== PostgreSQL Weekly News - April 09 2006 == WARNING: do not turn off full_page_writes in PG 8.1.*
Recent analysis has shown that turning off full_page_writes is not safe under *any* circumstances, even if you have infrastructure such as a battery-backed disk cache that should prevent partial page writes. We have seen two recent reports of full_page_writes = off causing failure to restart after a database crash, even though no OS- or hardware-level problem occurred. If you are running on 8.1.0 - 8.1.3, however, you need to make sure that full_page_writes is ON. http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-03/msg01168.php We need students and mentors who want to work on PostgreSQL projects for Google's next Summer Of Code. One of last year's winners was http://pgfoundry.org/projects/qbe/ Query By Example. If you are a professor or a college/gradute student interested in doing a database-oriented Summer of Code project, especially if you already have your own project which relates to PostgreSQL, please contact Josh Berkus ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) as soon as possible. Qingqing Zhou introduced a plan to add parallel sequential scan to the query execution. By splitting the sequential scan into two processes, a reader and a processor, he expects to make major performance gains for queries that involve sequential scans. Teodor Sigaev and Oleg Bartunov introduced a patch to add Generalized Inverted Indexes (GIN). This is a specialized kind of index which supports searching multi-value fields, such as array fields and TSearch fields. GIN is the first piece of the next version of TSearch, a full-text indexing system. Several developers discussed ways of making pg_hba.conf modifiable through SQL, even the possibility of keeping it in a table. We had a false alarm of red flags across the pgBuildFarm this last week which was caused by a regression test which was not daylight-savings-time aware. This test has been revised. Peter Brant presented an analysis of why statistics collection on Windows is crash-prone. The development team discussed it at length, but the Windows hackers do not yet have a solution. Tom Lane checked in a patch set that fixes a long-standing bug in PostgreSQL's domain implementation. You can now have sub-domains (and sub-sub-domains, and ...) EnterpriseDB has hired Bruce Momjian and Simon Riggs. Kudos to all. http://www.enterprisedb.com/news_events/press_releases/04_04_06.do Registration for the PostgreSQL Anniversary is open http://conference.postgresql.org/Registration The PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit is brought to you by Afilias, EnterpriseDB, GreenPlum, Pervasive and Sun Microsystems. == PostgreSQL Product News == dbVisualizer 5.0 is out. http://www.minq.se/ EMS SQLManager 3.5 is out http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/manager/ pgEdit 1.2 is out http://pgedit.com/ DBD::Pg 1.48 bug fix release is out. Really, this time :) http://search.cpan.org/~dbdpg/DBD-Pg-1.48/ Bizgres 0.9 is out. http://www.bizgres.org/ MicroOLAP Database Designer 1.0.6 for PostgreSQL is out. http://microolap.com/products/database/postgresql-designer/ == PostgreSQL Local == David Fetter will be speaking at FISL in Porto Alegre, Brazil. FISL is happening April 19-22 http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/7.0/www/?q=en == 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 and Josh Berkus ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match