-
Release Notes
7.4 Development Branch
- Below is a subset of the changes that have gone into the development
- branch of PostgreSQL since version 7.3. For a complete list of
- changes, consult the CVS logs.
-
- Explicit JOINs no longer constrain query plan, unless
- JOIN_COLLAPSE_LIMIT = 1
- Performance of "foo IN (SELECT ...)" queries has been considerably
- improved
- FETCH 0 now re-fetches cursor's current row, per SQL spec
- Revised executor state representation; plan trees are read-only
- to executor now
- Information schema
- Domains now support CHECK constraints
- psql backslash commands for listing conversions, casts, and schemas
- TRUNCATE TABLE is transaction-safe
- CLUSTER can re-cluster a previously clustered table, or all such tables
- Statement-level triggers
- System can use either hash- or sort-based strategy for grouped
- aggregation
- ON COMMIT options for temp tables
- extra_float_digits option allows pg_dump to dump float data accurately
- Long options for psql and pg_dump are now available on all platforms
- Read-only transactions
- Object owners can allow grantees to grant the privilege to others
- (grant option)
+
+Valid as of 2003-08-01.
+
+
+Server Operation
+
+Allow IPv6 server connections (Nigel Kukard, Johan Jordaan, Bruce, Tom, Kurt
+ Roeckx, Andrew Dunstan)
+Fix SSL to handle errors cleanly (Nathan Mueller)
+SSL protocol security and performance improvements (Sean Chittenden)
+Print lock information when a deadlock is detected (Tom)
+Update /tmp socket files regularly to avoid their removal (Tom)
+Enable PAM for MAC OS X (Aaron Hillegass)
+Make btree indexes fully WAL-safe (Tom)
+Allow btree index compaction and empty page reuse (Tom)
+Fix inconsistent index lookups during split of first root page (Tom)
+Improve free space map allocation logic (Tom)
+Preserve free space information between postmaster restarts (Tom)
+Set proper schema permissions in initdb (Peter)
+Add start time to pg_stat_activity (Neil)
+New code to detect corrupt disk pages; erase with zero_damaged_pages (Tom)
+New client/server protocol: faster, no username length limit, allow
+ clean exit
+Add transaction status, tableid, columnid to backend protocol (Tom)
+Add new binary I/O protocol (Tom)
+Remove autocommit server setting; move to client applications (Tom)
+New error message wording, error codes, and three levels of error detail (Tom)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Performance
+
+Add hashing for GROUP BY aggregates (Tom)
+Allow nested loops to be smarter about multicolumn indexes (Tom)
+Allow multi-key hash joins (Tom)
+Improve constant folding (Tom)
+Add ability to inline simple SQL functions (Tom)
+Reduce memory usage for queries using complex functions (Tom)
+Improve GEQO optimizer performance (Tom)
+Allow IN/NOT IN to be handled via hash tables (Tom)
+Improve NOT IN (subquery) performance (Tom)
+Allow most IN subqueries to be processed as joins (Tom)
+Improve reverse index scan performance (Tom)
+Improve optimizer cost computations, particularly for subqueries (Tom)
+Assume WHERE a.x = b.y and b.y = 42 also means a.x = 42 (Tom)
+Allow hash/merge joins on complex joins (Tom)
+Allow hash joins for more data types (Tom)
+Allow join optimization of ANSI joins, disable with join_collapse_limit (Tom)
+Add from_collapse_limit to control conversion of subqueries to joins (Tom)
+Use faster regex code from TCL (Henry Spencer, Tom)
+Use bit-mapped relation sets in the optimizer (Tom)
+Improve backend startup time (Tom)
+Improve trigger/constraint performance (Stephan)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Server Configuration
+
+Rename server parameter server_min_messages to log_min_messages (Bruce)
+Rename show_*_stats to log_*_stats (Bruce)
+Rename show_source_port to log_source_port (Bruce)
+Rename hostname_lookup to log_hostname (Bruce)
+Add checkpoint_warning to warn of excessive checkpointing (Bruce)
+Allow the postmaster to preload libraries using preload_libraries (Joe)
+New read-only server parameters for localization (Tom)
+Change debug server log messages to output as DEBUG rather than LOG (Bruce)
+Prevent server log variables from being turned off by non-super users (Bruce)
+log_min_messages/client_min_messages now controls debug_* output (Bruce)
+Add Rendezvous server support (Chris Campbell)
+Add ability to print only slow statements using log_min_duration_statement
+ (Christopher)
+Allow pg_hba.conf to accept netmasks in CIDR format (Andrew Dunstan)
+New is_superuser read-only variable (Tom)
+New server-side parameter log_error_verbosity to control error detail (Tom)
+postgres --help-config now dumps server config variables (Tom)
+Make default shared_buffers 1000 and max_connections 100, if possible (Tom)
+Add pg_settings table to see server settings (Joe)
+Prevent assign_session_authorization() from being confused by
+ all-numeric user names (Tom)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Queries
+
+New SQL-standard information schema (Peter)
+Add read-only transactions (Peter)
+Add server variable regex_flavor to control regular expression
+ processing (Tom)
+Allow ORDER BY in FROM subqueries to be honored by outer queries (Tom)
+Print key name in foreign-key violation messages (Dmitry Tkach)
+Allow users to see their own queries in pg_stat_activity (Kevin Brown)
+Allow subquery aggregates to reference upper query columns (?) (Tom)
+Add option to prevent auto-addition of tables referenced in query (Nigel J.
