It’s a joke alright, but no April Fool

When I saw the timestamp on the tech press articles I hoped against hope. April 1st 9:43am.  Draft International Standard DIS 29500, more commonly known by the wonderfully double-speak name of Office Open XML (it’s neither Open, nor XML), is about to became IS 29500.

It would seem that Microsoft have been successful in fast-tracking their OOXML “spec” through the International Standards Organisation,  somehow managing to side-step the fact that their proposal is overblown, has no reference implementation, is not based on user need, and is full of bug-for-bug compatibility flaws with existing proprietary Microsoft Office products.

How they managed to get their provincial proposal past a committee containing 47 coutries that aren’t even able to use their own alphabets in OOXML URLs is anyone’s guess.  And all this despite the fact that an ISO standard for office documents already exists – Open Document Format.

One barrier to adoption still remains however, and it’s a big one.  The global market. A market containing large constituencies who are are less inclined to bow down to Microsoft. China, India, Brazil.  After the posturing of the Committee processes, this is where the real battle will be fought.

PostgreSQL 8.3 – on its way

PostgreSQL 8.3 is now in Beta2 and judging by the change log it’s going to be a good’n. There’s one new feature in particular which comes along at just the right time for me & phuser.com, plus some other very welcome enhancements.

 

More on those headlines features in a moment. The word is that v8.3 will be a performance release. Looking at the official change log, this is only evident by a list of fairly gritty technical changes – asynchronous commits, heap-only tuples, distributed checkpoints, lazy XID assignment, on-disk data size savings – you get the picture. It sounds cool (never a bad thing!), but the important thing is that all the hard work by developer community appears have really paid off. For example Jeff Davis has demonstrated very significant performance improvements over v8.2.5. (On an aside, recent SPEC tests showed that v8.2 was no slouch either, falling 15% short of Oracle 10g on a hardware costing almost 15% less ($65,500 Sun vs $74,000 HP hardware; $0 vs $110,000 software, respectively). Not content with this, the Man in the Hat says that the PostgreSQL Core Team plan to be faster than Oracle, possibly starting with v8.3.

 

So what of the new features in this release?

 

The Full-Text Search component is now considered mature enough and functional enough to finally make the move from contrib/ to core. This is nice – one less thing to worry about when configuring new platforms, and finally removes MySQL’s long-standing advantage of having (albeit inferior) FTS out of the box.

 

But the one v8.3 feature I’m really looking forward to playing with (and hopefully using in earnest!) is the new set of XML functions. Perhaps I’ll write about these in more detail when I have had a chance to try them out, but in short they should make it much easier to generate XML representations of data from SQL. One subset of functions in particular maps tables to XML, apparently making it very easy to dump tables and queries as XML. This is just what I need to implement Phuser’s upcoming export feature, allowing our users to get their Phuse data out in a consistent, portable format. It should be very cool!

 

Of course, we’re still in Beta. There will be the traditional series of additional betas and RCs before we get the official release. But now is the time to start reviewing the change log and seeing if you need to make any modifications to your apps in order to make the switch. Download a beta and do some testing. If you find anything fishy, report it to the Postgres devs – they need to know. Having said that, in three and a half years of intensive Phuser development, I have never once encountered a bug, flaw or crash in PostgreSQL, even in betas. It really is as rock-solid as they say, and a real tribute to the chaps who make it happen and their rigorous release engineering processes.