GUC support. It's now possible to set datestyle, timezone, and
client_encoding from postgresql.conf and per-database or per-user
settings. Also, implement rollback of SET commands that occur in a
transaction that later fails. Create a SET LOCAL var = value syntax
that sets the variable only for the duration of the current transaction.
All per previous discussions in pghackers.
reference page to new configuration system. Big update to administrator's
guide, chapters Runtime environment, Client authentication, and User
management, the latter two were part of the old Security chapter.
accesses versus sequential accesses, a (very crude) estimate of the
effects of caching on random page accesses, and cost to evaluate WHERE-
clause expressions. Export critical parameters for this model as SET
variables. Also, create SET variables for the planner's enable flags
(enable_seqscan, enable_indexscan, etc) so that these can be controlled
more conveniently than via PGOPTIONS.
Planner now estimates both startup cost (cost before retrieving
first tuple) and total cost of each path, so it can optimize queries
with LIMIT on a reasonable basis by interpolating between these costs.
Same facility is a win for EXISTS(...) subqueries and some other cases.
Redesign pathkey representation to achieve a major speedup in planning
(I saw as much as 5X on a 10-way join); also minor changes in planner
to reduce memory consumption by recycling discarded Path nodes and
not constructing unnecessary lists.
Minor cleanups to display more-plausible costs in some cases in
EXPLAIN output.
Initdb forced by change in interface to index cost estimation
functions.