2008-01-07 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.20, including fixes for significant security issues. This is expected to be the last PostgreSQL release in the 7.3.X series. Users are encouraged to update to a newer release branch soon. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.13, see . Prevent functions in indexes from executing with the privileges of the user running VACUUM, ANALYZE, etc (Tom) Functions used in index expressions and partial-index predicates are evaluated whenever a new table entry is made. It has long been understood that this poses a risk of trojan-horse code execution if one modifies a table owned by an untrustworthy user. (Note that triggers, defaults, check constraints, etc. pose the same type of risk.) But functions in indexes pose extra danger because they will be executed by routine maintenance operations such as VACUUM FULL, which are commonly performed automatically under a superuser account. For example, a nefarious user can execute code with superuser privileges by setting up a trojan-horse index definition and waiting for the next routine vacuum. The fix arranges for standard maintenance operations (including VACUUM, ANALYZE, REINDEX, and CLUSTER) to execute as the table owner rather than the calling user, using the same privilege-switching mechanism already used for SECURITY DEFINER functions. To prevent bypassing this security measure, execution of SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION and SET ROLE is now forbidden within a SECURITY DEFINER context. (CVE-2007-6600) Require non-superusers who use /contrib/dblink to use only password authentication, as a security measure (Joe) The fix that appeared for this in 7.3.20 was incomplete, as it plugged the hole for only some dblink functions. (CVE-2007-6601, CVE-2007-3278) Fix potential crash in translate() when using a multibyte database encoding (Tom) Make contrib/tablefunc's crosstab() handle NULL rowid as a category in its own right, rather than crashing (Joe) Require a specific version of Autoconf to be used when re-generating the configure script (Peter) This affects developers and packagers only. The change was made to prevent accidental use of untested combinations of Autoconf and PostgreSQL versions. You can remove the version check if you really want to use a different Autoconf version, but it's your responsibility whether the result works or not. 2007-09-17 This release contains fixes from 7.3.19. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.13, see . Prevent index corruption when a transaction inserts rows and then aborts close to the end of a concurrent VACUUM on the same table (Tom) Make CREATE DOMAIN ... DEFAULT NULL work properly (Tom) Fix crash when log_min_error_statement logging runs out of memory (Tom) Require non-superusers who use /contrib/dblink to use only password authentication, as a security measure (Joe) 2007-04-23 This release contains fixes from 7.3.18, including a security fix. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.13, see . Support explicit placement of the temporary-table schema within search_path, and disable searching it for functions and operators (Tom) This is needed to allow a security-definer function to set a truly secure value of search_path. Without it, an unprivileged SQL user can use temporary objects to execute code with the privileges of the security-definer function (CVE-2007-2138). See CREATE FUNCTION for more information. Fix potential-data-corruption bug in how VACUUM FULL handles UPDATE chains (Tom, Pavan Deolasee) 2007-02-05 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.17, including a security fix. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.13, see . Remove security vulnerability that allowed connected users to read backend memory (Tom) The vulnerability involves changing the data type of a table column used in a SQL function (CVE-2007-0555). This error can easily be exploited to cause a backend crash, and in principle might be used to read database content that the user should not be able to access. Fix rare bug wherein btree index page splits could fail due to choosing an infeasible split point (Heikki Linnakangas) Tighten security of multi-byte character processing for UTF8 sequences over three bytes long (Tom) 2007-01-08 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.16. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.13, see . to_number() and to_char(numeric) are now STABLE, not IMMUTABLE, for new initdb installs (Tom) This is because lc_numeric can potentially change the output of these functions. Improve index usage of regular expressions that use parentheses (Tom) This improves psql \d performance also. 2006-10-16 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.15. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.13, see . Fix corner cases in pattern matching for psql's \d commands Fix index-corrupting bugs in /contrib/ltree (Teodor) Back-port 7.4 spinlock code to improve performance and support 64-bit architectures better Fix SSL-related memory leak in libpq Fix backslash escaping in /contrib/dbmirror Adjust regression tests for recent changes in US DST laws 2006-05-23 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.14, including patches for extremely serious security issues. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.13, see . Full security against the SQL-injection attacks described in CVE-2006-2313 and CVE-2006-2314 might require changes in application code. If you have applications that embed untrustworthy strings into SQL commands, you should examine them as soon as possible to ensure that they are using recommended escaping techniques. In most cases, applications should be using subroutines provided by libraries or drivers (such as libpq's PQescapeStringConn()) to perform string escaping, rather than relying on ad hoc code to do it. Change the server to reject invalidly-encoded multibyte characters in all cases (Tatsuo, Tom) While PostgreSQL has been moving in this direction for some time, the checks are now applied uniformly to all encodings and all textual input, and are now always errors not merely warnings. This change defends against SQL-injection attacks of the type described in CVE-2006-2313. Reject unsafe uses of \' in string literals As a server-side defense against SQL-injection attacks of the type described in CVE-2006-2314, the server now only accepts '' and not \' as a representation of ASCII single quote in SQL string literals. By default, \' is rejected only when client_encoding is set to a client-only encoding (SJIS, BIG5, GBK, GB18030, or UHC), which is the scenario in which SQL injection is possible. A new configuration parameter backslash_quote is available to adjust this behavior when needed. Note that full security against CVE-2006-2314 might require client-side changes; the purpose of backslash_quote is in part to make it obvious that insecure clients are insecure. Modify libpq's string-escaping routines to be aware of encoding considerations This fixes libpq-using applications for the security issues described in CVE-2006-2313 and CVE-2006-2314. Applications that use multiple PostgreSQL connections concurrently should migrate to PQescapeStringConn() and PQescapeByteaConn() to ensure that escaping is done correctly for the settings in use in each database connection. Applications that do string escaping by hand should be modified to rely on library routines instead. Fix some incorrect encoding conversion functions win1251_to_iso, alt_to_iso, euc_tw_to_big5, euc_tw_to_mic, mic_to_euc_tw were all broken to varying extents. Clean up stray remaining uses of \' in strings (Bruce, Jan) Fix server to use custom DH SSL parameters correctly (Michael Fuhr) Fix various minor memory leaks 2006-02-14 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.13. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.13, see . Fix potential crash in SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION (CVE-2006-0553) An unprivileged user could crash the server process, resulting in momentary denial of service to other users, if the server has been compiled with Asserts enabled (which is not the default). Thanks to Akio Ishida for reporting this problem. Fix bug with row visibility logic in self-inserted rows (Tom) Under rare circumstances a row inserted by the current command could be seen as already valid, when it should not be. Repairs bug created in 7.3.11 release. Fix race condition that could lead to file already exists errors during pg_clog file creation (Tom) Fix to allow restoring dumps that have cross-schema references to custom operators (Tom) Portability fix for testing presence of finite and isinf during configure (Tom) 2006-01-09 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.12. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.10, see . Also, you might need to REINDEX indexes on textual columns after updating, if you are affected by the locale or plperl issues described below. Fix character string comparison for locales that consider different character combinations as equal, such as Hungarian (Tom) This might require REINDEX to fix existing indexes on textual columns. Set locale environment variables during postmaster startup to ensure that plperl won't change the locale later This fixes a problem that occurred if the postmaster was started with environment variables specifying a different locale than what initdb had been told. Under these conditions, any use of plperl was likely to lead to corrupt indexes. You might need REINDEX to fix existing indexes on textual columns if this has happened to you. Fix longstanding bug in strpos() and regular expression handling in certain rarely used Asian multi-byte character sets (Tatsuo) Fix bug in /contrib/pgcrypto gen_salt, which caused it not to use all available salt space for MD5 and XDES algorithms (Marko Kreen, Solar Designer) Salts for Blowfish and standard DES are unaffected. Fix /contrib/dblink to throw an error, rather than crashing, when the number of columns specified is different from what's actually returned by the query (Joe) 2005-12-12 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.11. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.10, see . Fix race condition in transaction log management There was a narrow window in which an I/O operation could be initiated for the wrong page, leading to an Assert failure or data corruption. /contrib/ltree fixes (Teodor) Fix longstanding planning error for outer joins This bug sometimes caused a bogus error RIGHT JOIN is only supported with merge-joinable join conditions. Prevent core dump in pg_autovacuum when a table has been dropped 2005-10-04 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.10. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.3.10, see . Fix error that allowed VACUUM to remove ctid chains too soon, and add more checking in code that follows ctid links This fixes a long-standing problem that could cause crashes in very rare circumstances. Fix CHAR() to properly pad spaces to the specified length when using a multiple-byte character set (Yoshiyuki Asaba) In prior releases, the padding of CHAR() was incorrect because it only padded to the specified number of bytes without considering how many characters were stored. Fix missing rows in queries like UPDATE a=... WHERE a... with GiST index on column a Improve checking for partially-written WAL pages Improve robustness of signal handling when SSL is enabled Various memory leakage fixes Various portability improvements Fix PL/pgSQL to handle var := var correctly when the variable is of pass-by-reference type 2005-05-09 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.9, including several security-related issues. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. However, it is one possible way of handling a significant security problem that has been found in the initial contents of 7.3.X system catalogs. A dump/initdb/reload sequence using 7.3.10's initdb will automatically correct this problem. The security problem is that the built-in character set encoding conversion functions can be invoked from SQL commands by unprivileged users, but the functions were not designed for such use and are not secure against malicious choices of arguments. The fix involves changing the declared parameter list of these functions so that they can no longer be invoked from SQL commands. (This does not affect their normal use by the encoding conversion machinery.) It is strongly recommended that all installations repair this error, either by initdb or by following the manual repair procedure given below. The error at least allows unprivileged database users to crash their server process, and might allow unprivileged users to gain the privileges of a database superuser. If you wish not to do an initdb, perform the following procedure instead. As the database superuser, do: BEGIN; UPDATE pg_proc SET proargtypes[3] = 'internal'::regtype WHERE pronamespace = 11 AND pronargs = 5 AND proargtypes[2] = 'cstring'::regtype; -- The command should report having updated 90 rows; -- if not, rollback and investigate instead of committing! COMMIT; The above procedure must be carried out in each database of an installation, including template1, and ideally including template0 as well. If you do not fix the template databases then any subsequently created databases will contain the same error. template1 can be fixed in the same way as any other database, but fixing template0 requires additional steps. First, from any database issue: UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = true WHERE datname = 'template0'; Next connect to template0 and perform the above repair procedure. Finally, do: -- re-freeze template0: VACUUM FREEZE; -- and protect it against future alterations: UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = false WHERE datname = 'template0'; Change encoding function signature to prevent misuse Repair ancient race condition that allowed a transaction to be seen as committed for some purposes (eg SELECT FOR UPDATE) slightly sooner than for other purposes This is an extremely serious bug since it could lead to apparent data inconsistencies being briefly visible to applications. Repair race condition between relation extension and VACUUM This could theoretically have caused loss of a page's worth of freshly-inserted data, although the scenario seems of very low probability. There are no known cases of it having caused more than an Assert failure. Fix comparisons of TIME WITH TIME ZONE values The comparison code was wrong in the case where the --enable-integer-datetimes configuration switch had been used. NOTE: if you have an index on a TIME WITH TIME ZONE column, it will need to be REINDEXed after installing this update, because the fix corrects the sort order of column values. Fix EXTRACT(EPOCH) for TIME WITH TIME ZONE values Fix mis-display of negative fractional seconds in INTERVAL values This error only occurred when the --enable-integer-datetimes configuration switch had been used. Additional buffer overrun checks in plpgsql (Neil) Fix pg_dump to dump trigger names containing % correctly (Neil) Prevent to_char(interval) from dumping core for month-related formats Fix contrib/pgcrypto for newer OpenSSL builds (Marko Kreen) Still more 64-bit fixes for contrib/intagg Prevent incorrect optimization of functions returning RECORD 2005-01-31 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.8, including several security-related issues. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. Disallow LOAD to non-superusers On platforms that will automatically execute initialization functions of a shared library (this includes at least Windows and ELF-based Unixen), LOAD can be used to make the server execute arbitrary code. Thanks to NGS Software for reporting this. Check that creator of an aggregate function has the right to execute the specified transition functions This oversight made it possible to bypass denial of EXECUTE permission on a function. Fix security and 64-bit issues in contrib/intagg Add needed STRICT marking to some contrib functions (Kris Jurka) Avoid buffer overrun when plpgsql cursor declaration has too many parameters (Neil) Fix planning error for FULL and RIGHT outer joins The result of the join was mistakenly supposed to be sorted the same as the left input. This could not only deliver mis-sorted output to the user, but in case of nested merge joins could give outright wrong answers. Fix plperl for quote marks in tuple fields Fix display of negative intervals in SQL and GERMAN datestyles 2004-10-22 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.7. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. Repair possible failure to update hint bits on disk Under rare circumstances this oversight could lead to could not access transaction status failures, which qualifies it as a potential-data-loss bug. Ensure that hashed outer join does not miss tuples Very large left joins using a hash join plan could fail to output unmatched left-side rows given just the right data distribution. Disallow running pg_ctl as root This is to guard against any possible security issues. Avoid using temp files in /tmp in make_oidjoins_check This has been reported as a security issue, though it's hardly worthy of concern since there is no reason for non-developers to use this script anyway. 2004-08-16 This release contains one critical fix over 7.3.6, and some minor items. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X. Prevent possible loss of committed transactions during crash Due to insufficient interlocking between transaction commit and checkpointing, it was possible for transactions committed just before the most recent checkpoint to be lost, in whole or in part, following a database crash and restart. This is a serious bug that has existed since PostgreSQL 7.1. Remove asymmetrical word processing in tsearch (Teodor) Properly schema-qualify function names when pg_dump'ing a CAST 2004-03-02 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.5. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.*. Revert erroneous changes in rule permissions checking A patch applied in 7.3.3 to fix a corner case in rule permissions checks turns out to have disabled rule-related permissions checks in many not-so-corner cases. This would for example allow users to insert into views they weren't supposed to have permission to insert into. We have therefore reverted the 7.3.3 patch. The original bug will be fixed in 8.0. Repair incorrect order of operations in GetNewTransactionId() This bug could result in failure under out-of-disk-space conditions, including inability to restart even after disk space is freed. Ensure configure selects -fno-strict-aliasing even when an external value for CFLAGS is supplied On some platforms, building with -fstrict-aliasing causes bugs. Make pg_restore handle 64-bit off_t correctly This bug prevented proper restoration from archive files exceeding 4 GB. Make contrib/dblink not assume that local and remote type OIDs match (Joe) Quote connectby()'s start_with argument properly (Joe) Don't crash when a rowtype argument to a plpgsql function is NULL Avoid generating invalid character encoding sequences in corner cases when planning LIKE operations Ensure text_position() cannot scan past end of source string in multibyte cases (Korea PostgreSQL Users' Group) Fix index optimization and selectivity estimates for LIKE operations on bytea columns (Joe) 2003-12-03 This has a variety of fixes from 7.3.4. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.*. Force zero_damaged_pages to be on during recovery from WAL Prevent some obscure cases of variable not in subplan target lists Force stats processes to detach from shared memory, ensuring cleaner shutdown Make PQescapeBytea and byteaout consistent with each other (Joe) Added missing SPI_finish() calls to dblink's get_tuple_of_interest() (Joe) Fix for possible foreign key violation when rule rewrites INSERT (Jan) Support qualified type names in PL/Tcl's spi_prepare command (Jan) Make pg_dump handle a procedural language handler located in pg_catalog Make pg_dump handle cases where a custom opclass is in another schema Make pg_dump dump binary-compatible casts correctly (Jan) Fix insertion of expressions containing subqueries into rule bodies Fix incorrect argument processing in clusterdb script (Anand Ranganathan) Fix problems with dropped columns in plpython triggers Repair problems with to_char() reading past end of its input string (Karel) Fix GB18030 mapping errors (Tatsuo) Fix several problems with SSL error handling and asynchronous SSL I/O Remove ability to bind a list of values to a single parameter in JDBC (prevents possible SQL-injection attacks) Fix some errors in HAVE_INT64_TIMESTAMP code paths Fix corner case for btree search in parallel with first root page split 2003-07-24 This has a variety of fixes from 7.3.3. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.*. Repair breakage in timestamp-to-date conversion for dates before 2000 Prevent rare possibility of server startup failure (Tom) Fix bugs in interval-to-time conversion (Tom) Add constraint names in a few places in pg_dump (Rod) Improve performance of functions with many parameters (Tom) Fix to_ascii() buffer overruns (Tom) Prevent restore of database comments from throwing an error (Tom) Work around buggy strxfrm() present in some Solaris releases (Tom) Properly escape jdbc setObject() strings to improve security (Barry) 2003-05-22 This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.3.2. A dump/restore is not required for those running version 7.3.*. Repair sometimes-incorrect computation of StartUpID after a crash Avoid slowness with lots of deferred triggers in one transaction (Stephan) Don't lock referenced row when UPDATE doesn't change foreign key's value (Jan) Use -fPIC not -fpic on Sparc (Tom Callaway) Repair lack of schema-awareness in contrib/reindexdb Fix contrib/intarray error for zero-element result array (Teodor) Ensure createuser script will exit on control-C (Oliver) Fix errors when the type of a dropped column has itself been dropped CHECKPOINT does not cause database panic on failure in noncritical steps Accept 60 in seconds fields of timestamp, time, interval input values Issue notice, not error, if TIMESTAMP, TIME, or INTERVAL precision too large Fix abstime-to-time cast function (fix is not applied unless you initdb) Fix pg_proc entry for timestampt_izone (fix is not applied unless you initdb) Make EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM timestamp without time zone) treat input as local time 'now'::timestamptz gave wrong answer if timezone changed earlier in transaction HAVE_INT64_TIMESTAMP code for time with timezone overwrote its input Accept GLOBAL TEMP/TEMPORARY as a synonym for TEMPORARY Avoid improper schema-privilege-check failure in foreign-key triggers Fix bugs in foreign-key triggers for SET DEFAULT action Fix incorrect time-qual check in row fetch for UPDATE and DELETE triggers Foreign-key clauses were parsed but ignored in ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN Fix createlang script breakage for case where handler function already exists Fix misbehavior on zero-column tables in pg_dump, COPY, ANALYZE, other places Fix misbehavior of func_error() on type names containing '%' Fix misbehavior of replace() on strings containing '%' Regular-expression patterns containing certain multibyte characters failed Account correctly for NULLs in more cases in join size estimation Avoid conflict with system definition of isblank() function or macro Fix failure to convert large code point values in EUC_TW conversions (Tatsuo) Fix error recovery for SSL_read/SSL_write calls Don't do early constant-folding of type coercion expressions Validate page header fields immediately after reading in any page Repair incorrect check for ungrouped variables in unnamed joins Fix buffer overrun in to_ascii (Guido Notari) contrib/ltree fixes (Teodor) Fix core dump in deadlock detection on machines where char is unsigned Avoid running out of buffers in many-way indexscan (bug introduced in 7.3) Fix planner's selectivity estimation functions to handle domains properly Fix dbmirror memory-allocation bug (Steven Singer) Prevent infinite loop in ln(numeric) due to roundoff error GROUP BY got confused if there were multiple equal GROUP BY items Fix bad plan when inherited UPDATE/DELETE references another inherited table Prevent clustering on incomplete (partial or non-NULL-storing) indexes Service shutdown request at proper time if it arrives while still starting up Fix left-links in temporary indexes (could make backwards scans miss entries) Fix incorrect handling of client_encoding setting in postgresql.conf (Tatsuo) Fix failure to respond to pg_ctl stop -m fast after Async_NotifyHandler runs Fix SPI for case where rule contains multiple statements of the same type Fix problem with checking for wrong type of access privilege in rule query Fix problem with EXCEPT in CREATE RULE Prevent problem with dropping temp tables having serial columns Fix replace_vars_with_subplan_refs failure in complex views Fix regexp slowness in single-byte encodings (Tatsuo) Allow qualified type names in CREATE CAST and DROP CAST Accept SETOF type[], which formerly had to be written SETOF _type Fix pg_dump core dump in some cases with procedural languages Force ISO datestyle in pg_dump output, for portability (Oliver) pg_dump failed to handle error return from lo_read (Oleg Drokin) pg_dumpall failed with groups having no members (Nick Eskelinen) pg_dumpall failed to recognize --globals-only switch pg_restore failed to restore blobs if -X disable-triggers is specified Repair intrafunction memory leak in plpgsql pltcl's elog command dumped core if given wrong parameters (Ian Harding) plpython used wrong value of atttypmod (Brad McLean) Fix improper quoting of boolean values in Python interface (D'Arcy) Added addDataType() method to PGConnection interface for JDBC Fixed various problems with updateable ResultSets for JDBC (Shawn Green) Fixed various problems with DatabaseMetaData for JDBC (Kris Jurka, Peter Royal) Fixed problem with parsing table ACLs in JDBC Better error message for character set conversion problems in JDBC 2003-02-04 This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.3.1. A dump/restore is not required for those running version 7.3.