PowerBuilder 2017 R3 New Feature: PostgreSQL enhancements

The support for PostgreSQL that was added in R2 was covered in an earlier blog post.  The enhancements in R3 are primarily related to addition entries added to the PBODB170.INI file.  These additional entries provide more support for maintaining tables, views, primary and foreign keys, users and groups in the database painter.

One minor change with this new version.  If you are going to use identity columns using the GetIdentity syntax I covered in that blog post and/or stored procedure DataWindows using arguments you will need to turn off the "Enclose Table and Column Names in Quotes" option (DelimitIdentifier='No’ in the DBParm for the connection).  With this release, the quote are included in the calls to both those features, resulting in syntax errors.

Summary

Support for PostgreSQL was largely feature complete in R2.  The changes in R3 do make maintenance of the database through the PowerBuilder IDE more feasible.  Normally I would still use pgAdmin for that still, but it does have some idiosyncrasies.  For those not familiar with it, for for making quick and dirty changes, the ability to use the PowerBuilder database painter is welcome.