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Release Notes
Release 7.3
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Overview
Major changes in this release:
Schemas allow users to create objects in their own namespace so
two people or applications can have tables with the same name.
There is also a public schema for shared tables. Table/index
creation can be restricted by removing permissions on the
public schema.
PostgreSQL now supports the ALTER TABLE ... DROP COLUMN
functionality.
Functions returning multiple rows and/or multiple columns are
now much easier to use than before. You can call such a "table
function" in the SELECT FROM clause, treating its output like a
table. Also, PL/pgSQL functions can now return sets.
PostgreSQL now supports prepared queries, for improved
performance.
PostgreSQL now records object dependencies, which allows
improvements in many areas. "DROP" statements now take either
CASCADE or RESTRICT to control whether dependent objects are
also dropped.
Functions and procedural languages now have privileges, and
functions can be defined to run with the privileges of their
creator.
Internationalization
Both multibyte and locale support are now always enabled.
A variety of logging options have been enhanced.
A large number of interfaces have been moved to
http://gborg.postgresql.org where they can be developed and
released independently.
By default, functions can now take up to 32 parameters, and
identifiers can be up to 63 bytes long.
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A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate
data from any previous release. If your application examines the
system catalogs, additional changes will be required due to the
introduction of schemas in 7.3; for more information, see:
http://www.ca.postgresql.org/docs/momjian/upgrade_tips_7.3.
Observe the following incompatibilities:
* Pre-6.3 clients are no longer supported.
* "pg_hba.conf" now has a column for the user name and additional
features. Existing files need to be adjusted.
* Several "postgresql.conf" logging parameters have been renamed and
improved.
* LIMIT #,# has been disabled; use LIMIT # OFFSET #.
* "INSERT" statements with column lists must specify all values;
e.g., INSERT INTO tab (col1, col2) VALUES ('val1') is now invalid.
* An index is now not automatically created for serial columns.
* A "SET" command inside an aborted transaction is now rolled back.
* "COPY" no longer considers missing trailing columns to be null.
All columns need to be specified.
* The data type timestamp is now equivalent to timestamp without
timezone, instead of timestamp with timezone.
* Pre-7.3 databases loaded into 7.3 will not have the new object
dependencies for serial columns, unique constraints, and foreign
keys. See the directory "contrib/adddepend/" for a detailed
description and a script that will add such dependencies.
_________________________________________________________________
Add pg_locks view to show locks (Neil)
Security fixes for password negotiation memory allocation (Neil)
Remove support for version 0 FE/BE protocol (PostgreSQL 6.2 and
earlier) (Tom)
Reserve the last few backend slots for superusers, add parameter
superuser_reserved_connections to control this (Nigel J. Andrews)
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Improve startup by calling localtime() only once (Tom)
Cache system catalog information in flat files for faster startup
(Tom)
Improve caching of index information (Tom)
Optimizer improvements (Tom, Fernando Nasser)
Catalog caches now store failed lookups (Tom)
Hash function improvements (Neil)
Improve performance of query tokenization and network handling (Peter)
Speed improvement for large object restore (Mario Weilguni)
Mark expired index entries on first lookup, saving later heap fetches
(Tom)
Eliminate NULL bitmap padding when not required (Manfred)
Add BSD-licensed qsort() for Solaris, for performance (Bruce)
Reduce per-row overhead by four bytes (Manfred Koizar)
Fix GEQO optimizer bug (Neil Conway)
Make WITHOUT OID actually save four bytes per row (Manfred Koizar)
Add default_statistics_target variable to specify ANALYZE buckets
(Neil)
Use local buffer cache for temporary tables so no WAL overhead (Tom)
Improve free space map performance on large tables (Stephen Marshall,
Tom)
Improved WAL write concurrency (Tom)
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Add privileges on functions and procedural languages (Peter)
Add OWNER to CREATE DATABASE so superusers can create databases
on behalf of unprivileged users. (Gavin Sherry, Tom)
Add new object permission bits EXECUTE and USAGE (Tom)
Add SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION DEFAULT and RESET SESSION AUTHORIZATION
(Tom)
Allow functions to be executed with the privilege of the function
owner (Peter)
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Server log messages now tagged with LOG, not DEBUG (Bruce)
Add user column to pg_hba.conf (Bruce)
Have log_connections output two lines in log file (Tom)
