Postgres OnLine Journal   

As Robert Treat pointed out in our PostgreSQL 8.3 is out and the Project Moves On, one of the features that was introduced in PostgreSQL 8.0 was the syntax of

ALTER TABLE sometable 
    ALTER COLUMN somecolumn TYPE new_data_type 
    USING some_function_call_to_cast(somecolumn);

PostgreSQL 8.3 is out

As many have said - PostgreSQL 8.3 was released on February 4th, 2008 and has numerous enhancements. Listing of features can be found at PostgreSQL 8.3 release notes, and has been mentioned ad-nauseum by several Postgres bloggers. Robert Treat has provided a nice round-up of blog entries that demonstrate various 8.3 enhancements in his PostgreSQL Blog's 8.3 Feature Round-Up. As a side note, the new EnterpriseDb funded Stack Builder feature for windows provides a nice complement for getting add-ons to PostgreSQL.

Horizon of PostgreSQL

Many PostgreSQL contributors are very proud of the fact that PostgreSQL is an open source project and therefore can not be bought like MySQL which is an open source product made by a commercial company. I'm not sure general PostgreSQL users really care that much about this. I suspect that many think

• yah - and Microsoft can be bought, Oracle can be bought, IBM can be bought - who is big enough to buy them and like they will kill off their prize cows
• and if Oracle, IBM or Microsoft one day were to give away non-crippled versions of Oracle 11G, SQL Server 2008, DB2 to leverage their other holdings (perhaps slightly unrealistic), what would that mean to PostgreSQL or MySQL?
• Can a community grow without money pumping into it and if it is not growing does it F*** matter that it is an open source project?