PostgreSQL Weekly News - Feb 19th 2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - Feb 19th 2003 ==

Another rousing week in PostgreSQL development for sure. The best place
to start would be a recap of items marked off of the TODO list in the
past week:

Make a transaction safe truncate (Rod Taylor)
Add Alter Table tab Set without OIDS (Rod Taylor)
Allow CLUSTER to cluster all tables (Alvaro Herrera)
Make PL/PgSQL %Type schema-aware
Allow pg_dump to dump a specific schema (Neil Conway)
Make IN/NOT IN have similar performance to EXISTS/NOT EXISTS (Tom Lane)

If your interested in checking out the full TODO list, it's available at
http://developer.postgresql.org/todo.php

There was a rather spirited discussion on the -hackers list this week
trying to hammer out changes to allow for more flexibility on how
postgresql configuration files are kept on the server. Topics included
recommended verses forced practices, desire to be workable with FHS and
LSB, and diatribe on the evils of symbolic links. We did manage to stave
of both a vi vs. emacs AND a postgres vs postgresql ) (vs pgsql )
debate, so that must mean there is some chance for a solution.
In other development news we saw several patches from folks for a wide
variety of items. Christopher Kings-Lynne supplied a patch to allow
pg_get_constraintdef support Unique, Primary Key, and Check constraints
so that now all constraint types should be covered. Rod Taylor also
provided a patch to allow NO MAXVALUE and NO MINVALUE options in create
sequence per the 200X spec. Neil Conway submitted a few patches cleaning
up the source code. Changes included removing some of the statistics
code that no longer worked, fixing an error in the usage message for
'clusterdb', and several changes to the documentation. A couple of
changes were also committed for ecpg, including an error reporting patch
(Matthew Vanecek) and an informix compatibility option.
Kris Jurka also put some work in to allow COALESCE() AND NULLIF()
functions to be first-class expressions instead of macro's for CASE
expressions.
Bruno Wolf has updated the cube module in contrib to provide cube with
4 functions for building cubes directly from float8 values (rather than
converting the values to strings and parsing them). Along with that he
has updated earthdistance to take advantage of these new functions,
allowing more accurate conversion of latitudes and longitudes to
cartesian coordinates.
In the btree_gist contrib module, Oleg Bartunov has provided updates to
support int8, float4, and float8 (thanks to Janko Richter). Teodor
Sigaev has also supplied some more updates to the popular ltree contrib
module, fixing a few bugs and optimizing index storage.
And we can't forget to mention the bug squashing that's been going on.
A fix for transformExpr() to allow some cases it was missing (reported
by Greg Stark), a twek for timetz2tm(), adding an error condition when a
SetOP statement refers to a variable of the containing query (reported
by Brandon Craig Rhodes), a rule permission checking bug (reported by
Tim Burgess), a bug where the parser was dropping FK constraints if
present in Alter Table Add Column command (Bug #896), repair incorrect
indexing for attypemod in plpython (per Brad McLean), removing some
bogus SIGPIPE syscalls, some fixes to the IPV6 patch, and a change for
Async_NotifyHandler to fix a known problem with failure to respond to
'pg_ctl stop -m fast' (with thanks to Laurette Cisneros). Many thanks to
Tom Lane had a hand in all of those bug fixes, it's quite an impressive
list. Suffice it to say that Tom is "en fuego" :-)

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PL/R - R procedural language handler for PostgreSQL ready for beta
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2003-02/msg00989.php

pgin.tcl 1.3.9 released
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pgintcl/news/newsfull.php?news_id=98

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Software Learns Language Using Visual Perception
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2003/2/prweb57402.php

== 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 19th 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