Remove debug_level from postgresql.conf, now server_min_messages
(Bruce)
New ALTER DATABASE/USER ... SET command for per-user/database
initialization (Peter)
New parameters server_min_messages and client_min_messages to
control which messages are sent to the server logs or client
applications (Bruce)
Allow pg_hba.conf to specify lists of users/databases separated by
commas, group names prepended with +, and file names prepended
with @ (Bruce)
Remove secondary password file capability and pg_password utility
(Bruce)
Add variable db_user_namespace for database-local user names (Bruce)
SSL improvements (Bear Giles)
Make encryption of stored passwords the default (Bruce)
Allow pg_statistics to be reset by calling pg_stat_reset()
(Christopher)
Add log_duration parameter (Bruce)
Rename debug_print_query to log_statement (Bruce)
Rename show_query_stats to show_statement_stats (Bruce)
Add param log_min_error_statement to print commands to logs on error
(Gavin)
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Make cursors insensitive, meaning their contents do not change (Tom)
Disable LIMIT #,# syntax; now only LIMIT # OFFSET # supported (Bruce)
Increase identifier length to 63 (Neil, Bruce)
UNION fixes for merging >= 3 columns of different lengths (Tom)
Add DEFAULT keyword to INSERT, e.g., INSERT ... (..., DEFAULT, )
(Rod)
Allow views to have default values using ALTER COLUMN ... SET DEFAULT
(Neil)
Fail on INSERTs with column lists that don't supply all column
values, e.g., INSERT INTO tab (col1, col2) VALUES ('val1'); (Rod)
Fix for join aliases (Tom)
Fix for FULL OUTER JOINs (Tom)
Improve reporting of invalid identifier and location (Tom, Gavin)
Fix OPEN cursor(args) (Tom)
Allow 'ctid' to be used in a view and currtid(viewname) (Hiroshi)
Fix for CREATE TABLE AS with UNION (Tom)
SQL99 syntax improvements (Thomas)
Add statement_timeout variable to cancel queries (Bruce)
Allow prepared queries with PREPARE/EXECUTE (Neil)
Allow FOR UPDATE to appear after LIMIT/OFFSET (Bruce)
Add variable autocommit (Tom, David Van Wie)
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Make equals signs optional in CREATE DATABASE (Gavin Sherry)
Make ALTER TABLE OWNER to change index ownership (Neil)
New ALTER TABLE tabname ALTER COLUMN colname SET STORAGE controls
TOAST storage, compression (John Gray)
Add schema support, CREATE/DROP SCHEMA (Tom)
Create schema for temporary tables (Tom)
Add variable search_path for schema search (Tom)
Add ALTER TABLE SET/DROP NOT NULL (Christopher)
New CREATE FUNCTION volatility levels (Tom)
Make rule names unique only per table (Tom)
Add 'ON tablename' clause to DROP RULE and COMMENT ON RULE (Tom)
Add ALTER TRIGGER RENAME (Joe)
New current_schema() and current_schemas() inquiry functions (Tom)
Allow functions to return multiple rows (table functions) (Joe)
Make WITH optional in CREATE DATABASE, for consistency (Bruce)
Add object dependency tracking (Rod, Tom)
Add RESTRICT/CASCADE to DROP commands (Rod)
Add ALTER TABLE DROP for non-CHECK CONSTRAINT (Rod)
Autodestroy sequence on DROP of table with SERIAL (Rod)
Prevent column dropping if column is used by foreign key (Rod)
Automatically drop constraints/functions when object is dropped (Rod)
Add CREATE/DROP OPERATOR CLASS (Bill Studenmund, Tom)
Add ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN (Christopher, Tom, Hiroshi)
Prevent inherited columns from being removed or renamed (Alvaro
Herrera)
Fix foreign key constraints to not error on intermediate database
states (Stephan)
Propagate column or table renaming to foreign key constraints
Add CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW (Gavin, Neil, Tom)
Add CREATE OR REPLACE RULE (Gavin, Neil, Tom)
Have rules execute alphabetically, returning more predictable values
(Tom)
Triggers are now fired in alphabetical order (Tom)
Add /contrib/adddepend to handle pre-7.3 object dependencies (Rod)
Allow better casting when inserting/updating values (Tom)
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Have COPY TO output embedded carriage returns and newlines as \r and
\n (Tom)
Allow DELIMITER in COPY FROM to be 8-bit clean (Tatsuo)
Make pg_dump use ALTER TABLE ADD PRIMARY KEY, for performance (Neil)
Disable brackets in multistatement rules (Bruce)
Disable VACUUM from being called inside a function (Bruce)
Allow dropdb and other scripts to use identifiers with spaces (Bruce)
Restrict database comment changes to the current database
Allow comments on operators, independent of the underlying function
(Rod)
Rollback SET commands in aborted transactions (Tom)
EXPLAIN now outputs as a query (Tom)
Display sort keys in EXPLAIN (Tom)
Add 'SET LOCAL var = value' to set configuration variables for a
single transaction (Tom)
Allow ANALYZE to run in a transaction (Bruce)
Improve COPY syntax using new WITH clauses, keep backward
compatibility (Bruce)
Fix pg_dump to consistently output tags in non-ASCII dumps (Bruce)
Make foreign key constraints clearer in dump file (Rod)
Add COMMENT ON CONSTRAINT (Rod)
Allow COPY TO/FROM to specify column names (Brent Verner)
