== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 7th 2003 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 7th 2003 ==

PostgreSQL 7.4 Release Candidate 1 was released early this week, which
is a good sign, though Release Candidate 2 is expected to be put out
sometime on Sunday. Depending on what shakes out of RC2, a decision
will be made around next Thursday on whether to push for final release
or a RC3 build. This means that if everything goes smoothly we could be
looking at a final release in less than two weeks. For this reason,
expect next weeks weekly news on Friday as well, so that I can give
everyone a heads up on which direction were going.

There weren't too many bugs found this week, still a lot of
configure/build tweaking going on, lets run through the changes rather
quickly: A change to the freespace mapping took place to handle cases
where a relation's FSM data has to be both moved down and compressed,
based on a report from Dror Matalon. The error message in the optimizer
for encountering a RangeVar in an expression was improved to actually be
useful. Some corner cases in ACL manipulation dealing with empty ACL
arrays were fixed. Several bugs in ecpgs informix compatlib were fixed.
Queries in plpgsql cursors can now begin with '(' as well as 'SELECT'.
Some more jostling of psql's tab completion functionality went on,
making it so system catalogs will only be offered for tab completion
upon entering at least 'pg_'. A bug with unwanted character set
translation in libpgtcl's lo_read/lo_write commands was dealt with. The
fix required use of some newer functionality in Tcl's ByteArray objects
which has bumped up the requirement for tcl to be at least version 8.1.
If you think this might cause an issue you are encouraged to test your
applications on the release candidate and report back ASAP. A fix for a
possible referential integrity violation when a qualified ON INSERT rule
split the query into one INSERT and one UPDATE where the UPDATE then
hit's the just created row without modifying the key fields again, and a
regression test was added to check for this in the future. There was
some general cleanup in PQunescapeBytea(), fixing some portability
issues with 0 sized requests and with handling of escape sequences. A
problem with using cross joins with select ... for update that had
actually cropped in 7.3 was repaired. Some corner cases with handling
superuser issued GRANT or REVOKE on non-owned objects were fixed.

Not too many doc fixes this week which might be seen as a good sign.
Christopher Kings-Lyyne spent some time cleaning up the GiST
documentation, the README file for the buffer manager was updated to
reflect the current state of affairs in the code base, and the
documentation on system catalogs was updated to be more explicit when
referring to domains. Other than that we had some minor cleanup in the
ecpg docs, pg_dumpall's documentation, and in the regression docs.

One last note on infrastructure changes, we should have a new mirror
site for www located in Israel appearing soon. We also might have some
potential downtime on Saturday night due to some scheduled maintenance
on the server.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

SQL4X Manager J 2.7 Released
http://www.macosguru.com/macosguru3/products/sql4xmanagerj.html

PostgreSQL Autodoc 1.20 Released
http://www.rbt.ca/autodoc/releasenotes.html

Synchronicity Developer Suite 4.0 Proving up to 40X Faster for Design
Management
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20031030005

OpenLink Software Releases High-Performance 64-Bit Edition of ODBC
Drivers
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031104/netu027_1.html

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

Compiere on Postgres/MySQL
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/03/127244

Metapa database clustering (blog)
http://www.leyton.org/weblog/archives/000556.html

== Upcoming Events ==

Free Software International Congress: Sao Paulo, Brazil: November 8-9
The local PostgreSQL users group will have a stand in the event.
http://www.conisli.org.br

Drexel University: Philidelphia, PA: November 19
Bruce Momjian will be presenting "PostgreSQL: Past, Present, and Future"

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 7th 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