Welcome to our third Issue (March 2008) of Postgres Online Journal. We folded January and February together because February is a short month and we felt we had already covered quite a bit of ground. This also gives us time to fill March.
We have made a couple of changes to the underlying PDF output structure that we would like to cover.
Our January/February 2008 (Issue 2), can be downloaded from these links 8 1/2 by 11" and A4
In this issue as mentioned we hope to cover creating a lite Representational State Transfer (REST) application to showcase the new Full Text and XML features introduced in 8.3. Someone suggested we create a Java based server version to compliment our proposed ASP.NET and PHP versions since a lot of PostgreSQL users are Java Programmers. It has been a while since we've programmed with Java Servlets and JSP so not sure if we'll embarass ourselves too much by attempting such an example, but we'll think about it.
We are looking forward to PostgreSQL 8.3 and have started to test out 8.3 RC2 with our existing apps. So far so good, except for some little glitch we had using PostGIS in conjunction with UMN Mapserver. That particular problem seems to be more an issue with the UMN Mapserver Postgis driver with the way its reading the version number in PostgreSQL than anything else (the RC seems to be throwing it off). This issue only affects our more complicated view-based layers and we suspect will be a non-issue when PostgreSQL 8.3 has a bonafide version name e.g. 8.3.0 instead of 8.3 RC2. Aside from that we have noticed speed improvements among other things.
Check out Stefan Kaltenbrunner's Feature Matrix described here and displayed here. It is really quite a useful chart for those thinking of upgrading or wondering why they should or planning to move over from some other DBMS and waiting for a specific feature to be available in Postgres before they can make the jump.