Dump UNIQUE and PRIMARY KEY contraints as ALTER TABLE (Rod)
Have SHOW output a query result (Joe)
Generate failure on short COPY lines rather than pad NULLs (Neil)
Fix CLUSTER to preserve all table attributes (Alvaro Herrera)
New pg_settings table to view/modify GUC settings (Joe)
Add smart quoting, portability improvements to pg_dump output (Peter)
Dump serial columns out as SERIAL (Tom)
Enable large file support, >2G for pg_dump (Peter, Philip Warner,
Bruce)
Disallow TRUNCATE on tables that are involved in referential
constraints (Rod)
Have TRUNCATE also auto-truncate the toast table of the relation (Tom)
Add clusterdb utility that will auto-cluster an entire database
based on previous CLUSTER operations (Alvaro Herrera)
Overhaul pg_dumpall (Peter)
Allow REINDEX of TOAST tables (Tom)
Implemented START TRANSACTION, per SQL99 (Neil)
Fix rare index corruption when a page split affects bulk delete (Tom)
Fix ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN for inheritance (Alvaro Herrera)
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Fix factorial(0) to return 1 (Bruce)
Date/time/timezone improvements (Thomas)
Fix for array slice extraction (Tom)
Fix extract/date_part to report proper microseconds for timestamp
(Tatsuo)
Allow text_substr() and bytea_substr() to read TOAST values more
efficiently (John Gray)
Add domain support (Rod)
Make WITHOUT TIME ZONE the default for TIMESTAMP and TIME data types
(Thomas)
Allow alternate storage scheme of 64-bit integers for date/time types
using --enable-integer-datetimes in configure (Thomas)
Make timezone(timestamptz) return timestamp rather than a string
(Thomas)
Allow fractional seconds in date/time types for dates prior to 1BC
(Thomas)
Limit timestamp data types to 6 decimal places of precision (Thomas)
Change timezone conversion functions from timetz() to timezone()
(Thomas)
Add configuration variables datestyle and timezone (Tom)
Add OVERLAY(), which allows substitution of a substring in a string
(Thomas)
Add SIMILAR TO (Thomas, Tom)
Add regular expression SUBSTRING(string FROM pat FOR escape) (Thomas)
Add LOCALTIME and LOCALTIMESTAMP functions (Thomas)
Add named composite types using CREATE TYPE typename AS (column)
(Joe)
Allow composite type definition in the table alias clause (Joe)
Add new API to simplify creation of C language table functions (Joe)
Remove ODBC-compatible empty parentheses from calls to SQL99
functions for which these parentheses do not match the standard
(Thomas)
Allow macaddr data type to accept 12 hex digits with no separators
(Mike Wyer)
Add CREATE/DROP CAST (Peter)
Add IS DISTINCT FROM operator (Thomas)
Add SQL99 TREAT() function, synonym for CAST() (Thomas)
Add pg_backend_pid() to output backend pid (Bruce)
Add IS OF / IS NOT OF type predicate (Thomas)
Allow bit string constants without fully-specified length (Thomas)
Allow conversion between 8-byte integers and bit strings (Thomas)
Implement hex literal conversion to bit string literal (Thomas)
Allow table functions to appear in the FROM clause (Joe)
Increase maximum number of function parameters to 32 (Bruce)
No longer automatically create index for SERIAL column (Tom)
Add current_database() (Rod)
Fix cash_words() to not overflow buffer (Tom)
Add functions replace(), split_part(), to_hex() (Joe)
Fix LIKE for bytea as a right-hand argument (Joe)
Prevent crashes caused by SELECT cash_out(2) (Tom)
Fix to_char(1,'FM999.99') to return a period (Karel)
Fix trigger/type/language functions returning OPAQUE to return
proper type (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
Add additional encodings (Korean (JOHAB), Thai (WIN874), Vietnamese
(TCVN), Arabic (WIN1256), Simplified Chinese (GBK), Korean (UHC)
(Eiji Tokuya)
Enable locale support by default (Peter)
Add locale variables (Peter)
Escape byes >= 0x7f for multibyte in PQescapeBytea/PQunescapeBytea
(Tatsuo)
Add locale awareness to regular expression character classes
Enable multibyte support by default (Tatso)
Add GB18030 multibyte support (Bill Huang)
Add CREATE/DROP CONVERSION, allowing loadable encodings (Tatsuo,
Kaori)
Add pg_conversion table (Tatsuo)
Add SQL99 CONVERT() function (Tatsuo)
pg_dumpall, pg_controldata, and pg_resetxlog now national-language
aware (Peter)
New and updated translations
_________________________________________________________________
Allow recursive SQL function (Peter)
Change PL/Tcl build to use configured compiler and Makefile.shlib
(Peter)
Overhaul the PL/pgSQL FOUND variable to be more Oracle-compatible
(Tom, Neil)
Allow PL/pgSQL to handle quoted identifiers (Tom)
Allow set-returning PL/pgSQL functions (Neil)
Make PL/pgSQL schema-aware (Joe)
Remove some memory leaks (Nigel J. Andrews, Tom)
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Don't lowercase psql \connect database name for 7.2.0 compatibility
(Tom)
Add psql \timing to time user queries (Greg Sabino Mullane)
Have psql \d show index information (Greg Sabino Mullane)
New psql \dD shows domains (Jonathan Eisler)
Allow psql to show rules on views (Paul ?)
