The PostgreSQL project has again been selected to take part in Summer of Code for 2013. Google will be funding several students to work with mentors from our project in order to hack PostgreSQL code for the summer.

Applications for students open April 22nd. Our Summer Of Code page has all the information you need about applying this year.

If you are connected with a university, please make sure that students know about this opportunity. If you are a student, please apply!

LAS VEGAS — April 8, 2013 — Today at the Microsoft Management Summit, Microsoft Corp. showcased companies relying on Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center to adapt to the changing needs of their businesses and customers.

“Companies around the world are using our technologies to innovate for their businesses. Our focus is to help IT organizations expand their capabilities and embrace the opportunities of cloud computing,” said Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Windows Server and System Center Division. Anderson delivered the keynote address at the Summit and blogged about Microsoft’s Cloud OS strategy.

Powering Pizza Delivery

A pizza delivery pioneer, Domino’s Pizza has computerized nearly all aspects of store operations, from inventory to order taking to staff scheduling. The company moved to Windows Server Hyper-V for better reliability and management of its in-store servers running the Domino’s Pulse point-of-sale (POS) application.

Hyper-V is currently deployed in 750 stores and will be rolled out to more than 4,000 in the United States, as well as international locations. Using System Center to centrally manage over 15,000 servers and devices, Domino’s has cut virtualization-related help desk calls by 99 percent.

“If online ordering goes down, a third of our business evaporates. It’s that simple. It’s absolutely critical that our store servers remain running and, with Hyper-V, we’ve dramatically reduced store downtime,” said Lance Shinabarger, vice president, Global Infrastructure, Domino’s Pizza. “From pricing to management, performance and reliability gains, Hyper-V and System Center have been a huge win for Domino’s.”

Closing the “Dev-Ops” Gap

The Xerox India Development Center (IDC) supports software development for customers all over the world. IDC needed to help its developers better collaborate with customers and a more reliable way to quickly test and fix applications. The organization built a Microsoft private cloud with Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center that dynamically replicates customer datacenter environments. Using System Center with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, the operations team can efficiently provide developers with deep insights into applications for real-time troubleshooting and optimization. As a result, IDC improved developer productivity by approximately 40 percent and cut costs by about 30 percent.

“Microsoft is my cloud platform vendor of choice because it provides the complete, integrated stack of infrastructure, application platform and development tools,” said Raman Padmanabhan, senior vice president and chief information officer, Commercial Business Process Outsourcing, Xerox Commercial Solutions. “We want our developers to be able to work across multiple development projects and sites with ease. They now have the tools and infrastructure they need to accelerate the ever-shrinking write-test-debug cycle.”

Building Productivity and Cost Savings

Pedcor Companies develops, builds and manages housing communities, including construction of more than 17,000 apartment units in the U.S. The company needed to improve datacenter availability and give employees in 77 remote offices better access to data and important applications, such as the Pedcor Management Application for collecting and processing rental fees. By replacing VMware infrastructure with a Microsoft private cloud built with Windows Server and System Center, Pedcor has reduced downtime by 40 percent, saved US$560,000 in IT costs and enabled reliable remote access to corporate resources.

“We can automate the management and delivery of healthy applications, which boosts the productivity of our people in the field,” said Sumeeth Evans, vice president of Information Technology, Pedcor Companies. “Microsoft’s technologies free my team to focus on new solutions for the business and give us a platform for the future.”

More news about MMS is available on the STB News Bytes blog, while information about how organizations are turning to Microsoft technology is available in the Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

DtSQL is a FREE universal database query and editor tools for developers and database administrators to Query, Edit, Browse, and Manage Database objects such as tables, views, indexes, procedures, functions, triggers, contraints and sequences. It can access most databases : Cache, DB2, Derby, Firebird, FrontBase, H2, HSQLDB, Informix, Ingres, JDatastore, MaxDB, Mckoi, Mimer, MySQL, Oracle, PointBase, PostgresSQL, Solid, SQLite, SQL Server, SQL Anywhere, Sybase (ASE).

