a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
(LIKE and regexp matches). These are not yet referenced in pg_operator,
so by default the system will continue to use eqsel/neqsel.
Also, tweak convert_to_scalar() logic so that common prefixes of strings
are stripped off, allowing better accuracy when all strings in a table
share a common prefix.
selectivity functions and make the r-tree operators use them. The
estimation functions themselves are just stubs, unfortunately, but
perhaps someday someone will make them compute realistic estimates.
Change pg_am so that the optimizer can reliably tell the difference
between ordered and unordered indexes --- before it would think that
an r-tree index can be scanned in '<<' order, which is not right AFAIK.
Repair broken negator links for network_sup and related ops.
Initdb forced. This might be my last initdb force for 7.0 ... hope so
anyway ...
(ie, WHERE x > lowbound AND x < highbound). It's not very bright yet
but it does something useful. Also, rename intltsel/intgtsel to
scalarltsel/scalargtsel to reflect usage better. Extend convert_to_scalar
to do something a little bit useful with string data types. Still need
to make it do something with date/time datatypes, but I'll wait for
Thomas's datetime unification dust to settle first. Eventually the
routine ought not have any type-specific knowledge at all; it ought to
be calling a type-dependent routine found via a pg_type column; but
that's a task for another day.
Add an appendix with more details on date/time attributes and handling.
Update most references to Postgres version numbers to 6.5,
*except* for the porting list which will require a report
from a successful installation to be updated.
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Thomas G. Lockhart