Fix for psql variable substitution (Tom)
Allow psql \d to show temporary table structure (Tom)
Allow psql \d to show foreign keys (Rod)
Fix \? to honor \pset pager (Bruce)
Have psql reports its version number on startup (Tom)
Allow \copy to specify column names (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
Add $HOME/.pgpass to store host/user password combinations (Alvaro
Herrera)
Add PQunescapeBytea() function to libpq (Patrick Welche)
Fix for sending large queries over non-blocking connections
(Bernhard Herzog)
Fix for libpq using timers on Win9X (David Ford)
Allow libpq notify to handle servers with different-length
identifiers (Tom)
Add libpq PQescapeString() and PQescapeBytea() to Win32 (Bruce)
Fix for SSL with non-blocking connections (Jack Bates)
Add libpq connection timeout parameter (Denis A Ustimenko)
_________________________________________________________________
Allow JDBC to compile with JDK 1.4 (Dave)
Add JDBC 3 support (Barry)
Allows JDBC to set loglevel by adding ?loglevel=X to the connection
URL (Barry)
Add Driver.info() message that prints out the version number (Barry)
Add updateable result sets (Raghu Nidagal, Dave)
Add support for callable statements (Paul Bethe)
Add query cancel capability
Add refresh row (Dave)
Fix MD5 encryption handling for multibyte servers (Jun Kawai)
Add support for prepared statements (Barry)
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Fixed ECPG bug concerning octal numbers in single quotes (Michael)
Move src/interfaces/libpgeasy to http://gborg.postgresql.org (Marc,
Bruce)
Improve Python interface (Elliot Lee, Andrew Johnson, Greg Copeland)
Add libpgtcl connection close event (Gerhard Hintermayer)
Move src/interfaces/libpq++ to http://gborg.postgresql.org (Marc,
Bruce)
Move src/interfaces/odbc to http://gborg.postgresql.org (Marc)
Move src/interfaces/libpgeasy to http://gborg.postgresql.org (Marc,
Bruce)
Move src/interfaces/perl5 to http://gborg.postgresql.org (Marc,
Bruce)
Remove src/bin/pgaccess from main tree, now at
http://www.pgaccess.org (Bruce)
Add pg_on_connection_loss command to libpgtcl (Gerhard Hintermayer,
Tom)
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Fix for parallel make (Peter)
AIX fixes for linking Tcl (Andreas Zeugswetter)
Allow PL/Perl to build under Cygwin (Jason Tishler)
Improve MIPS compiles (Peter, Oliver Elphick)
Require Autoconf version 2.53 (Peter)
Require readline and zlib by default in configure (Peter)
Allow Solaris to use Intimate Shared Memory (ISM), for performance
(Scott Brunza, P.J. Josh Rovero)
Always enable syslog in compile, remove --enable-syslog option
(Tatsuo)
Always enable multibyte in compile, remove --enable-multibyte option
(Tatsuo)
Always enable locale in compile, remove --enable-locale option
(Peter)
Fix for Win9x DLL creation (Magnus Naeslund)
Fix for link() usage by WAL code on Win32, BeOS (Jason Tishler)
Add sys/types.h to c.h, remove from main files (Peter, Bruce)
Fix AIX hang on SMP machines (Tomoyuki Niijima)
AIX SMP hang fix (Tomoyuki Niijima)
Fix pre-1970 date handling on newer glibc libraries (Tom)
Fix PowerPC SMP locking (Tom)
Prevent gcc -ffast-math from being used (Peter, Tom)
Bison >= 1.50 now required for developer builds
Kerberos 5 support now builds with Heimdal (Peter)
Add appendix in the User's Guide which lists SQL features (Thomas)
Improve loadable module linking to use RTLD_NOW (Tom)
New error levels WARNING, INFO, LOG, DEBUG[1-5] (Bruce)
New src/port directory holds replaced libc functions (Peter, Bruce)
New pg_namespace system catalog for schemas (Tom)
Add pg_class.relnamespace for schemas (Tom)
Add pg_type.typnamespace for schemas (Tom)
Add pg_proc.pronamespace for schemas (Tom)
Restructure aggregates to have pg_proc entries (Tom)
System relations now have their own namespace, pg_* test not required
(Fernando Nasser)
Rename TOAST index names to be *_index rather than *_idx (Neil)
Add namespaces for operators, opclasses (Tom)
Add additional checks to server control file (Thomas)
New Polish FAQ (Marcin Mazurek)
Add Posix semaphore support (Tom)
Document need for reindex (Bruce)
Rename some internal identifiers to simplify Win32 compile (Jan,
Katherine Ward)
Add documentation on computing disk space (Bruce)
Remove KSQO from GUC (Bruce)
Fix memory leak in rtree (Kenneth Been)
Modify a few error messages for consistency (Bruce)
Remove unused system table columns (Peter)
Make system columns NOT NULL where appropriate (Tom)
Clean up use of sprintf in favor of snprintf() (Neil, Jukka Holappa)
Remove OPAQUE and create specific subtypes (Tom)
Cleanups in array internal handling (Joe, Tom)
Disallow pg_atoi('') (Bruce)
