== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 23rd 2003 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 23rd 2003 ==

Another week, another beta release... PostgreSQL 7.4 beta5 was packaged
up yesterday with fingers crossed that it will be the last beta release
before RC1. The were a few changes significant enough to require an
initdb for this release, something to keep in mind when you go to do
your testing.

Some of the more significant changes revolved around improvements to
the information schema implementation. Changes included making use of
UNION ALL instead of UNION, making use of regclass type for getting OID
of system catalogs, and adding schema qualifications where needed.
_pg_keyissubset() was made fully search-path-proof, element_types view
was made to work with parameters and result types of functions, a few
bugs in the referential_constraints view were fixed, and dependencies on
INDEX_MAX_KEYS/FUNC_MAX_ARGS were centralized into a function returning
setof int to help ease future maintenance.

Igor Shevchenko reported some bad interaction between NOTIFY processing
and the V3 extended query protocol, which has subsequently been fixed.
The internal StartTransaction() function was cleaned up.
We now ensure that all places that complain about exhaustion of shared
memory consistently report 'out of shared memory' rather than just a
general 'out of memory' message. We now avoid a potential division by
zero in estimate_num_groups() when the table has no rows. The
attstattarget column was set to -1 for all system catalog columns in
order to improve the planners decisions when dealing with the
information_schema views. We now forcibly include -lgcc on HPUX to
ensure any needed compiler support routines are included. A bug in elog
tab insertion was fixed. A missing freeing of the pgParameterStatus
chain in freePGConn() was added in. Some problems that had snuck into
the interaction between IN-join processing and subselect pullups were
repaired.

Psql now uses pg_get_constraintdef() rather than pg_constraint.consrc
which has been deprecated. Also psql's support for tab completion of
mixed-case identifiers was enhanced. We no longer accept both -d and -f
options for pg_dump since it suggests the user is confused about whether
-f is the input or output file. The internal pg_dump function
findLastBuiltinOid_V70() was fixed to return the correct result when run
against a 7.0 server. EXPLAIN output was modified to use three
fractional digits, and relabeled to ms, to better match psql's \timing
display. A bug in the ANALYZE command on AIX was fixed. ecpg was
modified to cope with platforms that offer LONGLONG_MIN instead of the
C99-spec LLONG_MIN (such as AIX). ecpg now checks for both Informix
modes when parsing include files. libpq was adjusted to avoid deadlock
when both client and server went to send data and both had filled
transmission buffers. The built-in SQL language functions were worked
over to ensure they were all properly schema-qualified.

And as expected we round out this week with a good chunk of
documentation changes. Documentation regarding index cost estimation
functions and writing procedural language handlers were moved into the
internals section and a listing of our SQLSTATE error codes was added to
the documentation. The documentation of system views created by initdb
was completed for several previously undocumented views and then
centralized into the catalogs section. Documentation for the contrib
module findoidjoins was brought up to speed for 7.4 to match earlier
code changes and a note about successful use of pg_autovacuum on AIX was
added. The use of SIGHUP was added to the postmaster manual page.
Information regarding the use of dollar signs in identifiers was added
to the migration section. Finally, several additions to the HISTORY file
were submitted including a note to mention that "today" no longer works
as a column default anymore.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Bricolage 1.6.7 Released
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=192775

ProSQL 2.0 brings Panther support, more
http://www.macnn.com/news/21646

Aqua Data Studio adds support for PostgreSQL 7.3
http://macnn.com/news/21635

Ethereal Realms 3.1.0 (Now Running On PostgreSQL)
http://freshmeat.net/releases/139293/

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

JBOSS, PostgreSQL, and Primary Keys
http://www.pirack.com/viewHowto.xphp?id=3

== Upcoming Events ==

LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2003 : Frankfurt, Germany : October 27-29
PostgreSQL will have a booth at the LinuxWorld Conference
http://www.linuxworldexpo.de/

International PHP Conference: Frankfurt, Germany: November 2-5
Bruce Momjian will be presenting several PostgreSQL talks at this year's
International PHP Conference.
http://www.phpconference.de/2003/

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 23rd 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