*. Restore creation of OID column in CREATE TABLE AS / SELECT INTO Fix pg_dump core dump when dumping views having comments Dump DEFERRABLE/INITIALLY DEFERRED constraints properly Fix UPDATE when child table's column numbering differs from parent Increase default value of max_fsm_relations Fix problem when fetching backwards in a cursor for a single-row query Make backward fetch work properly with cursor on SELECT DISTINCT query Fix problems with loading pg_dump files containing contrib/lo usage Fix problem with all-numeric user names Fix possible memory leak and core dump during disconnect in libpgtcl Make plpython's spi_execute command handle nulls properly (Andrew Bosma) Adjust plpython error reporting so that its regression test passes again Work with bison 1.875 Handle mixed-case names properly in plpgsql's %type (Neil) Fix core dump in pltcl when executing a query rewritten by a rule Repair array subscript overruns (per report from Yichen Xie) Reduce MAX_TIME_PRECISION from 13 to 10 in floating-point case Correctly case-fold variable names in per-database and per-user settings Fix coredump in plpgsql's RETURN NEXT when SELECT into record returns no rows Fix outdated use of pg_type.typprtlen in python client interface Correctly handle fractional seconds in timestamps in JDBC driver Improve performance of getImportedKeys() in JDBC Make shared-library symlinks work standardly on HPUX (Giles) Repair inconsistent rounding behavior for timestamp, time, interval SSL negotiation fixes (Nathan Mueller) Make libpq's ~/.pgpass feature work when connecting with PQconnectDB Update my2pg, ora2pg Translation updates Add casts between types lo and oid in contrib/lo fastpath code now checks for privilege to call function 2002-12-18 This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.3. A dump/restore is not required for those running version 7.3. However, it should be noted that the main PostgreSQL interface library, libpq, has a new major version number for this release, which might require recompilation of client code in certain cases. Fix a core dump of COPY TO when client/server encodings don't match (Tom) Allow pg_dump to work with pre-7.2 servers (Philip) contrib/adddepend fixes (Tom) Fix problem with deletion of per-user/per-database config settings (Tom) contrib/vacuumlo fix (Tom) Allow 'password' encryption even when pg_shadow contains MD5 passwords (Bruce) contrib/dbmirror fix (Steven Singer) Optimizer fixes (Tom) contrib/tsearch fixes (Teodor Sigaev, Magnus) Allow locale names to be mixed case (Nicolai Tufar) Increment libpq library's major version number (Bruce) pg_hba.conf error reporting fixes (Bruce, Neil) Add SCO Openserver 5.0.4 as a supported platform (Bruce) Prevent EXPLAIN from crashing server (Tom) SSL fixes (Nathan Mueller) Prevent composite column creation via ALTER TABLE (Tom) 2002-11-27 Major changes in this release: Schemas Schemas allow users to create objects in separate namespaces, 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 privileges on the public schema. Drop Column PostgreSQL now supports the ALTER TABLE ... DROP COLUMN functionality. Table Functions 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. Prepared Queries PostgreSQL now supports prepared queries, for improved performance. Dependency Tracking 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. Privileges 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. Logging A variety of logging options have been enhanced. Interfaces A large number of interfaces have been moved to http://gborg.postgresql.org where they can be developed and released independently. Functions/Identifiers By default, functions can now take up to 32 parameters, and identifiers can be up to 63 bytes long. Also, OPAQUE is now deprecated: there are specific pseudo-datatypes to represent each of the former meanings of OPAQUE in function argument and result types. 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: . 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. LIMIT #,# has been disabled; use LIMIT # OFFSET #. INSERT statements with column lists must specify a value for each specified column. For example, INSERT INTO tab (col1, col2) VALUES ('val1') is now invalid. It's still allowed to supply fewer columns than expected if the INSERT does not have a column list. serial columns are no longer automatically UNIQUE; thus, an index will not automatically be created. 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. (However, one can achieve a similar effect by specifying a column list in the COPY command.) The data type timestamp is now equivalent to timestamp without time zone, instead of timestamp with time zone. 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. An empty string ('') is no longer allowed as the input into an integer field. Formerly, it was silently interpreted as 0. 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) 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) Avoid excessive NULL bitmap padding (Manfred Koizar) 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) 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 privilege 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) 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) 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 key word 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) Make equals signs optional in CREATE DATABASE (Gavin Sherry) Make ALTER TABLE OWNER change index ownership too (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) 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 condition expressions and 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 constraints 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) 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 (Tatsuo) 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 (Neil, Tom) 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) 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 ~/.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 Windows (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) 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) 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 Windows, 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 Windows 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) 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, pg_resetxlog into main tree (Bruce) Fixes to /contrib/cube (Bruno Wolff) Improve /contrib/fulltextindex (Christopher) 2005-05-09 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.2.7, including one security-related issue. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.2.X. Repair ancient race condition that allowed a transaction to be seen as committed for some purposes (eg SELECT FOR UPDATE) slightly sooner than for other purposes This is an extremely serious bug since it could lead to apparent data inconsistencies being briefly visible to applications. Repair race condition between relation extension and VACUUM This could theoretically have caused loss of a page's worth of freshly-inserted data, although the scenario seems of very low probability. There are no known cases of it having caused more than an Assert failure. Fix EXTRACT(EPOCH) for TIME WITH TIME ZONE values Additional buffer overrun checks in plpgsql (Neil) Fix pg_dump to dump index names and trigger names containing % correctly (Neil) Prevent to_char(interval) from dumping core for month-related formats Fix contrib/pgcrypto for newer OpenSSL builds (Marko Kreen) 2005-01-31 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.2.6, including several security-related issues. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.2.X. Disallow LOAD to non-superusers On platforms that will automatically execute initialization functions of a shared library (this includes at least Windows and ELF-based Unixen), LOAD can be used to make the server execute arbitrary code. Thanks to NGS Software for reporting this. Add needed STRICT marking to some contrib functions (Kris Jurka) Avoid buffer overrun when plpgsql cursor declaration has too many parameters (Neil) Fix planning error for FULL and RIGHT outer joins The result of the join was mistakenly supposed to be sorted the same as the left input. This could not only deliver mis-sorted output to the user, but in case of nested merge joins could give outright wrong answers. Fix display of negative intervals in SQL and GERMAN datestyles 2004-10-22 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.2.5. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.2.X. Repair possible failure to update hint bits on disk Under rare circumstances this oversight could lead to could not access transaction status failures, which qualifies it as a potential-data-loss bug. Ensure that hashed outer join does not miss tuples Very large left joins using a hash join plan could fail to output unmatched left-side rows given just the right data distribution. Disallow running pg_ctl as root This is to guard against any possible security issues. Avoid using temp files in /tmp in make_oidjoins_check This has been reported as a security issue, though it's hardly worthy of concern since there is no reason for non-developers to use this script anyway. Update to newer versions of Bison 2004-08-16 This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.2.4. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.2.X. Prevent possible loss of committed transactions during crash Due to insufficient interlocking between transaction commit and checkpointing, it was possible for transactions committed just before the most recent checkpoint to be lost, in whole or in part, following a database crash and restart. This is a serious bug that has existed since PostgreSQL 7.1. Fix corner case for btree search in parallel with first root page split Fix buffer overrun in to_ascii (Guido Notari) Fix core dump in deadlock detection on machines where char is unsigned Fix failure to respond to pg_ctl stop -m fast after Async_NotifyHandler runs Repair memory leaks in pg_dump Avoid conflict with system definition of isblank() function or macro 2003-01-30 This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.2.3, including fixes to prevent possible data loss. A dump/restore is not required for those running version 7.2.*. Fix some additional cases of VACUUM "No one parent tuple was found" error Prevent VACUUM from being called inside a function (Bruce) Ensure pg_clog updates are sync'd to disk before marking checkpoint complete Avoid integer overflow during large hash joins Make GROUP commands work when pg_group.grolist is large enough to be toasted Fix errors in datetime tables; some timezone names weren't being recognized Fix integer overflows in circle_poly(), path_encode(), path_add() (Neil) Repair long-standing logic errors in lseg_eq(), lseg_ne(), lseg_center() 2002-10-01 This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.2.2, including fixes to prevent possible data loss. A dump/restore is not required for those running version 7.2.*. 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) 2002-08-23 This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.2.1. A dump/restore is not required for those running version 7.2.*. 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 (Tatsuo) Fix for psql and pg_dump crashing when invoked with non-existent 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 (Thomas, Neil) Fix for repeat(), lpad(), rpad() and long strings (Neil) 2002-03-21 This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.2. A dump/restore is not required for those running version 7.2. Ensure that sequence counters do not go backwards after a crash (Tom) Fix pgaccess kanji-conversion 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) 2002-02-04 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. 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 might 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, Tom) 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 privileges 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 (Helge 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 than 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 (Martijn 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 Kings-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 (Brent 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 available 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 when appropriate (Martijn van Oosterhout) Fix privilege 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 (Tatsuo) 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 bytea 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 INTERVAL data types (Thomas) Modify type coercion logic to attempt binary-compatible functions first (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_salt() (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 closed 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, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Swedish (Peter E, Serguei A. Mokhov, Karel 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 (Bruce) 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-Lynne) 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 (Florian Weimer) New function PQescapeBytea() escapes binary strings for use as SQL string 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 Davies) DatabaseMetaData.getColumns() performance improvement (Jeroen van Vianen) Some JDBC1 and JDBC2 merging (Anders Bengtsson) Transaction performance improvements (Barry Lind) Array fixes (Greg Zoller) Serialize addition 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 now settable 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) Use UTF, Unicode in Tcl where appropriate (Vsevolod Lobko, Reinhard Max) Add Tcl COPY TO/FROM (ljb) Prevent output of default index op class in pg_dump (Tom) Fix libpgeasy memory leak (Bruce) Configure, dynamic loader, and shared library fixes (Peter E) Fixes in QNX 4 port (Bernd Tegge) Fixes in Cygwin and Windows ports (Jason Tishler, Gerhard Haring, Dmitry Yurtaev, Darko Prenosil, Mikhail Terekhov) Fix for Windows socket communication failures (Magnus, Mikhail Terekhov) Hurd compile fix (Oliver Elphick) BeOS fixes (Cyril Velter) Remove configure --enable-unicode-conversion, now enabled by multibyte (Tatsuo) AIX fixes (Tatsuo, Andreas) Fix parallel make (Peter E) Install SQL language manual pages into OS-specific directories (Peter E) Rename config.h to pg_config.h (Peter E) Reorganize installation layout of header files (Peter E) Remove SEP_CHAR (Bruce) New GUC hooks (Tom) Merge GUC and command line handling (Marko Kreen) Remove EXTEND INDEX (Martijn van Oosterhout, Tom) New pgjindent utility to indent java code (Bruce) Remove define of true/false when compiling under C++ (Leandro Fanzone, Tom) pgindent fixes (Bruce, Tom) Replace strcasecmp() with strcmp() where appropriate (Peter E) Dynahash portability improvements (Tom) Add 'volatile' usage in spinlock structures Improve signal handling logic (Tom) New contrib/rtree_gist (Oleg Bartunov, Teodor Sigaev) New contrib/tsearch full-text indexing (Oleg, Teodor Sigaev) Add contrib/dblink for remote database access (Joe Conway) contrib/ora2pg Oracle conversion utility (Gilles Darold) contrib/xml XML conversion utility (John Gray) contrib/fulltextindex fixes (Christopher Kings-Lynne) New contrib/fuzzystrmatch with levenshtein and metaphone, soundex merged (Joe Conway) Add contrib/intarray boolean queries, binary search, fixes (Oleg Bartunov) New pg_upgrade utility (Bruce) Add new pg_resetxlog options (Bruce, Tom) 2001-08-15 A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.1.X. Remove unused WAL segments of large transactions (Tom) Multiaction rule fix (Tom) PL/pgSQL memory allocation fix (Jan) VACUUM buffer fix (Tom) Regression test fixes (Tom) pg_dump fixes for GRANT/REVOKE/comments on views, user-defined types (Tom) Fix subselects with DISTINCT ON or LIMIT (Tom) BeOS fix Disable COPY TO/FROM a view (Tom) Cygwin build (Jason Tishler) 2001-05-11 This has one fix from 7.1.1. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.1.X. Fix PL/pgSQL SELECTs when returning no rows Fix for psql backslash core dump Referential integrity privilege fix Optimizer fixes pg_dump cleanups 2001-05-05 This has a variety of fixes from 7.1. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.1. Fix for numeric MODULO operator (Tom) pg_dump fixes (Philip) pg_dump can dump 7.0 databases (Philip) readline 4.2 fixes (Peter E) JOIN fixes (Tom) AIX, MSWIN, VAX, N32K fixes (Tom) Multibytes fixes (Tom) Unicode fixes (Tatsuo) Optimizer improvements (Tom) Fix for whole rows in functions (Tom) Fix for pg_ctl and option strings with spaces (Peter E) ODBC fixes (Hiroshi) EXTRACT can now take string argument (Thomas) Python fixes (Darcy) 2001-04-13 This release focuses on removing limitations that have existed in the PostgreSQL code for many years. Major changes in this release: Write-ahead Log (WAL) To maintain database consistency in case of an operating system crash, previous releases of PostgreSQL have forced all data modifications to disk before each transaction commit. With WAL, only one log file must be flushed to disk, greatly improving performance. If you have been using -F in previous releases to disable disk flushes, you might want to consider discontinuing its use. TOAST TOAST - Previous releases had a compiled-in row length limit, typically 8k - 32k. This limit made storage of long text fields difficult. With TOAST, long rows of any length can be stored with good performance. Outer Joins We now support outer joins. The UNION/NOT IN workaround for outer joins is no longer required. We use the SQL92 outer join syntax. Function Manager The previous C function manager did not handle null values properly, nor did it support 64-bit CPU's (Alpha). The new function manager does. You can continue using your old custom functions, but you might want to rewrite them in the future to use the new function manager call interface. Complex Queries A large number of complex queries that were unsupported in previous releases now work. Many combinations of views, aggregates, UNION, LIMIT, cursors, subqueries, and inherited tables now work properly. Inherited tables are now accessed by default. Subqueries in FROM are now supported. A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release. Bug Fixes --------- Many multibyte/Unicode/locale fixes (Tatsuo and others) More reliable ALTER TABLE RENAME (Tom) Kerberos V fixes (David Wragg) Fix