Remove parameter wal_files because WAL files are now recycled (Bruce)
Add version numbers to heap pages (Tom)
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Allow inet arrays in /contrib/array (Neil)
Gist fixes (Teodor Sigaev, Neil)
Upgrade /contrib/mysql
Add /contrib/dbsize which shows table sizes without vacuum (Peter)
Add /contrib/intagg, integer aggregator routines (mlw)
Improve /contrib/oid2name (Neil, Bruce)
Improve /contrib/tsearch (Oleg, Teodor Sigaev)
Cleanups of /contrib/rserver (Alexey V. Borzov)
Update /contrib/oracle conversion utility (Gilles Darold)
Update /contrib/dblink (Joe)
Improve options supported by /contrib/vacuumlo (Mario Weilguni)
Improvements to /contrib/intarray (Oleg, Teodor Sigaev, Andrey
Oktyabrski)
Add /contrib/reindexdb utility (Shaun Thomas)
Add indexing to /contrib/isbn_issn (Dan Weston)
Add /contrib/dbmirror (Steven Singer)
Improve /contrib/pgbench (Neil)
Add /contrib/tablefunc table function examples (Joe)
Add /contrib/ltree data type for tree structures (Teodor Sigaev,
Oleg Bartunov)
Move /contrib/pg_controldata into main tree (Bruce)
Fixes to /contrib/cube (Bruno Wolff)
Improve /contrib/fulltextindex (Christopher)
_________________________________________________________________
Release 7.2.3
Release date: 2002-10-01
This has a variety of fixes from 7.2.2, including fixes to prevent
possible data loss.
_________________________________________________________________
Migration to version 7.2.3
A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.2.X.
_________________________________________________________________
Prevent possible compressed transaction log loss (Tom)
Prevent non-superuser from increasing most recent vacuum info (Tom)
Handle pre-1970 date values in newer versions of glibc (Tom)
Fix possible hang during server shutdown
Prevent spinlock hangs on SMP PPC machines (Tomoyuki Niijima)
Fix pg_dump to properly dump FULL JOIN USING (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
This has a variety of fixes from 7.2.1.
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Migration to version 7.2.2
A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.2.X.
_________________________________________________________________
Allow EXECUTE of "CREATE TABLE AS ... SELECT" in PL/pgSQL (Tom)
Fix for compressed transaction log id wraparound (Tom)
Fix PQescapeBytea/PQunescapeBytea so that they handle bytes > 0x7f (Ta
tsuo)
Fix for psql and pg_dump crashing when invoked with non-existand long
options (Tatsuo)
Fix crash when invoking geometric operators (Tom)
Allow OPEN cursor(args) (Tom)
Fix for rtree_gist index build (Teodor)
Fix for dumping user-defined aggregates (Tom)
Contrib/intarray fixes (Oleg)
Fix for complex UNION/EXCEPT/INTERSECT queries using parens (Tom)
Fix to pg_convert (Tatsuo)
Fix for crash with long DATA strings (Thomes, Neil)
Fix for repeat(), lpad(), rpad() and long strings (Neil)
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Release 7.2.1
Release date: 2002-03-21
This has a variety of fixes from 7.2.
_________________________________________________________________
Migration to version 7.2.1
A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.2.
_________________________________________________________________
Ensure that sequence counters do not go backwards after a crash (Tom)
Fix pgaccess kanji-coversion key binding (Tatsuo)
Optimizer improvements (Tom)
cash I/O improvements (Tom)
New Russian FAQ
Compile fix for missing AuthBlockSig (Heiko)
Additional time zones and time zone fixes (Thomas)
Allow psql \connect to handle mixed case database and user names (Tom)
Return proper OID on command completion even with ON INSERT rules (Tom
)
Allow COPY FROM to use 8-bit DELIMITERS (Tatsuo)
Fix bug in extract/date_part for milliseconds/microseconds (Tatsuo)
Improve handling of multiple UNIONs with different lengths (Tom)
contrib/btree_gist improvements (Teodor Sigaev)
contrib/tsearch dictionary improvements, see README.tsearch for
an additional installation step (Thomas T. Thai, Teodor Sigaev)
Fix for array subscripts handling (Tom)
Allow EXECUTE of "CREATE TABLE AS ... SELECT" in PL/pgSQL (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
Release 7.2
Release date: 2002-02-04
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Overview
This release improves PostgreSQL for use in high-volume applications.
Major changes in this release:
VACUUM
Vacuuming no longer locks tables, thus allowing normal user
access during the vacuum. A new "VACUUM FULL" command does
old-style vacuum by locking the table and shrinking the on-disk
copy of the table.
Transactions
There is no longer a problem with installations that exceed
four billion transactions.
OIDs
OIDs are now optional. Users can now create tables without OIDs
for cases where OID usage is excessive.
Optimizer
The system now computes histogram column statistics during
"ANALYZE", allowing much better optimizer choices.
Security
A new MD5 encryption option allows more secure storage and
transfer of passwords. A new Unix-domain socket authentication
option is available on Linux and BSD systems.
Statistics
Administrators can use the new table access statistics module
to get fine-grained information about table and index usage.
Internationalization
Program and library messages can now be displayed in several
languages.
_________________________________________________________________
Migration to version 7.2
A dump/restore using "pg_dump" is required for those wishing to
migrate data from any previous release.
Observe the following incompatibilities:
* The semantics of the "VACUUM" command have changed in this
release. You may wish to update your maintenance procedures
accordingly.
* In this release, comparisons using = NULL will always return false
(or NULL, more precisely). Previous releases automatically
transformed this syntax to IS NULL. The old behavior can be
re-enabled using a "postgresql.conf" parameter.
* The "pg_hba.conf" and "pg_ident.conf" configuration is now only
reloaded after receiving a SIGHUP signal, not with each
connection.
* The function "octet_length()" now returns the uncompressed data
length.
* The date/time value 'current' is no longer available. You will
need to rewrite your applications.
* The timestamp(), time(), and interval() functions are no longer
available. Instead of timestamp(), use timestamp 'string' or CAST.
The SELECT ... LIMIT #,# syntax will be removed in the next release.
You should change your queries to use separate LIMIT and OFFSET
clauses, e.g. LIMIT 10 OFFSET 20.
_________________________________________________________________
Create temporary files in a separate directory (Bruce)
Delete orphaned temporary files on postmaster startup (Bruce)
Added unique indexes to some system tables (Tom)
System table operator reorganization (Oleg Bartunov, Teodor Sigaev, To
m)
Renamed pg_log to pg_clog (Tom)
Enable SIGTERM, SIGQUIT to kill backends (Jan)
Removed compile-time limit on number of backends (Tom)
Better cleanup for semaphore resource failure (Tatsuo, Tom)
Allow safe transaction ID wraparound (Tom)
Removed OIDs from some system tables (Tom)
Removed "triggered data change violation" error check (Tom)
SPI portal creation of prepared/saved plans (Jan)
Allow SPI column functions to work for system columns (Tom)
Long value compression improvement (Tom)
Statistics collector for table, index access (Jan)
Truncate extra-long sequence names to a reasonable value (Tom)
Measure transaction times in milliseconds (Thomas)
Fix TID sequential scans (Hiroshi)
Superuser ID now fixed at 1 (Peter E)
New pg_ctl "reload" option (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
Optimizer improvements (Tom)
New histogram column statistics for optimizer (Tom)
Reuse write-ahead log files rather than discarding them (Tom)
Cache improvements (Tom)
IS NULL, IS NOT NULL optimizer improvement (Tom)
Improve lock manager to reduce lock contention (Tom)
Keep relcache entries for index access support functions (Tom)
Allow better selectivity with NaN and infinities in NUMERIC (Tom)
R-tree performance improvements (Kenneth Been)
B-tree splits more efficient (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
Change UPDATE, DELETE permissions to be distinct (Peter E)
New REFERENCES, TRIGGER privileges (Peter E)
Allow GRANT/REVOKE to/from more than one user at a time (Peter E)
New has_table_privilege() function (Joe Conway)
Allow non-superuser to vacuum database (Tom)
New SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION command (Peter E)
Fix bug in privilege modifications on newly created tables (Tom)
Disallow access to pg_statistic for non-superuser, add user-accessible
views (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
Fork postmaster before doing authentication to prevent hangs (Peter E)
Add ident authentication over Unix domain sockets on Linux, *BSD (Helg
e Bahmann, Oliver Elphick, Teodor Sigaev, Bruce)
Add a password authentication method that uses MD5 encryption (Bruce)
Allow encryption of stored passwords using MD5 (Bruce)
PAM authentication (Dominic J. Eidson)
Load pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf only on startup and SIGHUP (Bruce)
_________________________________________________________________
Interpretation of some time zone abbreviations as Australian rather th
an North American now settable at run time (Bruce)
New parameter to set default transaction isolation level (Peter E)
New parameter to enable conversion of "expr = NULL" into "expr IS NULL
", off by default (Peter E)
New parameter to control memory usage by VACUUM (Tom)
