[Babase] New postgresql release, fixes date interperation

Karl O. Pinc babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Sun, 14 Nov 2004 11:38:11 -0600


Hi,

I'm going to a newer postgresql (7.4.6) as part of
getting the interpolation to run faster, and hence
to speed up the conversion.  Now that we have our own
box I can see that the conversion is presently cpu limited
and I have access to all the info I need to tune the
part of the application that lives in the database.
I've already tuned the server, but before I get to
optimizing my code it only makes sense to get the latest
and fastest database server, especially as code optimizations
are sometimes release dependent or unnecessary on later
releases.

Daphne and Cathrine noticed that dates that are
illegal in one date style, European or American, but
are legal when interpreted under the other style, are
accepted by postgres as good 'other style' dates.
This is no longer true in the new version.  from
the release notes:

  Ambiguous date values now must match the ordering specified by the 
datestyle setting. In prior releases, a date specification of 10/20/03 
was interpreted as a date in October even if datestyle specified that 
the day should be first. 7.4 will throw an error if a date 
specification is invalid for the current setting of datestyle.

Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein