Happy New Year   

Welcome to the January 2008 Issue of Postgres OnLine Journal Magazine. In this issue we will have a special feature PostgreSQL 8.3 Cheatsheet to commemorate the upcoming PostgreSQL 8.3 release and the new year. This cheat sheet will look similar in format to the Postgis Cheatsheet and will cover standard PostgreSQL features as well as new features added to the 8.3 release.

In future issues we hope to provide similar cheatsheets that highlight certain PostgreSQL advanced and specialty features. Any thoughts on what topics people would like to see in a cheatsheet are welcome.

Other interesting topics that will be covered in this issue to name a few

• Part 2 of our PostgreSQL Anatomy Series. We shall delve into the details of the database structure.
• CrossTab queries using TableFunc contrib
• Using Open Office Base with PostgreSQL
• Setting up PgAgent and using it for scheduled backups.

On another note - check out Andrew Dunstan's, minimum update Trigger. It will be nice to see this make it into the PostgreSQL 8.4 release. Granted we haven't had much of a need of this feature, but when you need it, it comes in very handy as demonstrated in Hubert Lubaczewski's related article Avoiding Empty Updates. We remember the first time we started working on MySQL a long long time ago - MySQL had this built in, but you couldn't turn it off. In certain situations such as when you have triggers this feature is often a misfeature. Granted I guess there are only a few cases where having this automatically on could be annoying especially when all the other Databases you work with don't do this and there is probably some overhead involved with checking which may not always outweigh the update/logging cost. Any rate as far as check-off lists goes for people who consider this a feature, it will be nice to cross this off the list as one reason why one would choose MySQL over PostgreSQL and better yet in PostgreSQL it is optional.