New parameter to set client authentication timeout (Tom)
New parameter to set maximum number of open files (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
Statements added by INSERT rules now execute after the INSERT (Jan)
Prevent unadorned relation names in target list (Bruce)
NULLs now sort after all normal values in ORDER BY (Tom)
New IS UNKNOWN, IS NOT UNKNOWN Boolean tests (Tom)
New SHARE UPDATE EXCLUSIVE lock mode (Tom)
New EXPLAIN ANALYZE command that shows run times and row counts (Marti
jn van Oosterhout)
Fix problem with LIMIT and subqueries (Tom)
Fix for LIMIT, DISTINCT ON pushed into subqueries (Tom)
Fix nested EXCEPT/INTERSECT (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
Fix SERIAL in temporary tables (Bruce)
Allow temporary sequences (Bruce)
Sequences now use int8 internally (Tom)
New SERIAL8 creates int8 columns with sequences, default still SERIAL4
(Tom)
Make OIDs optional using WITHOUT OIDS (Tom)
Add %TYPE syntax to CREATE TYPE (Ian Lance Taylor)
Add ALTER TABLE / DROP CONSTRAINT for CHECK constraints (Christopher K
ings-Lynne)
New CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION to alter existing function (preserving
the function OID) (Gavin Sherry)
Add ALTER TABLE / ADD [ UNIQUE | PRIMARY ] (Christopher Kings-Lynne)
Allow column renaming in views
Make ALTER TABLE / RENAME COLUMN update column names of indexes (Brent
Verner)
Fix for ALTER TABLE / ADD CONSTRAINT ... CHECK with inherited tables (
Stephan Szabo)
ALTER TABLE RENAME update foreign-key trigger arguments correctly (Bre
nt Verner)
DROP AGGREGATE and COMMENT ON AGGREGATE now accept an aggtype (Tom)
Add automatic return type data casting for SQL functions (Tom)
Allow GiST indexes to handle NULLs and multikey indexes (Oleg Bartunov
, Teodor Sigaev, Tom)
Enable partial indexes (Martijn van Oosterhout)
_________________________________________________________________
Add RESET ALL, SHOW ALL (Marko Kreen)
CREATE/ALTER USER/GROUP now allow options in any order (Vince)
Add LOCK A, B, C functionality (Neil Padgett)
New ENCRYPTED/UNENCRYPTED option to CREATE/ALTER USER (Bruce)
New light-weight VACUUM does not lock table; old semantics are availab
le as VACUUM FULL (Tom)
Disable COPY TO/FROM on views (Bruce)
COPY DELIMITERS string must be exactly one character (Tom)
VACUUM warning about index tuples fewer than heap now only appears whe
n appropriate (Martijn van Oosterhout)
Fix permission checks for CREATE INDEX (Tom)
Disallow inappropriate use of CREATE/DROP INDEX/TRIGGER/VIEW (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
SUM(), AVG(), COUNT() now uses int8 internally for speed (Tom)
Add convert(), convert2() (Tatsuo)
New function bit_length() (Peter E)
Make the "n" in CHAR(n)/VARCHAR(n) represents letters, not bytes (Tats
uo)
CHAR(), VARCHAR() now reject strings that are too long (Peter E)
BIT VARYING now rejects bit strings that are too long (Peter E)
BIT now rejects bit strings that do not match declared size (Peter E)
INET, CIDR text conversion functions (Alex Pilosov)
INET, CIDR operators << and <<= indexable (Alex Pilosov)
Bytea \### now requires valid three digit octal number
Bytea comparison improvements, now supports =, <>, >, >=, <, and <=
Bytea now supports B-tree indexes
Bytea now supports LIKE, LIKE...ESCAPE, NOT LIKE, NOT LIKE...ESCAPE
Bytea now supports concatenation
New bytea functions: position, substring, trim, btrim, and length
New encode() function mode, "escaped", converts minimally escaped byte
a to/from text
Add pg_database_encoding_max_length() (Tatsuo)
Add pg_client_encoding() function (Tatsuo)
now() returns time with millisecond precision (Thomas)
New TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIMEZONE data type (Thomas)
Add ISO date/time specification with "T", yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss (Thomas)
New xid/int comparison functions (Hiroshi)
Add precision to TIME, TIMESTAMP, and INVERVAL data types (Thomas)
Modify type coercion logic to attempt binary-compatible functions firs
t (Tom)
New encode() function installed by default (Marko Kreen)
Improved to_*() conversion functions (Karel Zak)
Optimize LIKE/ILIKE when using single-byte encodings (Tatsuo)
New functions in contrib/pgcrypto: crypt(), hmac(), encrypt(), gen_sal
t() (Marko Kreen)
Correct description of translate() function (Bruce)
Add INTERVAL argument for SET TIME ZONE (Thomas)
Add INTERVAL YEAR TO MONTH (etc.) syntax (Thomas)
Optimize length functions when using single-byte encodings (Tatsuo)
Fix path_inter, path_distance, path_length, dist_ppath to handle close
d paths (Curtis Barrett, Tom)
octet_length(text) now returns non-compressed length (Tatsuo, Bruce)
Handle "July" full name in date/time literals (Greg Sabino Mullane)
Some datatype() function calls now evaluated differently
Add support for Julian and ISO time specifications (Thomas)
