Inaugural Issue Of Postgres Online Magazine Available

The inaugural issue of the Postgres Online Magazine is available. The magazine is available in two formats: HTML and PDF

Here is the table of contents

From the Editors
PostgreSQL The Road Behind and Ahead

What's new and upcoming in PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL 8.3 is just around the Corner

PostgreSQL Q & A
Converting from Unix Timestamp to PostgreSQL Timestamp or Date Beginner
Using Distinct ON to return newest order for each customer Intermediate
How to create an index based on a function Intermediate

Basics
The Anatomy of a PostgreSQL - Part 1 Beginner
How does CLUSTER ON improve index performance Intermediate

PL Programming
Language Architecture in PostgreSQL Intermediate

Using PostgreSQL Contribs
PostGIS for geospatial analysis and mapping Intermediate

Application Development
Database Abstraction with Updateable Views Advanced

Product Showcase
Serendipity Blogging Software

A Product of Paragon Corporation

You can read the magazine here: http://www.postgresonline.com/

xTuple Apps 2.3: PostgreSQL-powered Open Source ERP adds Yahoo!, Returns, Job Shop

xTuple, the leader in open source enterprise resource planning software, announced the general availability of version 2.3 of the xTuple Applications, PostBooks and OpenMFG. Featuring more than 200 community-driven enhancements in just three months, version 2.3 adds:

* support for customer returns and service management;

* an expansion of unit of measure options in sales, purchasing, and inventory;

* better support for job shops and engineer-to-order companies;

* the ability to reserve specific product inventory for particular sales orders;

* and a rich XML-powered interface for external ordering systems, including prebuilt order mapping for web stores powered by Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.

The xTuple Applications are advanced ERP software solutions built with open source components, such as the PostgreSQL database, the Qt toolkit for C++, and the OpenRPT report writer. The fully integrated packages include Inventory Management, Product Definition and Costing, Work Order Management, Manufacturing, Purchasing, Sales, Shipping and Receiving, Project Management, Sales Analysis, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, a full General Ledger, and Corporate/Customer Relationship Management. Both packages are fully multi-currency, multi-lingual, and support a range of multi-layered taxation structures. The commercial OpenMFG product adds Manufacturing Scheduling, Capacity Planning, and several other advanced features.

"The progress in the product from release to release is amazing," said Ritzo Muntinga, president of Oceanside, California-based ElectroSport Industries. ElectroSport manufactures specialized power accessories for the streetbike, dirtbike and ATV aftermarket, and championed the Sales Order Reservations functionality new in version 2.3. "We're very impressed with the functionality and stability of OpenMFG, and the xTuple team's ability to design new features without making the application overly cluttered or difficult to use."

The xTuple online community is growing by leaps and bounds as well; there have been over 40,000 downloads of the PostBooks software, and the project has catapulted into the Top 10 projects on the SourceForge open source repository (out of 165,000). In addition to product enhancements, the open source community has contributed translations of the applications into French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Turkish - with efforts underway in German, Japanese, and several other languages.

PostBooks is available free of charge under the OSI-approved Common Public Attribution License (CPAL). OpenMFG is available under xTuple's innovative hybrid license, whereby customers and partners have full access to the application source code, and any enhancements made to the product flow back to xTuple for review, quality testing, and possible incorporation into the baseline product. Both PostBooks and OpenMFG run equally well on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers, and are fully internationalized with multi-currency, support for multiple tax structures, and multilingual translation packs maintained by the global open-source community. All this and more, including public discussion forums, blogs, and the community issue/bug tracker, can be found at www.xtuple.org.

About xTuple:
xTuple (formerly OpenMFG) develops next-generation, enterprise-class business process applications powered by open source software such as Linux, PostgreSQL, and Qt. xTuple products, led by its OpenMFG, OpenRPT and new PostBooks applications, give companies better control over operations, increased productivity, and measurable growth across all areas of their businesses-all at a lower cost of ownership. For more information, please visit the company Web site at www.xtuple.com.

Viewalyzer 1.0.2 Released

Viewalyzer is a graphical tool for recompiling Views and all dependent views. Also all Grants on all views will be available after recompiling. Before recompilation a backup will be made. When some unsolvable errors occur during recompilation everything will be “rolled back”. Also an errorlog is written to get informations what has happened. All your originally written DDL’s can be stored in the database and will that way be used during recompilation. You now can use “CREATE VIEW my_view AS SELECT * FROM my_table” and this will be used every time you recompile this view or one that my_view is dependent on.

New Features:

- Documentation available
- Compatibility with postgres 8.0 – 8.2
- Some minor bugs fixed


Download here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/viewalyzer/
Screen shots here: http://www.consipio.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36&Itemid=48

You need Java 1.6 to run Viewalyzer

IronPython 2.0 Alpha 7 is now available:

IronPython 2.0 Alpha 7 (source and binary) is now available:
IronPython Project Homepage
Release Notes and Download

There’s been numerous changes to IronPython in the past month and a half. Most notably a lot of work has been done to get usage of the ‘yield’ statement compatible with CPython 2.5. There might be a few more changes that need to be made, but by and far IP now adheres to PEP 342. Another notable change brings the code closer to the new hosting API spec they published on the mailing list. The next couple of releases should finish that work.

Zenoss Core 2.1.2 Available

The latest packaged version of Zenoss Core, version 2.1.2 is available for download.

Zenoss Core 2.1.2 is available from: http://www.zenoss.com/download

This is primarily a maintenance release that addresses the following issues:
ZENMODEL

* Fixed MinMaxThreshold escalation always escalating to 5 (2394)
* Fixed Production state error for non-existent devices in the stopProductionStates list. (2404)
* Fixed MinMaxThreshold string values failure (2419)
* Changing device settings from System/Group fails to update deviceSearch catalog (2433)
* Allow for branch DeviceClasses and EventClasses to be added to ZenPacks (2332)
* Fixed T1 interface display speed (2444)

ZENEVENTS

* Made sure "clear" emails/pages are resent if there is a failure sending (2448)
* Device priority not being set on events (2483)

USER INTERFACE

* Made sure that ZenUsers do not lose ZenUser role when changing their password (2350)
* Fixed UnicodeDecodeError (2127)
* Repeat display for alering rules flip-flops "Does not repeat" display (2409)
* Corrected zoom controls malfunction in IE7 (2425)
* Corrected missing Navtool on OS/Filesystems with more than 40 entries. (2174)

DATACOLLECTOR

* Fixed checkCiscoChange method in SnmpClient (2004)
* Do not monitor hard disks with empty IDs (2398)

ZENRRD

* Fixed issue where disabled RRD Thresholds continued to send events (2278)
* Zencommand thresholds now getting proper eventclass (2423)

GRAPHING

* Apply TALES from DataPointGraphPoint to associated ThresholdGraphPoint. (2382)
* Allow TALES to be used within GraphPoint RPNs (2383)

ZENREPORTS

* Corrected typo in memory performance report (2487)

ZENPACKS

* Fixed broken DellDeviceMap condition (2454)
* Fixed broken HPDeviceMap condition (2455)
* HttpMonitor now usesthe user-supplied timeout value in data sources (2482)
* Removed HelloWorldZenPack from the RPM spec file (2342)

ZENOSSINST

* Fixed pyip version of zenping (1881)

Volume 2, Issue 4 of The Python Papers Available For Download

The latest PDF may be downloaded from http://archive.pythonpapers.org/ThePythonPapersVolume2Issue4.pdf. It is their largest issue yet at 81 pages and is chock full of great content.

Table of Contents for Volume 2, Issue 4

Letter from the editor: Page 4
Industry Articles
GrrlCamp: Page 6
News from the Python Software Foundation: Page 9
Interview with Michael Foord: Page 16
Screen Scraping Web Pages: Page 22
Interview with Resolver Systems: Page 24
Eight Tips for Starting with Python: Page 30
Python Events: Page 80
Peer Reviewed Section
Acknowledgment of Reviewers: Page 34
pypk - A Python extension module to handle chemical kinetics in plasma physics modeling: Page 35
The Why and How for Design Patterns: Page 48
Python Switch Statement: Page 58
An Introduction to Test Driven Generation: Page 64

PostgreSQL Maestro 7.12 released (8.3 support and more)

SQL Maestro Group announces the release of PostgreSQL Maestro 7.12, a
powerful Windows GUI solution for PostgreSQL administration and database
development.

http://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/postgresql/maestro/

New features
=================

PostgreSQL 8.3 management extensions:

1. Support for ENUM types has been added. You can create new such types,
edit existing ones and, of course, drop unnecessary types. Also the
corresponding editor has been implemented in the Data Grid (also works for
domains based on ENUM types, domains based on domains based on ENUM types
and so on).

2. Function management: now it is possible to set up the environment for a
function as well as customize its execution cost and estimated number of
rows returned by a set-returning function.

