I’ve been working on MacSQL 3.1 the last few days and have fixed a number of bugs with schema view printing, the job manager. I’ve also added PostgreSQL8+ support for tablespace, with oids, and on commit options in the create table tool.

The big new feature in 3.1b11 will be a new import/export file format — binary. This is a proprietary format (though I’d be happy to document it if someone really wanted to know it) that offers a big speed increase over the text-based formats. But the number one advantage is data type fidelity. Data can easily be migrated between different database servers without regard for formatting the data.

I ended up adding this feature because we are in the process of moving all of our data out of Oracle into another database server. (We are currently leaning towards PostgreSQL 8.1, but OpenBase might be a possibility because of the strong WebObjects support.) But moving our data was looking to be a big nightmare because of date formats. But using a binary format removed any issue with that, and any issues related to the size of a text literal in a Postgres insert statement.

The file format is endian-neutral, as we’ve tested exporting from PowerPC and importing on intel, and vice versa. It also includes versioning information, so previously exported data can still be imported even if we make changes to the file format.

I hope to release b11 by the end of this week. If not then, it will go out Monday morning.