PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 24th 2003

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 24th 2003 ==

Like a mid-season sitcom, this weeks weekly news jumps to Sunday, where it
will hopefully settle in for a few weeks. Most of the action (or reaction)
last week centered around the release of PostgreSQL 7.4. This release had
some international coordination and saw news articles in several different
countries; I've supplied several links to articles below, and a few links to
more links regarding the release. For those who are planning migrations,
it's worth noting that rpms (source and some compiled) are now available from
the PostgreSQL ftp servers for both Red Hat and SUSE, look under /binary/v7.4
for your desired flavor. Updated Cygwin packages are also available from the
Cygwin mirror system.

While most of the news has been good, we have had a couple of bug reports
come in which will lay the groundwork for an eventual 7.4.1. One bug that
was confirmed and fixed involved schema processing in the ecpg preprocessor,
should you be hit by that you may want to retrieve the latest code from the
7.4 branch of CVS.

International users of the tsearch2 module might want to look at an update
that came in just after 7.4's release. The change involves improved ispell
support for compound words. While the change is 100% compatible with 7.4, as
a feature addition after 7.4 final release, the change will not be integrated
into the core distribution until 7.5. In the mean time, you can get updated
tsearch modules at http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/ .
Thanks go out to ABC Startsiden (www.startsiden.no) who sponsored the
development.

Last week I also mentioned that development had started on PostgreSQL 7.5,
and wanted to share some of the upcoming changes that have already been put
into place. One such item was the replacement of the LRU buffer replacement
strategy with an ARC algorithm adopted to PostgreSQL. Along with the new
buffer management code, a new background writer process was committed to help
improve disk i/o. This knocks off the TODO item "Use background process to
write dirty shared buffers to disk". These two changes should give a
noticeable performance increase for 7.5, and initial testing seems positive.

Another performance increase that is sure to make a lot of users happy is new
cross data-type index support. This should help out in those cases where
(for example) one is searching for an int4 but the index on the tables are
bigints. In the past this would have required casting of the value to avoid a
sequential scan, but now it will use the index if appropriate. Another big
change for 7.5 is the rewrite of initdb in C, replacing the shell script that
had been used in the past. This will be needed once win32 support is
finished, but should have other benefits as well; you can expect to see most
(if not all) of the remaining shell script tools rewritten this way. Finally
on the 7.5 front, Christoper Kings-Lynne has added support for COMMENT ON
casts, conversions, languages, operator classes, and large objects. Along
the way improved support for this functionality was added to pg_dump and
psql.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Updated Cygwin Package: postgresql-7.4-1
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2003-11/msg00010.php

PgManage released under Open Software License
http://www.commandprompt.com/entry.lxp?lxpe=303

TheKompany.com announces free version of Rekall
http://www.newsforge.com/business/03/11/14/1613201.shtml?tid=85

theKompany.com's Data Architect - A Linux and Windows Review
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5170

SQLFusion Announces Release of HTMLFusion.com
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20031117006136&newsLang=en

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

New PostgreSQL 7.4 release targets the enterprise
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php?id=817806074

Open-Source DB PostgreSQL Polishes its Rough Edges
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1391237,00.asp

PostgreSQL 7.4 Released
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/03/11/18/1741248.shtml?tid=137&tid=198

PostgreSQL 7.4 queries 'up to 400% faster now'
http://www.tectonic.co.za/default.php?action=view&id=241&topic=Database

PostgreSQL boosts open source database
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/11/20/HNpostgre_1.html

Turkish News Articles Regarding 7.4
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-advocacy/2003-11/msg00253.php

Press Coverage in Germany
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-advocacy/2003-11/msg00214.php

== Upcoming Events ==

Linux.Conf.Au: Adelaide, Australia: January 12-17
BOF and Tutorials presented by Gavin Sherry
http://lca2004.linux.org.au.

NordU Usenix 2004: Denmark: January 28 - February 1
Bruce Momjian will be giving PostgreSQL several tutorials
http://www.nordu.org/NordU2004/

Linux Solutions 2004: Paris, France: February 4-6
Bruce Momjian will be presenting
http://www.linuxsolutions.fr/EN/home/index.php?site=default

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - November 24th 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

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