for INSERT INTO...SELECT where targetlist has subqueries (Tom) Prompt username/password on standard error (Bruce) Large objects inv_read/inv_write fixes (Tom) Fixes for to_char(), to_date(), to_ascii(), and to_timestamp() (Karel, Daniel Baldoni) Prevent query expressions from leaking memory (Tom) Allow UPDATE of arrays elements (Tom) Wake up lock waiters during cancel (Hiroshi) Fix rare cursor crash when using hash join (Tom) Fix for DROP TABLE/INDEX in rolled-back transaction (Hiroshi) Fix psql crash from \l+ if MULTIBYTE enabled (Peter E) Fix truncation of rule names during CREATE VIEW (Ross Reedstrom) Fix PL/perl (Alex Kapranoff) Disallow LOCK on views (Mark Hollomon) Disallow INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE on views (Mark Hollomon) Disallow DROP RULE, CREATE INDEX, TRUNCATE on views (Mark Hollomon) Allow PL/pgSQL accept non-ASCII identifiers (Tatsuo) Allow views to proper handle GROUP BY, aggregates, DISTINCT (Tom) Fix rare failure with TRUNCATE command (Tom) Allow UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT to be used with ALL, subqueries, views, DISTINCT, ORDER BY, SELECT...INTO (Tom) Fix parser failures during aborted transactions (Tom) Allow temporary relations to properly clean up indexes (Bruce) Fix VACUUM problem with moving rows in same page (Tom) Modify pg_dump to better handle user-defined items in template1 (Philip) Allow LIMIT in VIEW (Tom) Require cursor FETCH to honor LIMIT (Tom) Allow PRIMARY/FOREIGN Key definitions on inherited columns (Stephan) Allow ORDER BY, LIMIT in subqueries (Tom) Allow UNION in CREATE RULE (Tom) Make ALTER/DROP TABLE rollback-able (Vadim, Tom) Store initdb collation in pg_control so collation cannot be changed (Tom) Fix INSERT...SELECT with rules (Tom) Fix FOR UPDATE inside views and subselects (Tom) Fix OVERLAPS operators conform to SQL92 spec regarding NULLs (Tom) Fix lpad() and rpad() to handle length less than input string (Tom) Fix use of NOTIFY in some rules (Tom) Overhaul btree code (Tom) Fix NOT NULL use in Pl/pgSQL variables (Tom) Overhaul GIST code (Oleg) Fix CLUSTER to preserve constraints and column default (Tom) Improved deadlock detection handling (Tom) Allow multiple SERIAL columns in a table (Tom) Prevent occasional index corruption (Vadim) Enhancements ------------ Add OUTER JOINs (Tom) Function manager overhaul (Tom) Allow ALTER TABLE RENAME on indexes (Tom) Improve CLUSTER (Tom) Improve ps status display for more platforms (Peter E, Marc) Improve CREATE FUNCTION failure message (Ross) JDBC improvements (Peter, Travis Bauer, Christopher Cain, William Webber, Gunnar) Grand Unified Configuration scheme/GUC. Many options can now be set in data/postgresql.conf, postmaster/postgres flags, or SET commands (Peter E) Improved handling of file descriptor cache (Tom) New warning code about auto-created table alias entries (Bruce) Overhaul initdb process (Tom, Peter E) Overhaul of inherited tables; inherited tables now accessed by default; new ONLY key word prevents it (Chris Bitmead, Tom) ODBC cleanups/improvements (Nick Gorham, Stephan Szabo, Zoltan Kovacs, Michael Fork) Allow renaming of temp tables (Tom) Overhaul memory manager contexts (Tom) pg_dumpall uses CREATE USER or CREATE GROUP rather using COPY (Peter E) Overhaul pg_dump (Philip Warner) Allow pg_hba.conf secondary password file to specify only username (Peter E) Allow TEMPORARY or TEMP key word when creating temporary tables (Bruce) New memory leak checker (Karel) New SET SESSION CHARACTERISTICS (Thomas) Allow nested block comments (Thomas) Add WITHOUT TIME ZONE type qualifier (Thomas) New ALTER TABLE ADD CONSTRAINT (Stephan) Use NUMERIC accumulators for INTEGER aggregates (Tom) Overhaul aggregate code (Tom) New VARIANCE and STDDEV() aggregates Improve dependency ordering of pg_dump (Philip) New pg_restore command (Philip) New pg_dump tar output option (Philip) New pg_dump of large objects (Philip) New ESCAPE option to LIKE (Thomas) New case-insensitive LIKE - ILIKE (Thomas) Allow functional indexes to use binary-compatible type (Tom) Allow SQL functions to be used in more contexts (Tom) New pg_config utility (Peter E) New PL/pgSQL EXECUTE command which allows dynamic SQL and utility statements (Jan) New PL/pgSQL GET DIAGNOSTICS statement for SPI value access (Jan) New quote_identifiers() and quote_literal() functions (Jan) New ALTER TABLE table OWNER TO user command (Mark Hollomon) Allow subselects in FROM, i.e. FROM (SELECT ...) [AS] alias (Tom) Update PyGreSQL to version 3.1 (D'Arcy) Store tables as files named by OID (Vadim) New SQL function setval(seq,val,bool) for use in pg_dump (Philip) Require DROP VIEW to remove views, no DROP TABLE (Mark) Allow DROP VIEW view1, view2 (Mark) Allow multiple objects in DROP INDEX, DROP RULE, and DROP TYPE (Tom) Allow automatic conversion to/from Unicode (Tatsuo, Eiji) New /contrib/pgcrypto hashing functions (Marko Kreen) New pg_dumpall --globals-only option (Peter E) New CHECKPOINT command for WAL which creates new WAL log file (Vadim) New AT TIME ZONE syntax (Thomas) Allow location of Unix domain socket to be configurable (David J. MacKenzie) Allow postmaster to listen on a specific IP address (David J. MacKenzie) Allow socket path name to be specified in hostname by using leading slash (David J. MacKenzie) Allow CREATE DATABASE to specify template database (Tom) New utility to convert MySQL schema dumps to SQL92 and PostgreSQL (Thomas) New /contrib/rserv replication toolkit (Vadim) New file format for COPY BINARY (Tom) New /contrib/oid2name to map numeric files to table names (B Palmer) New "idle in transaction" ps status message (Marc) Update to pgaccess 0.98.7 (Constantin Teodorescu) pg_ctl now defaults to -w (wait) on shutdown, new -l (log) option Add rudimentary dependency checking to pg_dump (Philip) Types ----- Fix INET/CIDR type ordering and add new functions (Tom) Make OID behave as an unsigned type (Tom) Allow BIGINT as synonym for INT8 (Peter E) New int2 and int8 comparison operators (Tom) New BIT and BIT VARYING types (Adriaan Joubert, Tom, Peter E) CHAR() no longer faster than VARCHAR() because of TOAST (Tom) New GIST seg/cube examples (Gene Selkov) Improved round(numeric) handling (Tom) Fix CIDR output formatting (Tom) New CIDR abbrev() function (Tom) Performance ----------- Write-Ahead Log (WAL) to provide crash recovery with less performance overhead (Vadim) ANALYZE stage of VACUUM no longer exclusively locks table (Bruce) Reduced file seeks (Denis Perchine) Improve BTREE code for duplicate keys (Tom) Store all large objects in a single table (Denis Perchine, Tom) Improve memory allocation performance (Karel, Tom) Source Code ----------- New function manager call conventions (Tom) SGI portability fixes (David Kaelbling) New configure --enable-syslog option (Peter E) New BSDI README (Bruce) configure script moved to top level, not /src (Peter E) Makefile/configuration/compilation overhaul (Peter E) New configure --with-python option (Peter E) Solaris cleanups (Peter E) Overhaul /contrib Makefiles (Karel) New OpenSSL configuration option (Magnus, Peter E) AIX fixes (Andreas) QNX fixes (Maurizio) New heap_open(), heap_openr() API (Tom) Remove colon and semi-colon operators (Thomas) New pg_class.relkind value for views (Mark Hollomon) Rename ichar() to chr() (Karel) New documentation for btrim(), ascii(), chr(), repeat() (Karel) Fixes for NT/Cygwin (Pete Forman) AIX port fixes (Andreas) New BeOS port (David Reid, Cyril Velter) Add proofreader's changes to docs (Addison-Wesley, Bruce) New Alpha spinlock code (Adriaan Joubert, Compaq) UnixWare port overhaul (Peter E) New macOS (Darwin) port (Peter Bierman, Bruce Hartzler) New FreeBSD Alpha port (Alfred) Overhaul shared memory segments (Tom) Add IBM S/390 support (Neale Ferguson) Moved macmanuf to /contrib (Larry Rosenman) Syslog improvements (Larry Rosenman) New template0 database that contains no user additions (Tom) New /contrib/cube and /contrib/seg GIST sample code (Gene Selkov) Allow NetBSD's libedit instead of readline (Peter) Improved assembly language source code format (Bruce) New contrib/pg_logger New --template option to createdb New contrib/pg_control utility (Oliver) New FreeBSD tools ipc_check, start-scripts/freebsd 2000-11-11 This has a variety of fixes from 7.0.2. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.0.