Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Literarisches Code-Quartett

In Germany, there is a television show called "Literarisches Quartett" where four important people discuss books. Here at the Chaos Communication Congress, there is a session called "Literarisches Code-Quartett" where four people discuss source code, mostly bad code. Last year, they dwelt on MySQL for quite a while, leaving with a promise of dealing with PostgreSQL this year. So what they came up with is a supposed buffer overflow in the precompiler part of ECPG (looks like using array bounds longer than 11 characters might be a problem in certain places) and a supposed flaw in the German translation that causes an SQL syntax error (so it was probably in psql), but I could not actually find the place or the revision where this was ever the case. (If anyone knows details, tell me.) In any case, they pointed out that the PostgreSQL code was much better for one's stomach than last year's alternative...