== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 15th 2004 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 15th 2004 ==

Well, 7.4.2 was officially released last week. It is worth extra
mention that this particular upgrade release requires an update to the
internal catalogs for those upgrading from previous 7.4.x versions, something
that is not normally required for minor version increases. Because of this it
is strongly recommend that anyone upgrading read over the notes in the
HISTORY file.

With that out of the way, focus returned to the 7.5 development branch
where we saw a number of changes as well as submission by several new folks.
Ray Aspeitia, with help from David Wheeler, submitted new start-up scripts
for Mac OSX. The int2/int4/int8/float4/float8 input routines were all revised
to allow for any amount of leading or trailing whitespace, which brings them
in-line with the SQL spec, and makes them more consistent with other numeric
types. Another change in the same area; we now accept 'Infinity' and
'-Infinity' as input to the float4 and float8 types. We now provide a WARNING
when creating a foreign key constraint that uses a column type that is
incompatible enough to prevent indexscanning of the referenced table. David
Turner submitted a patch to allow the building of debug dll's for win32
development. There was also some clean up in the initialization of the stats
process, which now allows win32 to pass the stats tests.

Andrew Dunstan's work on increasing logging functionality was
committed in. It introduces a number of changes in both what can be logged
and how it can be logged, for a good summary you should probably check out
the CVS documentation available from the developer website. The ALSO keyword
was added to the CREATE RULE command, thanks to Fabien Coelho, allowing rules
to perform thier original operations as well as a rule defined operation. The
LOCK command was also modified, as it now has a NOWAIT option to allow it to
immediately return if it cannot acquire its lock. The psql program was given
some more smarts to now be able to show the location of syntax errors
visually.

Last week I mentioned how there was some good movement on
Point-In-Time Recovery for 7.5, and I am happy to report that this week Simon
Riggs posted a well fleshed out summary/proposal on how the PITR is to be
implemented. Anyone interested in PITR development is encouraged to read it
over, and even for those not involved with PITR, it provides a nice summary
of PostgreSQL's current crash recovery mechanisms. You can find the posting
at http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2004-03/msg00295.php.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

PostgreSQL Web Inventory 2.1
http://freshmeat.net/projects/pgwebinventory/?branch_id=15686&release_id=154262

BiggerSQL-.12.2 a Mac Postgresql Browser/Editor
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2004-03/msg00487.php

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

U.S. government seeks the open road
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/03/12/11FEopgov_1.html

Big business opens up to Linux
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=1827627000&fp=16&fpid=0

Popularity growing for open-source databases
http://www.itnews.com.au/storycontent.asp?ID=10&Art_ID=18712

== Upcoming Events ==

eGovOs: Washington, DC. USA: March 15-17
Bruce Momjian will give a brief talk
http://www.egovos.org/Conferences/

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 15th 2004 ==
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