*. Jdbc fixes (Peter) Large object fix (Tom) Fix lean in COPY WITH OIDS leak (Tom) Fix backwards-index-scan (Tom) Fix SELECT ... FOR UPDATE so it checks for duplicate keys (Hiroshi) Add --enable-syslog to configure (Marc) Fix abort transaction at backend exit in rare cases (Tom) Fix for psql \l+ when multibyte enabled (Tatsuo) Allow PL/pgSQL to accept non ascii identifiers (Tatsuo) Make vacuum always flush buffers (Tom) Fix to allow cancel while waiting for a lock (Hiroshi) Fix for memory allocation problem in user authentication code (Tom) Remove bogus use of int4out() (Tom) Fixes for multiple subqueries in COALESCE or BETWEEN (Tom) Fix for failure of triggers on heap open in certain cases (Jeroen van Vianen) Fix for erroneous selectivity of not-equals (Tom) Fix for erroneous use of strcmp() (Tom) Fix for bug where storage manager accesses items beyond end of file (Tom) Fix to include kernel errno message in all smgr elog messages (Tom) Fix for '.' not in PATH at build time (SL Baur) Fix for out-of-file-descriptors error (Tom) Fix to make pg_dump dump 'iscachable' flag for functions (Tom) Fix for subselect in targetlist of Append node (Tom) Fix for mergejoin plans (Tom) Fix TRUNCATE failure on relations with indexes (Tom) Avoid database-wide restart on write error (Hiroshi) Fix nodeMaterial to honor chgParam by recomputing its output (Tom) Fix VACUUM problem with moving chain of update row versions when source and destination of a row version lie on the same page (Tom) Fix user.c CommandCounterIncrement (Tom) Fix for AM/PM boundary problem in to_char() (Karel Zak) Fix TIME aggregate handling (Tom) Fix to_char() to avoid coredump on NULL input (Tom) Buffer fix (Tom) Fix for inserting/copying longer multibyte strings into char() data types (Tatsuo) Fix for crash of backend, on abort (Tom) 2000-06-05 This is a repackaging of 7.0.1 with added documentation. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.*. Added documentation to tarball. 2000-06-01 This is a cleanup release for 7.0. A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.0. Fix many CLUSTER failures (Tom) Allow ALTER TABLE RENAME works on indexes (Tom) Fix plpgsql to handle datetime->timestamp and timespan->interval (Bruce) New configure --with-setproctitle switch to use setproctitle() (Marc, Bruce) Fix the off by one errors in ResultSet from 6.5.3, and more. jdbc ResultSet fixes (Joseph Shraibman) optimizer tunings (Tom) Fix create user for pgaccess Fix for UNLISTEN failure IRIX fixes (David Kaelbling) QNX fixes (Andreas Kardos) Reduce COPY IN lock level (Tom) Change libpqeasy to use PQconnectdb() style parameters (Bruce) Fix pg_dump to handle OID indexes (Tom) Fix small memory leak (Tom) Solaris fix for createdb/dropdb (Tatsuo) Fix for non-blocking connections (Alfred Perlstein) Fix improper recovery after RENAME TABLE failures (Tom) Copy pg_ident.conf.sample into /lib directory in install (Bruce) Add SJIS UDC (NEC selection IBM kanji) support (Eiji Tokuya) Fix too long syslog message (Tatsuo) Fix problem with quoted indexes that are too long (Tom) JDBC ResultSet.getTimestamp() fix (Gregory Krasnow & Floyd Marinescu) ecpg changes (Michael) 2000-05-08 This release contains improvements in many areas, demonstrating the continued growth of PostgreSQL. There are more improvements and fixes in 7.0 than in any previous release. The developers have confidence that this is the best release yet; we do our best to put out only solid releases, and this one is no exception. Major changes in this release: Foreign Keys Foreign keys are now implemented, with the exception of PARTIAL MATCH foreign keys. Many users have been asking for this feature, and we are pleased to offer it. Optimizer Overhaul Continuing on work started a year ago, the optimizer has been improved, allowing better query plan selection and faster performance with less memory usage. Updated psql psql, our interactive terminal monitor, has been updated with a variety of new features. See the psql manual page for details. Join Syntax SQL92 join syntax is now supported, though only as INNER JOIN for this release. JOIN, NATURAL JOIN, JOIN/USING, and JOIN/ON are available, as are column correlation names. A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release of PostgreSQL. For those upgrading from 6.5.*, you can instead use pg_upgrade to upgrade to this release; however, a full dump/reload installation is always the most robust method for upgrades. Interface and compatibility issues to consider for the new release include: The date/time types datetime and timespan have been superseded by the SQL92-defined types timestamp and interval. Although there has been some effort to ease the transition by allowing PostgreSQL to recognize the deprecated type names and translate them to the new type names, this mechanism cannot be completely transparent to your existing application. The optimizer has been substantially improved in the area of query cost estimation. In some cases, this will result in decreased query times as the optimizer makes a better choice for the preferred plan. However, in a small number of cases, usually involving pathological distributions of data, your query times might go up. If you are dealing with large amounts of data, you might want to check your queries to verify performance. The JDBC and ODBC interfaces have been upgraded and extended. The string function CHAR_LENGTH is now a native function. Previous versions translated this into a call to LENGTH, which could result in ambiguity with other types implementing LENGTH such as the geometric types. Bug Fixes --------- Prevent function calls exceeding maximum number of arguments (Tom) Improve CASE construct (Tom) Fix SELECT coalesce(f1,0) FROM int4_tbl GROUP BY f1 (Tom) Fix SELECT sentence.words[0] FROM sentence GROUP BY sentence.words[0] (Tom) Fix GROUP BY scan bug (Tom) Improvements in SQL grammar processing (Tom) Fix for views involved in INSERT ... SELECT ... (Tom) Fix for SELECT a/2, a/2 FROM test_missing_target GROUP BY a/2 (Tom) Fix for subselects in INSERT ... SELECT (Tom) Prevent INSERT ... SELECT ... ORDER BY (Tom) Fixes for relations greater than 2GB, including vacuum Improve propagating system table changes to other backends (Tom) Improve propagating user table changes to other backends (Tom) Fix handling of temp tables in complex situations (Bruce, Tom) Allow table locking at table open, improving concurrent reliability (Tom) Properly quote sequence names in pg_dump (Ross J. Reedstrom) Prevent DROP DATABASE while others accessing Prevent any rows from being returned by GROUP BY if no rows processed (Tom) Fix SELECT COUNT(1) FROM table WHERE ...' if no rows matching WHERE (Tom) Fix pg_upgrade so it works for MVCC (Tom) Fix for SELECT ... WHERE x IN (SELECT ... HAVING SUM(x) > 1) (Tom) Fix for "f1 datetime DEFAULT 'now'" (Tom) Fix problems with CURRENT_DATE used in DEFAULT (Tom) Allow comment-only lines, and ;;; lines too. (Tom) Improve recovery after failed disk writes, disk full (Hiroshi) Fix cases where table is mentioned in FROM but not joined (Tom) Allow HAVING clause without aggregate functions (Tom) Fix for "--" comment and no trailing newline, as seen in perl interface Improve pg_dump failure error reports (Bruce) Allow sorts and hashes to exceed 2GB file sizes (Tom) Fix for pg_dump dumping of inherited rules (Tom) Fix for NULL handling comparisons (Tom) Fix inconsistent state caused by failed CREATE/DROP commands (Hiroshi) Fix for dbname with dash Prevent DROP INDEX from interfering with other backends (Tom) Fix file descriptor leak in verify_password() Fix for "Unable to identify an operator =$" problem Fix ODBC so no segfault if CommLog and Debug enabled (Dirk Niggemann) Fix for recursive exit call (Massimo) Fix for extra-long timezones (Jeroen van Vianen) Make pg_dump preserve primary key information (Peter E) Prevent databases with single quotes (Peter E) Prevent DROP DATABASE inside transaction (Peter E) ecpg memory leak fixes (Stephen Birch) Fix for SELECT null::text, SELECT int4fac(null) and SELECT 2 + (null) (Tom) Y2K timestamp fix (Massimo) Fix for VACUUM 'HEAP_MOVED_IN was not expected' errors (Tom) Fix for views with tables/columns containing spaces (Tom) Prevent privileges on indexes (Peter E) Fix for spinlock stuck problem when error is generated (Hiroshi) Fix ipcclean on Linux Fix handling of NULL constraint conditions (Tom) Fix memory leak in odbc driver (Nick Gorham) Fix for privilege check on UNION tables (Tom) Fix to allow SELECT 'a' LIKE 'a' (Tom) Fix for SELECT 1 + NULL (Tom) Fixes to CHAR Fix log() on numeric type (Tom) Deprecate ':' and ';' operators Allow vacuum of temporary tables Disallow inherited columns with the same name as new columns Recover or force failure when disk space is exhausted (Hiroshi) Fix INSERT INTO ... SELECT with AS columns matching result columns Fix INSERT ... SELECT ... GROUP BY groups by target columns not source columns (Tom) Fix CREATE TABLE test (a char(5) DEFAULT text '', b int4) with INSERT (Tom) Fix UNION with LIMIT Fix CREATE TABLE x AS SELECT 1 UNION SELECT 2 Fix CREATE TABLE test(col char(2) DEFAULT user) Fix mismatched types in CREATE TABLE ... DEFAULT Fix SELECT * FROM pg_class where oid in (0,-1) Fix SELECT COUNT('asdf') FROM pg_class WHERE oid=12 Prevent user who can create databases can modifying pg_database table (Peter E) Fix btree to give a useful elog when key > 1/2 (page - overhead) (Tom) Fix INSERT of 0.0 into DECIMAL(4,4) field (Tom) Enhancements ------------ New CLI interface include file sqlcli.h, based on SQL3/SQL98 Remove all limits on query length, row length limit still exists (Tom) Update jdbc protocol to 2.0 (Jens Glaser jens@jens.de) Add TRUNCATE command to quickly