_________________________________________________________________
National language support in psql, pg_dump, libpq, and server (Peter E
)
Message translations in Chinese (simplified, traditional), Czech, Fren
ch, German, Hungarian, Russian, Swedish (Peter E, Serguei A. Mokhov, K
arel Zak, Weiping He, Zhenbang Wei, Kovacs Zoltan)
Make trim, ltrim, rtrim, btrim, lpad, rpad, translate multibyte aware
(Tatsuo)
Add LATIN5,6,7,8,9,10 support (Tatsuo)
Add ISO 8859-5,6,7,8 support (Tatsuo)
Correct LATIN5 to mean ISO-8859-9, not ISO-8859-5 (Tatsuo)
Make mic2ascii() non-ASCII aware (Tatsuo)
Reject invalid multibyte character sequences (Tatsuo)
_________________________________________________________________
Now uses portals for SELECT loops, allowing huge result sets (Jan)
CURSOR and REFCURSOR support (Jan)
Can now return open cursors (Jan)
Add ELSEIF (Klaus Reger)
Improve PL/pgSQL error reporting, including location of error (Tom)
Allow IS or FOR key words in cursor declaration, for compatibility (Br
uce)
Fix for SELECT ... FOR UPDATE (Tom)
Fix for PERFORM returning multiple rows (Tom)
Make PL/pgSQL use the server's type coercion code (Tom)
Memory leak fix (Jan, Tom)
Make trailing semicolon optional (Tom)
_________________________________________________________________
New untrusted PL/Perl (Alex Pilosov)
PL/Perl is now built on some platforms even if libperl is not shared (
Peter E)
_________________________________________________________________
Now reports errorInfo (Vsevolod Lobko)
Add spi_lastoid function (bob@redivi.com)
_________________________________________________________________
...is new (Andrew Bosma)
_________________________________________________________________
\d displays indexes in unique, primary groupings (Christopher Kings-Ly
nne)
Allow trailing semicolons in backslash commands (Greg Sabino Mullane)
Read password from /dev/tty if possible
Force new password prompt when changing user and database (Tatsuo, Tom
)
Format the correct number of columns for Unicode (Patrice)
_________________________________________________________________
New function PQescapeString() to escape quotes in command strings (Flo
rian Weimer)
New function PQescapeBytea() escapes binary strings for use as SQL str
ing literals
_________________________________________________________________
Return OID of INSERT (Ken K)
Handle more data types (Ken K)
Handle single quotes and newlines in strings (Ken K)
Handle NULL variables (Ken K)
Fix for time zone handling (Barry Lind)
Improved Druid support
Allow eight-bit characters with non-multibyte server (Barry Lind)
Support BIT, BINARY types (Ned Wolpert)
Reduce memory usage (Michael Stephens, Dave Cramer)
Update DatabaseMetaData (Peter E)
Add DatabaseMetaData.getCatalogs() (Peter E)
Encoding fixes (Anders Bengtsson)
Get/setCatalog methods (Jason Davies)
DatabaseMetaData.getColumns() now returns column defaults (Jason Davie
s)
DatabaseMetaData.getColumns() performance improvement (Jeroen van Vian
en)
Some JDBC1 and JDBC2 merging (Anders Bengtsson)
Transaction performance improvements (Barry Lind)
Array fixes (Greg Zoller)
Fix batch processing (Rene Pijlman)
ExecSQL method reorganization (Anders Bengtsson)
GetColumn() fixes (Jeroen van Vianen)
Fix isWriteable() function (Rene Pijlman)
Improved passage of JDBC2 conformance tests (Rene Pijlman)
Add bytea type capability (Barry Lind)
Add isNullable() (Rene Pijlman)
JDBC date/time test suite fixes (Liam Stewart)
Fix for SELECT 'id' AS xxx FROM table (Dave Cramer)
Fix DatabaseMetaData to show precision properly (Mark Lillywhite)
New getImported/getExported keys (Jason Davies)
MD5 password encryption support (Jeremy Wohl)
Fix to actually use type cache (Ned Wolpert)
_________________________________________________________________
Remove query size limit (Hiroshi)
Remove text field size limit (Hiroshi)
Fix for SQLPrimaryKeys in multibyte mode (Hiroshi)
Allow ODBC procedure calls (Hiroshi)
Improve boolean handing (Aidan Mountford)
Most configuration options on setable via DSN (Hiroshi)
Multibyte, performance fixes (Hiroshi)
Allow driver to be used with iODBC or unixODBC (Peter E)
MD5 password encryption support (Bruce)
Add more compatibility functions to odbc.sql (Peter E)
_________________________________________________________________
EXECUTE ... INTO implemented (Christof Petig)
Multiple row descriptor support (e.g. CARDINALITY) (Christof Petig)
Fix for GRANT parameters (Lee Kindness)
Fix INITIALLY DEFERRED bug
Various bug fixes (Michael, Christof Petig)
Auto allocation for indicator variable arrays (int *ind_p=NULL)
Auto allocation for string arrays (char **foo_pp=NULL)
ECPGfree_auto_mem fixed
All function names with external linkage are now prefixed by ECPG
Fixes for arrays of structures (Michael)
_________________________________________________________________
Python fix fetchone() (Gerhard Haring)