PostgreSQL Weekly News - Feb 26th 2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - Feb 26th 2003 ==

After several weeks of furious coding and a couple of releases, the
pace relaxed a little this week. That said, some very significant work
has been underway. Those on the -hackers list will have noticed a
decent thread trying to tackle the "index bloat" issue, and much of that
discussion has started working it's way into CVS. Changes in the btree
index structure, WAL logging, Vacuuming, and a few other places have
been put in trying to resolve this problem. The (very simplified) idea
is to allow Vacuum an opportunity to remove empty pages from indexes, so
that index size can be controlled with regular maintenance. While this
change isn't as sexy as some of the other things being talked about, it
is extremely important and those of us running high turnover databases
really do appreciate it.
Some other fixes that were added was a fix from Tasuo Ishii for the GUC
client_encoding variable not being handled correctly. A change from Tom
Lane was made so that if a shutdown request comes in while still
starting up, don't service it until after the current start up id is
set. While this wasn't known to cause any problems, the idea was that it
might head some off at the pass. Tom did some work to simplify timezone
handling as well; the current method was designed to handle some outer
cases on platforms that are not supported. Also regarding time handling,
a bug report from Robert Haas led to a fix in the parsing of
'now'::timestamp when SET TIMEZONE has been done since start of the
current transaction. Another report, this from Ryan VanderBijl, led to
some work on catching self-referential views. Hopefully this will help
stabilize Create or Replace View functionality. And finally a patch was
sent in from Rajesh Kumar Mallah so that psql could avoid using a second
query to fetch default expressions for columns.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

phpPgAdmin 3.0.0 development version released
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=254991

AquaFold, Inc. Releases Version 2.0 Of Aqua Data Studio
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/02/24.8.shtml

GtkPizza goes embedded
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4952435001.html

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Next from Open Source: Killer Apps?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_09/b3822617_tc102.htm

== Upcoming Events ==

Online Struts Training: Internet : March 1st-29th
Best Practice in Struts - Web Training by Cekvenich, Husted and Turner
and a presentation by Momjian on PostgreSQL.
http://www.basebeans.com/do/classReservation

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 26th 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