Re: driver beta release

As the server is nearing release, we've been winding down our own
development cycle with plans to release the driver at the same time as the
server. I've put up a new build (308) on the website and we'd like to get
your help in testing it out to catch any problems before release.

At the moment I don't feel comfortable sending this announcement out to a
wider audience as we have nothing resembling release notes and the
documentation hasn't been touched in any meaningful way in over four
months. Hopefully reading this list you have enough of an idea about
what's going on to be able to provide valuable feedback without being
"supervised". Even better would be to provide documentation for some of
the new features that have been incorporated:

- the ability to customize SSL setups to do things like skip
authenticaion or provide a truststore from another location.
- the ability to configure the driver through a .properties file.

Remaining 8.0 items are listed here:
http://jdbc.postgresql.org/todo.html#Before+8.0+Release

Kris Jurka

I dropped this new driver in and ran it with Jboss against my 7.4.5
server...

One of our legacy apps seems to have some 'suspicious' coding practices
going on... The keys in the DB are int4 but the app seems to use Strings
everywhere in JDBC...

The old driver sent along the string and it went into the query. The new
driver seems to be more sensitive to the correct types being used...

Retrofitting the old app will take some time and we'd like to start testing
8.0 and the new drivers now. Any way to ask the driver to revert to the old
behavior for certain applications?

Hunter

> From: Kris Jurka <books(at)ejurka(dot)com>
> Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 05:58:18 -0500 (EST)
> To: <pgsql-jdbc(at)postgresql(dot)org>
> Subject: [JDBC] driver beta release
>
>
> As the server is nearing release, we've been winding down our own
> development cycle with plans to release the driver at the same time as the
> server. I've put up a new build (308) on the website and we'd like to get
> your help in testing it out to catch any problems before release.
>
> At the moment I don't feel comfortable sending this announcement out to a
> wider audience as we have nothing resembling release notes and the
> documentation hasn't been touched in any meaningful way in over four
> months. Hopefully reading this list you have enough of an idea about
> what's going on to be able to provide valuable feedback without being
> "supervised". Even better would be to provide documentation for some of
> the new features that have been incorporated:
>
> - the ability to customize SSL setups to do things like skip
> authenticaion or provide a truststore from another location.
> - the ability to configure the driver through a .properties file.
>
> Remaining 8.0 items are listed here:
> http://jdbc.postgresql.org/todo.html#Before+8.0+Release
>
> Kris Jurka
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Hunter Hillegas wrote:

> I dropped this new driver in and ran it with Jboss against my 7.4.5
> server...
>
> One of our legacy apps seems to have some 'suspicious' coding practices
> going on... The keys in the DB are int4 but the app seems to use Strings
> everywhere in JDBC...
>
> The old driver sent along the string and it went into the query. The new
> driver seems to be more sensitive to the correct types being used...
>
> Retrofitting the old app will take some time and we'd like to start testing
> 8.0 and the new drivers now. Any way to ask the driver to revert to the old
> behavior for certain applications?
>

You can add ?protocolVersion=2 to the JDBC URL. Which will make it use
the older un-parameterized method of sending queries.

Kris Jurka

Hi,

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004 11:48:19 -0500 (EST)
Kris Jurka <books(at)ejurka(dot)com> wrote:

> > Retrofitting the old app will take some time and we'd like to start testing
> > 8.0 and the new drivers now. Any way to ask the driver to revert to the old
> > behavior for certain applications?
>
> You can add ?protocolVersion=2 to the JDBC URL. Which will make it use
> the older un-parameterized method of sending queries.

I thought a "compatible=7.4" setting should do this?

Thanks,
Markus
--
markus schaber | dipl. informatiker
logi-track ag | rennweg 14-16 | ch 8001 zürich
phone +41-43-888 62 52 | fax +41-43-888 62 53
mailto:schabios(at)logi-track(dot)com | www.logi-track.com

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Markus Schaber wrote:

> > You can add ?protocolVersion=2 to the JDBC URL. Which will make it use
> > the older un-parameterized method of sending queries.
>
> I thought a "compatible=7.4" setting should do this?
>

The compatible parameter is largely unused and at the moment only changes
the behavior of storing binary data. The 7.4 driver implemented the V3
protocol with the minimum of effort. The 8.0 driver implements (and takes
advantage of) many V3 features and the partial implementation was
abandoned. This means making compatible=7.4 mean the V2 protocol isn't
entirely accurate. Note that with the 8.0 driver the V2 protocol has been
simplified as well, no longer supporting streaming result sets or server
prepared statements. In general this release is going to be a major
headache for a lot of people, but that is a price we feel is acceptable
given the major improvements made in the driver. Keeping full
compatibility would be a huge undertaking and if you want true
compatibility you can actually use the 7.4 driver against an 8.0 server.

Kris Jurka

Hi, Kris,

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004 13:05:48 -0500 (EST)
Kris Jurka <books(at)ejurka(dot)com> wrote:

> > > You can add ?protocolVersion=2 to the JDBC URL. Which will make it use
> > > the older un-parameterized method of sending queries.
> >
> > I thought a "compatible=7.4" setting should do this?
>
> The compatible parameter is largely unused and at the moment only changes
> the behavior of storing binary data. The 7.4 driver implemented the V3
> protocol with the minimum of effort. The 8.0 driver implements (and takes
> advantage of) many V3 features and the partial implementation was
> abandoned. This means making compatible=7.4 mean the V2 protocol isn't
> entirely accurate.

Okay, I thing my statement was ambigous.

I meant to say 'I thought a "compatible=7.4" setting should make the
driver use an un-typed way of sending the queries'. This does not
necessarily imply a switch back to V2 protocol, which may bring other
disadvantages.

But maybe the effort for implementing this is too large, I'll try to
have a look at it.

Thanks,
Markus

--
markus schaber | dipl. informatiker
logi-track ag | rennweg 14-16 | ch 8001 zürich
phone +41-43-888 62 52 | fax +41-43-888 62 53
mailto:schabios(at)logi-track(dot)com | www.logi-track.com

Kris Jurka wrote:
> As the server is nearing release, we've been winding down our own
> development cycle with plans to release the driver at the same time
> as the server. I've put up a new build (308) on the website and we'd
> like to get your help in testing it out to catch any problems before
> release.

Could you please align the names of the release jars and source code
packages with some common practice? I think a reasonable mangling of
PostgreSQL practice and, say, practice for Apache Java packages might
be:

pg80b1.308.jdbc3.jar --> postgresql-jdbc-8.0b1.308-jdbc3.jar

pg80b1.308.src.tar.gz --> postgresql-jdbc-8.0b1.308-src.tar.gz

I'm not sure sure about the version number "8.0b1.308", actually, but
something that says package-version-style.ext, where package is widely
recognizable, would certainly help.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/