PostgreSQL Weekly News - Mar 5th 2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - Mar 5th 2003 ==

There was a flurry of rough work put forward this week, including an
entry to the -patches list this week including an auto-vacuuming
solution. As there is also an auto-vacuuming project on gborg, I think
this bodes well for this often requested feature. Those interested are
encouraged to help out, even if all you can do is test.
In the meantime, we've had a number of little bugs squashed this week.
A quick run down includes fixing a memory leak in plpgsql when receiving
no tuples and enhancing outer-join qualifications that mention only one
side of the join. A fix was also made to preventing clustering on
incomplete indexes. This bug was particularly nasty in that it caused
indexes to lose null values. Those on 7.3 are advised to avoid this
behavior until the next release (or get the patch of course). Tom Lane
also did some work on restructuring free-space-map management, this
should work alongside the "index-bloat" work to improve server
maintenance. A behavioral change was also introduced to change
EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM timestamp) so that a timestamp without time zone is
assumed to be in local time, not GMT. This improves consistency with
other operations, which all assume local timezone when it matters.
On the PostgreSQL interfaces side, SSL support has been added in to the
jdbc driver, and a bug was fixed in the Python interface with the quote
function. This fix should allow strings returned from quote() to always
be suitable for dropping into a query.
And finally our feel good story of the week: PostgreSQL won the
LinuxQuestions.org Database of the Year Award. It was a close race, as
we only one by a single vote, thanks to all those who voted for
PostgreSQL! Full results of the award voting are available at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=47970

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

fwtrends 0.3 released, adds PostgreSQL support
http://www.sr-71.nu/fwtrends/ChangeLog

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

PostgreSQL - analyzing a query to improve speed
http://www.freebsddiary.org/postgresql-analyze.php

== Upcoming Events ==

Online Struts Training: Internet : Mar 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 - March 5th 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