+ Andrews)
+Allow dollar signs in identifiers, except as first character (Tom)
+Allow UPDATE ... SET col = DEFAULT (Rod)
+Allow expressions to be used in LIMIT/OFFSET (Tom)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Object Manipulation
+
+Make CREATE SEQUENCE grammar more SQL1999 standards compliant (Neil)
+Add FOR EACH STATEMENT statement-level triggers (Neil Conway)
+Add DOMAIN CHECK constraints (Rod)
+Add ALTER DOMAIN .. SET / DROP NOT NULL, SET / DROP DEFAULT, ADD / DROP
+ CONSTRAINT (Rod)
+Allow zero-column tables (Tom)
+Have ALTER TABLE ... ADD PRIMARY KEY add NOT NULL constraint (Rod)
+Add ALTER DOMAIN OWNER (Rod)
+Add pg_trigger.tgenabled to disable triggers? (Neil)
+Add ALTER TABLE ... WITHOUT OIDS? (Rod)
+Have parser honor foreign-key constraints if created via ALTER TABLE ADD
+ COLUMN? (Tom)
+Add ALTER SEQUENCE to modify min/max/increment/cache/cycle values (Rod)
+Add ALTER TABLE ... CLUSTER ON (Alvaro Herrera)
+Improve DOMAIN automatic type casting (Tom)
+Disallow dollar signs in operator names (Tom)
+Allow SQL200X inheritance syntax LIKE <subtable>, INCLUDING DEFAULTS? (Rod)
+Object owners can allow grantees to grant privilege to others?
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Utility Commands
+
+Add ON COMMIT PRESERVE ROWS for temp tables (Gavin)
+Allow cursors outside transactions using WITH HOLD (Neil)
+Make MOVE/FETCH 0 actually move/fetch 0 (Bruce)
+Add MOVE ALL to move to end of cursor (Bruce)
+Cause FETCH 1 to return the current cursor row, or zero if at
+ beginning/end of cursor, per SQL spec (Bruce)
+Have MOVE return 0 or 1 depending on cursor position (Bruce)
+Properly handle SCROLL with cursors, or report an error (Tom)
+Implement SQL92-compatible FIRST, LAST, ABSOLUTE n, RELATIVE n options
+ for FETCH and MOVE (Tom)
+Allow EXPLAIN on DECLARE CURSOR (Tom)
+Allow CLUSTER to use index marked as pre-clustered by default (Alvaro Herrera)
+Allow CLUSTER without tablename clusters all tables (Alvaro Herrera)
+Prevent CLUSTER on partial indexes (Tom)
+Allow \r and \r\n termination for COPY files (Bruce)
+Disallow literal carriage return as a data value, backslash-carriage-return
+ and \r still allowed (Bruce)
+COPY changes (binary, \.)? (Tom)
+Recover from COPY IN/OUT failure cleanly (Tom)
+Reduce memory used by COPY (Tom)
+Make TRUNCATE transaction-safe (Rod)
+Multiple pg_dump fixes, including tar format and large objects
+Allow pg_dump to dump specific schemas (Neil)
+Allow pg_dump to preserve column storage characteristics (Christopher)
+Allow pg_dump to preserve CLUSTER characteristics (Christopher)
+Have pg_dumpall use GRANT/REVOKE to dump database-level permissions (Tom)
+Allow pg_dumpall to support the -a, -s, -x options of pg_dump (Tom)
+Prevent pg_dump from lowercasing identifiers specified on the command line (Tom)
+Allow EXPLAIN EXECUTE (Neil)
+Allow pg_get_constraintdef() to support UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY and
+ CHECK constraints (Christopher)
+Improve VACUUM performance on indexes by reducing WAL traffic (Tom)
+Allow pg_ctl to better handle non-standard ports (Greg)
+Functional indexes now support indexes on column expressions (Tom)
+Syntax errors now reported as 'syntax error' rather than 'parse error' (Tom)
+Have SHOW TRANSACTION_ISOLATION match input to SET TRANSACTION_ISOLATION (Tom)