3. Support for XML and UUID types has been implemented.

Other server management extensions:

1. The Rule permission is no longer displayed for PostgreSQL 8.2+ because it
was removed in that release for security reasons.

2. SQL parser now accepts queries with !~~, ~~, ~~* and !~~* operators (SQL
Formatter, View Editor).

Interface improvements:

1. The SQL Generator tool has been implemented. Use this feature to produce
various SQL scripts (CREATE, DROP, SELECT, INSERT, etc) for the selected
object. The result script can be saved to a file, copied to clipboard, and
opened in SQL Editor or SQL Script Editor.

2. Data Grid: the notification pane is now displayed after simple mode
activation (filtering, grouping and sorting features are not supported in
this mode). All the related settings can be customized in the Options
dialog.

3. Data Grid: the Generate Query command has been added to the Table / View
Editor. Use this command to copy current filter conditions to the SQL Editor
window as an SQL query. It is also possible to copy filter condition to
clipboard as WHERE clause using grid's popup menu.

4. Data Grid: now it is possible to encrypt the contents of the selected
cell by the md5 algorithm (the corresponding item has been added to grid's
popup menu).

5. Object editors, SQL Editor, Database Designer, BLOB Viewer and other
database-dependent windows: only connected databases are now displayed in
the drop-down list.

6. Some other minor improvements and corrections.

Full press release:
http://www.sqlmaestro.com/news/company/4706/

Background information:

SQL Maestro Group is engaged in developing complete database admin and
management tools for MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite,
Firebird and MaxDB providing the highest performance, scalability and
reliability to meet the requirements of today's database applications.

IronPython Studio Is Now Available From CodePlex

IronPython Studio is a free full IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for the Python programming language. It is based on the existing IronPython example that is included in the VS SDK.IronPython Studio is based on the Visual Studio 2008 Shell runtime (royalty free) and can be installed without requiring any version of Visual Studio.

Get it here: http://www.codeplex.com/IronPythonStudio

Resolver Systems announces the public Beta release of Resolver One: the first Spreadsheet/Python hybrid

Resolver Systems (www.resolversystems.com) today announces the public Beta release of its groundbreaking program, Resolver One, a Rapid Application Development tool for analysing and presenting business data using a familiar spreadsheet interface. Resolver One integrates databases, code and IT-developed components to create powerful and easy-to-use solutions - all using your existing knowledge of spreadsheets. The power and ingenious flexibility of Resolver One comes from the fact that it is fully programmable with Python code. After the success of the private Beta subscription in September 2007 (more than 1,000 sign-ups), Resolver is now planning on an official v1.0 release as early as January 2008.

Today Resolver Systems announces the public beta of Resolver One, a revolutionary improvement in spreadsheet systems. In Resolver One, the spreadsheet is a computer program
“This will change the way businesses think about and use spreadsheets. So many of the problems of the traditional model – poor database integration, and the lack of auditing, iterative analysis, or web-publishing - are solved when you realize that any spreadsheet is, at heart, just a computer program,” said Giles Thomas, CTO and MD of Resolver Systems.

“With this launch,” said Jean Viry-Babel, Head of Sales, “we get the opportunity to get our product into the hands of the 1,000s of people who have expressed an interest since Resolver One was featured on Jon Udell’s blog and Slashdot.”

Resolver One uses the Python programming language which was first released in 1991. Python is an easily learnable and highly expressive language with a rich standard library; it has been successfully used in a wide variety of applications, in businesses and in academia. Its clean syntax allows newcomers to become productive rapidly, while its more sophisticated features and built-in test framework allow experienced developers to build powerful tools which can adapt quickly to changing requirements.

“We’re excited that at last people will be able to develop sophisticated applications, all within a familiar spreadsheet interface,” added Giles Thomas.

About Resolver Systems:

Resolver Systems was founded in 2005 to produce a next generation spreadsheet. The founders, Giles Thomas, Robert Smithson and Patrick Kemmis, had all struggled with the challenges of running multi-million or multi-billion dollar businesses through poorly debugged spreadsheets. Their solution – Resolver One – seamlessly integrates a powerful and flexible programming language and a traditional spreadsheet environment. Already Resolver One has received extensive interest from companies in the financial, medical and academic communities.

Python 3.0 Alpha 2 Has Been Released!

Python 3.0 Alpha 2 Has Been Released!

Get it here: http://python.org/download/releases/3.0/