== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 11th 2004 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 11th 2004 ==

With a lot of talk the last couple of weeks about "Enterprise
Features" it was nice to see a pickup in commit activity this week even if it
wasn't for any of the favored sons. Well, that is not entirely true since a
couple of this weeks changes will be huge for some people out there; the
point is that progress is progress and this week was another good step
forward.

This weeks biggest feature add comes in the form of an overhaul to the
ALTER TABLE command. ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN now supports defaults and NOT
NULL constraints as per the SQL spec. We now also have an implementation of
ALTER COLUMN TYPE which will allow a change between any two datatypes as long
as you can specify how to convert the values. Multiple ALTER actions can now
be carried out in a single ALTER command as well (ie. adding two new columns
in one command). Finally, after some discussion, ALTER COLUMN TYPE was made
to preserve clustered status for indexes it doesn't modify, and the ALTER
TABLE CLUSTER ON code was cleaned up in a number of places. Thanks go out to
Rod Taylor and Tom Lane for their work on these much anticipated features.

Some work was done to make PostgreSQL to get past undesirable locale
behavior for case conversion of basic ASCII letters found in the Turkish
language. All uses of strcasecmp and strncasecmp were removed in favor of new
functions pg_strcasecmp and pg_strncasecmp, and most direct uses of toupper
and tolower were removed in favor of pg_toupper and pg_tolower. These
functions use the same notions of case folding already developed for
identifier case conversion. The straight locale-based folding was left in
place for situations where we are just manipulating user data and not trying
to match it to built-in strings, for example, the SQL upper() function.

Rounding out the week were several smaller changes including removing
the use of the term NATURAL CROSS JOIN per the SQL spec, erasing MD5 user
passwords when a user is renamed (since the username is used as salt for the
MD5 password), several patches from the win32 group including one to allow
whitespaces in the db/install directory, and row expressions are now allowed
in all places of the expression syntax, which means you could now pass a
ROW() construct to a function that accepts a rowtype parameter. This is
another step in the work being done to make rowtype values into first-class
citizens inside the database.

In other big news, the new project hosting infrastructure was
officially announced this week, available at http://projects.postgresql.org.
Currently all new projects are welcome, and the team hopes to begin moving
projects from the old gborg.postgresql.org site soon. The new site uses code
from the gforge project; a highly popular, open source collaborative software
development tool. It is based on PostgreSQL and PHP (among other open source
tools) and has a thriving development community behind it. We're happy to be
taking this step forward, but also want to give special thanks to Chris Ryan
for his efforts over the last several years in maintaining the gborg
community.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Bricolage 1.8.0 Released
http://www.bricolage.cc/releases/1.8.0/

Announce: PgBrowse-0.9
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2004-05/msg00199.php

PgOleDb version 1.0.0.8 released
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/oledb/news/newsfull.php?news_id=171

OFIA 2.2 adds Linux and Portal support
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=25786

Nexonia Inc. Announces Web-Based Expense Report and Timesheet System
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/5/emw122900.htm

== PostgreSQL In the News ==

FileMaker to PostgreSQL Migration with FmPro Migrator on Windows
http://techdocs.postgresql.org/techdocs/fmpromigrator/fmpro_migrator_win_postgresql_article.php

pgFoundry Open For Business
http://pgfoundry.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=47

PostgreSQL 7.4
http://www.linux-mag.com/2004-02/postgresql_01.html

== Upcoming Events ==

European Regional Open Source Conference: Yerevan, Armenia: June 28-30
Bruce Momjian will be speaking at the Conference
http://www.opensourcearmenia.com/osconference

OSCon: Portland, OR. USA: July 26-30
There will be a PostgreSQL Track with many community members participating.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2004/

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - May 11th 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