+Have COMMENT ON DATABASE on non-local database generate a warning (Tom)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Data Types and Functions
+
+New extra_float_digits server parameter to control float precision display
+ (Pedro Ferreira, Tom)
+Allow +1300 as a numeric timezone specifier, for FJST (Tom)
+Remove rarely used oidrand(), oidsrand(), and userfntest() functions (Neil)
+Add md5() function to main server, already in /contrib/pgcrypto (Joe)
+Increase date range of timestamp (John Cochran)
+Change EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM timestamp) so timestamp without time zone
+ is assumed to be in local time, not GMT (Tom)
+Trap division by zero in case the operating system doesn't prevent it (Tom)
+Change the NUMERIC data type internally to base 10000 (Tom)
+New hostmast() function (Greg Wickham)
+Fixes for to_char() (Karel)
+Allow functions that can take any argument data type and return
+ any data type, using ANYELEMENT and ANYARRAY (Joe)
+Arrays may now be specified as ARRAY[1,2,3], ARRAY[['a','b'],['c','d']],
+ or ARRAY[ARRAY[ARRAY[2]]] (Joe)
+Allow proper comparisons for arrays (Joe)
+Allow indexes on array columns, and used in ORDER BY and DISTINCT (Joe)
+Allow WHERE qualifications of the form 'col IN/ANY/SOME/ALL (array) (?) (Joe)
+Allow SQL functions to return arrays and take them as params (Joe)
+Allow array concatenation with '||' and normal array comparisons (Joe)
+New array functions array_append(), array_cat(), array_lower(),
+ array_prepend(), array_to_string(), array_upper(), string_to_array() (Joe)
+Allow assignments to empty arrays (Joe)
+Allow 60 in seconds fields of timestamp, time, interval input values (Tom)
+Allow PREPARE/bind of utility commands like FETCH and EXPLAIN (Tom)
+Allow CIDR data type to be cast to text (Tom)
+Allow the creation of special LIKE indexes for non-C locales (Peter)
+Disallow invalid timezone names (Tom)
+Trim trailing spaces when CHAR() data is cast to VARCHAR or TEXT (Tom)
+Make FLOAT(p) measure the precision p in bits, not decimal digits (Tom)
+Add IPv6 support to the inet and cidr data types (Michael Graff)
+Add family() function to report whether address is IPv4 or IPv6 (Michael Graff)
+Have SHOW DATESTYLE generate output similar to that used by SET DATESTYLE (Tom)
+Change DATESTYLE to output its value in a more common format (Tom)
+Make EXTRACT(TIMEZONE) and SET/SHOW TIMEZONE follow the SQL convention
+ for the sign of timezone offsets, ie, positive is east from UTC (Tom)
+Fix date_trunc('quarter',...) (B?jthe Zolt?n)
+Make initcap() more compatible with Oracle (Mike Nolan)
+Honor only DateStyle setting for date entry without a four-digit year (Greg)
+Add new DateStyle values MDY, DMY, and YMD, honor US and European for
+ backward compatibility (Tom)
+'now' will no longer work as a default, use now() (change required for prepared
+ statements) (Tom)
+Assume NaN value to be larger than any other value in comparisons (Tom)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Server-side Languages
+
+Prevent PL/pgSQL crash when RETURN NEXT is used on a zero-row record (Tom)
+Make PL/python's spi_execute interface handle NULLs properly (Andrew Bosma)
+Allow PL/pgSQL to declare variables of composite types without %ROWTYPE (Tom)
+Fix PL/python _quote() function to handle big integers (?)