1. Database Browser Tools : browse schemas, tables, columns, primary and foreign keys, constraints, views, indexes, triggers, stored procedures, functions, sequences, and so on.
2. Database Tools : create, alter, view and drop database tables, views, indexes, constraints, stored procedures, functions, triggers, sequences, and so on.
3. Database Management Tools : edit database table data including binary/BLOB and CLOB data types. Filter, sort and search query result. Insert, duplicate, update, and delete database table data. Find and replace database data, preview generated SQL. Redo or undo last table data change before update is commit.
4. SQL Tools : tools to edit, format and execute SQL scripts.
5. SQL Builder : help tools to build database select, insert, update, delete SQL scripts.
6. Import Data : tools to import data from various formats such as CSV files, Excel files, and fixed-width files. Parse import data according to integer, date, time, timestamp, and boolean pattern.

7. Export Data : tools to export database data (single table/multiple tables/query result) in various formats such as CSV files, Excel files, XML, HTML, SQL insert statements and fixed width files. Format export data according to applied integer, date, time, timestamp, and boolean pattern.

8. It is FREE to use.

9. Home: http://www.dtsql.com

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released a security update to all current versions of the PostgreSQL database system, including versions 9.2.4, 9.1.9, 9.0.13, and 8.4.17. This update fixes a high-exposure security vulnerability in versions 9.0 and later. All users of the affected versions are strongly urged to apply the update immediately.

A major security issue fixed in this release, CVE-2013-1899, makes it possible for a connection request containing a database name that begins with "-" to be crafted that can damage or destroy files within a server's data directory. Anyone with access to the port the PostgreSQL server listens on can initiate this request. This issue was discovered by Mitsumasa Kondo and Kyotaro Horiguchi of NTT Open Source Software Center.

Two lesser security fixes are also included in this release: CVE-2013-1900, wherein random numbers generated by contrib/pgcrypto functions may be easy for another database user to guess, and CVE-2013-1901, which mistakenly allows an unprivileged user to run commands that could interfere with in-progress backups. Finally, this release fixes two security issues with the graphical installers for Linux and Mac OS X: insecure passing of superuser passwords to a script, CVE-2013-1903 and the use of predictable filenames in /tmp CVE-2013-1902. Marko Kreen, Noah Misch and Stefan Kaltenbrunner reported these issues, respectively.

We are grateful for each developer's efforts in making PostgreSQL more secure.

This release also corrects several errors in management of GiST indexes. After installing this update, it is advisable to REINDEX any GiST indexes that meet one or more of the conditions described below.

This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last two months, including:

• Fix GiST indexes to not use "fuzzy" geometric comparisons for box, polygon, circle, and point columns
• Fix bugs in contrib/btree_gist for GiST indexes on text, bytea, bit, and numeric columns
• Fix bugs in page splitting code for multi-column GiST indexes
• Fix buffer leak in WAL replay causing "incorrect local pin count" errors
• Ensure crash recovery before entering archive recovery during unclean shutdown when recovery.conf is present
• Avoid deleting not-yet-archived WAL files during crash recovery
• Fix race condition in DELETE RETURNING
• Fix possible planner crash after adding columns to a view depending on another view
• Eliminate memory leaks in PL/Perl's spi_prepare() function
• Fix pg_dumpall to handle database names containing "=" correctly
• Avoid crash in pg_dump when an incorrect connection string is given
• Ignore invalid indexes in pg_dump and pg_upgrade
• Include only the current server version's subdirectory when backing up a tablespace with pg_basebackup
• Add a server version check in pg_basebackup and pg_receivexlog
• Fix contrib/dblink to handle inconsistent settings of DateStyle or IntervalStyle safely
• Fix contrib/pg_trgm's similarity() function to return zero for trigram-less strings
• Enable building PostgreSQL with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012
• Update time zone data files for DST law changes in Chile, Haiti, Morocco, Paraguay, and some Russian areas

As always, update releases only require installation of packages and a database system restart. You do not need to dump/restore or use pg_upgrade for this update release. Users who have skipped multiple update releases may need to perform additional, post-update steps; see the Release Notes for details.

Links:

• Download
• Release Notes
• Release FAQ