== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 12 2006 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - March 12 2006 ==

The PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit dates and location information are
now posted: http://conference.postgresql.org. The Summit is also
looking for corporate sponsors. Please see the Sponsors page
http://conference.postgresql.org/Sponsors/ on the site.

LinuxWorld Boston needs volunteers to help staff the PostgreSQL .ORG
booth at the conference. Come for an afternoon or all 3 days. No
special knowledge required. Contact Josh Drake at
jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com

Jonah Harris suggested implementing SYNONYMs, which are something like
symlinks for database objects, to PostgreSQL. While SYNONYMs are not
part of the SQL Standard, they are common to other large-scale SQL
database systems. Discussion about permissions and syntax continues.

Not to be outdone in virtual objects, Bernd Hemle submitted a
first-draft patch for SQL92-spec updatable VIEWs. Given the interest
in this patch, it seems certain to make it into 8.2. Other hackers
are currently editing the patch.

In CVS TIP, PL/Perl now has prepared queries. Thanks to Dmitry
Karasic for the patch and Andrew Dunstan for help cleaning it up.

There was a fiery discussion about the performance improvements for
vacuum process and free space usage. Despite the fact that this is
an old issue, ideas from people collected again and laid on table.
Some of them resulted in TODO items, while others stayed in the
"impractical" and/or "not-worth-adding" state.

Tom Lane's proposal about the improvements in the merge sorting
framework for large number of "tapes," which currently uses a standard
polyphase merge, triggered a long, lively discussion. Other ideas
came up and highlighted some further steps to take.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

psqlODBC 7.03.0261 released
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/psqlodbc/

EMS DB Comparer 2006 released
http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/dbcomparer/

Continuent is doing a webinar on high availability and clustering for PostgreSQL
http://continuent.webex.com

Charonware Case Studio 2 2.23 now supports PostgreSQL 8.1
http://www.casestudio.com/enu/ver223.aspx

pgAdmin3 1.4.2 bug fix release is out.
http://www.pgadmin.org/

TurboDbAdmin now supports PostgreSQL.
http://turboajax.com/turbodbadmin.html

Microolap Database Designer for PostgreSQL 1.0.5 released.
http://microolap.com/products/database/postgresql-designer/

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Elein Mustain, Managing Director of Varlena, LLC will be giving a
PostgreSQL overview at the East Bay Linux Users Group. The meeting
will be at 7:00pm on April 19 will be at Hurricane Electric 760 Mission
Court, Fremont, CA 94539.
http://www.varlena.com/
http://www.eblug.org/

The PostgreSQL User group Germany ran a booth and a very successful
workshop at the Linux day in Chemnitz, Germany. The Workshop documents
are available at:
http://www.pgug.de/events/events.php

On February 17 and 18, 2006, the Japan PostgreSQL Users Group hosted
the PostgreSQL Conference 2006 in Tokyo. The two days included a
variety of presentations from various members of the PostgreSQL
community both in Japan and from abroad.

Also, JPUG incorporated as an non-profit organization on December 20,
2005. This clarifies organizational issues such as banking and domain
names ownership.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, published on Mondays (PST/PDT):
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter,
Josh Berkus, Andrew Dunstan, Michael (grzm) Glaesemann, Andreas (ads)
Scherbaum and Volkan (knt) Yazici.