+Make PL/python an untrusted language, now called plpythonu (Kevin Jacobs, Tom)
+Change PL/pgSQL EXECUTE INTO to CREATE TABLE AS EXECUTE? (Peter)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Psql
+
+Add "\pset pager always" to always use pager (Greg)
+Improve tab completion (Rod, Ross Reedstrom, Ian Barwick)
+Reorder \? help into groupings (Harald Armin Massa, Bruce)
+Add schema, cast, and conversion backslash commands (Christopher)
+\encoding now tracks client_encoding server variable (Tom)
+Save edit history into readline history (Ross)
+Improve \d display (Christopher)
+Enhance HTML mode to be more standards-compliant (Greg)
+New '\set autocommit off' capability (Tom)
+New '\set verbosity' to control error detail (Tom)
+New %T prompt string to show transaction status (Tom)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Libpq
+
+Allow PQcmdTuples() to return row counts for MOVE and FETCH (Neil)
+Add PQfreemem() for freeing memory on Win32, suggest for NOTIFY (Bruce)
+Document service capability, and add sample file (Bruce)
+Make PQsetdbLogin() have the same defaults as PQconnectdb() (Tom)
+Allow libpq to cleanly fail when result sets are too large (Tom)
+Improve performance of PGunescapeBytea() (Ben Lamb)
+Allow threaded with --enable-thread-safety (Lee Kindness, Bruce)
+Allow pqInternalNotice() to accept a format string and args instead of
+ just a preformatted message (Tom, Sean Chittenden)
+Allow control SSL negotiation with sslmode values "disable", "allow",
+ "Prefer", and "require" (Jon Jensen)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+JDBC
+
+Allow setNull on updateable resultsets
+Allow executeBatch on a prepared statement (Barry)
+Support SSL connections (Barry)
+Handle schema names in result sets (Paul Sorenson)
+Add refcursor support (Nic Ferrier)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Miscellaneous Interfaces
+
+Prevent possible memory leak or core dump during libpgtcl shutdown (Tom)
+Add ecpg Informix compatibility (Michael)
+Add ecpg DECIMAL type that is fixed length, for Informix (Michael)
+Allow threaded ecpg with --enable-thread-safety (Lee Kindness, Bruce)
+Allow client interfaces to compile under MinGW/win32 (Bruce)
+Move python client interface to http://www.pygresql.org (Marc)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Source Code
+
+Prevent need for separate platform geometry regression result files (Tom)
+Improved PPC locking primitive (Reinhard Max)
+Embed LD_LIBRARY_PATH used for build process into binaries (Billy)
+New palloc0 to allocate and clear memory (Bruce)
+Fix locking code for s390x CPU (64-bit) (Tom)
+Allow OpenBSD to use local indent credentials (William Ahern)
+Allow read-only query plans (Tom)
+Add Darwin startup scripts (David Wheeler)
+Allow libpq to compile with Borland C++ compiler (Lester Godwin, Karl Waclawek)
+Use our own version of getopt_long() if needed (Peter)
+Convert administration scripts to C (Peter)
+Bison >=1.85 is now required for grammar changes
+Merge documentation into one book (Peter)
+Add Win32 compatibility functions (Bruce)
+New ereport() function for error reporting (Tom)
+Support Intel Linux compiler (Peter)
+Improve Linux startup scripts (Slawomir Sudnik, Darko Prenosil)
+Add support for AMD Opteron and Itanium (Jeffrey W. Baker, Bruce)
+
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+Contrib
+
+Change dbmirror license to BSD
+Improve earthdistance (Bruno Wolff III)
+Portability improvements to pgcrypto (Marko Kreen)
+Prevent xml crash (John Gray, Michael Richards)
+Upgrade oracle
+Upgrade mysql
+Update cube (Bruno Wolff III)
+Update earthdistance to use cube (Bruno Wolff III)
+Update btree_gist (Oleg)
+Add hashes to tablefuncs (Joe)
+New pg_autovacuum allows automatic VACUUM (Matthew T. O'Connor)
+Allow pgbench to honor PGHOST, PGPORT, PGUSER env. variables (Tatsuo)
+Improve intarray (Teodor Sigaev)
+Improve pgstattuple (Rod)
+Fix second argument to metaphone() in fullystrmatch
+Add named persistent connections to dblink (Shridhar Daithanka)
+Improve adddepend (Rod)
+Update spi/timetravel (B?jthe Zolt?n)
+Fix dbase -s option (Thomas Behr)
+
_________________________________________________________________
Release 7.3.3
projects / postgresql / commitdiff