Speaking of building on previous changes, Tom also has revised the
mechanism for getting rid of temp tables at back end shutdown. Instead
of "grovelling" through pg_class to get the information, he used the new
dependency mechanism to simply delete everything dependent on the temp
schema. This had the added bonus that the dependency mechanism is smart
enough to delete things in a safe order. The idea was spawned while
fixing a bug report from David Heggie where he was seeing errors from
the back end dropping sequences in bad order.
From the "Hey, that's cool" department, coinciding with news that
Berkeley and CMU have adopted PostgreSQL for their database courses; UC
Berkely has announced they are building a system called Telegraph for a
number of different research angles. They originally wrote the system in
Java, which proved to be too painful so the scrapped that and decided to
start over in C, using PostgreSQL as a base. For more details, check out
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~franklin/Papers/TCQcidr03.pdf .
And one final note, Rudy Lippan has done a whole bunch of work on
DBD::Pg. While it's still living in patch form, plans are underway to
get the work committed. David Wheeler, one of the DBD::Pg maintainers
noted that "it represents the first real advances in DBD::Pg in years".
You can find the DBD::Pg project page at
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/dbdpg/projdisplay.php

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgbash-7.3 has been released
http://www.psn.co.jp/PostgreSQL/pgbash/index-e.html

Informix to PostgreSQL script
http://www.databasejournal.com/scripts/article.php/1581241

libpqxx 1.4.0 released
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-interfaces/2003-02/msg00027.php

Prime Time Freeware Manual: the Dossier Series
http://books.slashdot.org/books/03/02/05/1536216.shtml?tid=117

PostgreSQL gains 24 hour pay-for phone support
http://www.digitaldistribution.com/phonesupport/

Webmin version 1.060 released
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2003-02/msg00347.php

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Zapatec Launches ASP Service Building Custom Applications for the Small
to Mid-Sized Business Market
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030210/sfm107_1.html

== Upcoming Events ==

Open Source Conference: Portland, Oregon: July 7-11
A PostgreSQL track will be available at this years conference.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - Feb 12th 22nd 2003 ==

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