truncate relation (Mike Mascari) Fix to give super user and createdb user proper update catalog rights (Peter E) Allow ecpg bool variables to have NULL values (Christof) Issue ecpg error if NULL value for variable with no NULL indicator (Christof) Allow ^C to cancel COPY command (Massimo) Add SET FSYNC and SHOW PG_OPTIONS commands(Massimo) Function name overloading for dynamically-loaded C functions (Frankpitt) Add CmdTuples() to libpq++(Vince) New CREATE CONSTRAINT TRIGGER and SET CONSTRAINTS commands(Jan) Allow CREATE FUNCTION/WITH clause to be used for all language types configure --enable-debug adds -g (Peter E) configure --disable-debug removes -g (Peter E) Allow more complex default expressions (Tom) First real FOREIGN KEY constraint trigger functionality (Jan) Add FOREIGN KEY ... MATCH FULL ... ON DELETE CASCADE (Jan) Add FOREIGN KEY ... MATCH <unspecified> referential actions (Don Baccus) Allow WHERE restriction on ctid (physical heap location) (Hiroshi) Move pginterface from contrib to interface directory, rename to pgeasy (Bruce) Change pgeasy connectdb() parameter ordering (Bruce) Require SELECT DISTINCT target list to have all ORDER BY columns (Tom) Add Oracle's COMMENT ON command (Mike Mascari mascarim@yahoo.com) libpq's PQsetNoticeProcessor function now returns previous hook(Peter E) Prevent PQsetNoticeProcessor from being set to NULL (Peter E) Make USING in COPY optional (Bruce) Allow subselects in the target list (Tom) Allow subselects on the left side of comparison operators (Tom) New parallel regression test (Jan) Change backend-side COPY to write files with permissions 644 not 666 (Tom) Force permissions on PGDATA directory to be secure, even if it exists (Tom) Added psql LASTOID variable to return last inserted oid (Peter E) Allow concurrent vacuum and remove pg_vlock vacuum lock file (Tom) Add privilege check for vacuum (Peter E) New libpq functions to allow asynchronous connections: PQconnectStart(), PQconnectPoll(), PQresetStart(), PQresetPoll(), PQsetenvStart(), PQsetenvPoll(), PQsetenvAbort (Ewan Mellor) New libpq PQsetenv() function (Ewan Mellor) create/alter user extension (Peter E) New postmaster.pid and postmaster.opts under $PGDATA (Tatsuo) New scripts for create/drop user/db (Peter E) Major psql overhaul (Peter E) Add const to libpq interface (Peter E) New libpq function PQoidValue (Peter E) Show specific non-aggregate causing problem with GROUP BY (Tom) Make changes to pg_shadow recreate pg_pwd file (Peter E) Add aggregate(DISTINCT ...) (Tom) Allow flag to control COPY input/output of NULLs (Peter E) Make postgres user have a password by default (Peter E) Add CREATE/ALTER/DROP GROUP (Peter E) All administration scripts now support --long options (Peter E, Karel) Vacuumdb script now supports --all option (Peter E) ecpg new portable FETCH syntax Add ecpg EXEC SQL IFDEF, EXEC SQL IFNDEF, EXEC SQL ELSE, EXEC SQL ELIF and EXEC SQL ENDIF directives Add pg_ctl script to control backend start-up (Tatsuo) Add postmaster.opts.default file to store start-up flags (Tatsuo) Allow --with-mb=SQL_ASCII Increase maximum number of index keys to 16 (Bruce) Increase maximum number of function arguments to 16 (Bruce) Allow configuration of maximum number of index keys and arguments (Bruce) Allow unprivileged users to change their passwords (Peter E) Password authentication enabled; required for new users (Peter E) Disallow dropping a user who owns a database (Peter E) Change initdb option --with-mb to --enable-multibyte Add option for initdb to prompts for superuser password (Peter E) Allow complex type casts like col::numeric(9,2) and col::int2::float8 (Tom) Updated user interfaces on initdb, initlocation, pg_dump, ipcclean (Peter E) New pg_char_to_encoding() and pg_encoding_to_char() functions (Tatsuo) libpq non-blocking mode (Alfred Perlstein) Improve conversion of types in casts that don't specify a length New plperl internal programming language (Mark Hollomon) Allow COPY IN to read file that do not end with a newline (Tom) Indicate when long identifiers are truncated (Tom) Allow aggregates to use type equivalency (Peter E) Add Oracle's to_char(), to_date(), to_datetime(), to_timestamp(), to_number() conversion functions (Karel Zak <zakkr@zf.jcu.cz>) Add SELECT DISTINCT ON (expr [, expr ...]) targetlist ... (Tom) Check to be sure ORDER BY is compatible with the DISTINCT operation (Tom) Add NUMERIC and int8 types to ODBC Improve EXPLAIN results for Append, Group, Agg, Unique (Tom) Add ALTER TABLE ... ADD FOREIGN KEY (Stephan Szabo) Allow SELECT .. FOR UPDATE in PL/pgSQL (Hiroshi) Enable backward sequential scan even after reaching EOF (Hiroshi) Add btree indexing of boolean values, >= and <= (Don Baccus) Print current line number when COPY FROM fails (Massimo) Recognize POSIX time zone e.g. "PST+8" and "GMT-8" (Thomas) Add DEC as synonym for DECIMAL (Thomas) Add SESSION_USER as SQL92 key word, same as CURRENT_USER (Thomas) Implement SQL92 column aliases (aka correlation names) (Thomas) Implement SQL92 join syntax (Thomas) Make INTERVAL reserved word allowed as a column identifier (Thomas) Implement REINDEX command (Hiroshi) Accept ALL in aggregate function SUM(ALL col) (Tom) Prevent GROUP BY from using column aliases (Tom) New psql \encoding option (Tatsuo) Allow PQrequestCancel() to terminate when in waiting-for-lock state (Hiroshi) Allow negation of a negative number in all cases Add ecpg descriptors (Christof, Michael) Allow CREATE VIEW v AS SELECT f1::char(8) FROM tbl Allow casts with length, like foo::char(8) New libpq functions PQsetClientEncoding(), PQclientEncoding() (Tatsuo) Add support for SJIS user defined characters (Tatsuo) Larger views/rules supported Make libpq's PQconndefaults() thread-safe (Tom) Disable // as comment to be ANSI conforming, should use -- (Tom) Allow column aliases on views CREATE VIEW name (collist) Fixes for views with subqueries (Tom) Allow UPDATE table SET fld = (SELECT ...) (Tom) SET command options no longer require quotes Update pgaccess to 0.98.6 New SET SEED command New pg_options.sample file New SET FSYNC command (Massimo) Allow pg_descriptions when creating tables Allow pg_descriptions when creating types, columns, and functions Allow psql \copy to allow delimiters (Peter E) Allow psql to print nulls as distinct from "" [null] (Peter E) Types ----- Many array fixes (Tom) Allow bare column names to be subscripted as arrays (Tom) Improve type casting of int and float constants (Tom) Cleanups for int8 inputs, range checking, and type conversion (Tom) Fix for SELECT timespan('21:11:26'::time) (Tom) netmask('x.x.x.x/0') is 255.255.255.255 instead of 0.0.0.0 (Oleg Sharoiko) Add btree index on NUMERIC (Jan) Perl fix for large objects containing NUL characters (Douglas Thomson) ODBC fix for large objects (free) Fix indexing of cidr data type Fix for Ethernet MAC addresses (macaddr type) comparisons Fix for date/time types when overflows happened in computations (Tom) Allow array on int8 (Peter E) Fix for rounding/overflow of NUMERIC type, like NUMERIC(4,4) (Tom) Allow NUMERIC arrays Fix bugs in NUMERIC ceil() and floor() functions (Tom) Make char_length()/octet_length including trailing blanks (Tom) Made abstime/reltime use int4 instead of time_t (Peter E) New lztext data type for compressed text fields Revise code to handle coercion of int and float constants (Tom) Start at new code to implement a BIT and BIT VARYING type (Adriaan Joubert) NUMERIC now accepts scientific notation (Tom) NUMERIC to int4 rounds (Tom) Convert float4/8 to NUMERIC properly (Tom) Allow type conversion with NUMERIC (Thomas) Make ISO date style (2000-02-16 09:33) the default (Thomas) Add NATIONAL CHAR [ VARYING ] (Thomas) Allow NUMERIC round and trunc to accept negative scales (Tom) New TIME WITH TIME ZONE type (Thomas) Add MAX()/MIN() on time type (Thomas) Add abs(), mod(), fac() for int8 (Thomas) Rename functions to round(), sqrt(), cbrt(), pow() for float8 (Thomas) Add transcendental math functions (e.g. sin(), acos()) for float8 (Thomas) Add exp() and ln() for NUMERIC type Rename NUMERIC power() to pow() (Thomas) Improved TRANSLATE() function (Edwin Ramirez, Tom) Allow X=-Y operators (Tom) Allow SELECT float8(COUNT(*))/(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t) FROM t GROUP BY f1; (Tom) Allow LOCALE to use indexes in regular expression searches (Tom) Allow creation of functional indexes to use default types Performance ----------- Prevent exponential space consumption with many AND's and OR's (Tom) Collect attribute selectivity values for system columns (Tom) Reduce memory usage of aggregates (Tom) Fix for LIKE optimization to use indexes with multibyte encodings (Tom) Fix r-tree index optimizer selectivity (Thomas) Improve optimizer selectivity computations and functions (Tom) Optimize btree searching for cases where many equal keys exist (Tom) Enable fast LIKE index processing only if index present (Tom) Re-use free space on index pages with duplicates (Tom) Improve hash join processing (Tom) Prevent descending sort if result is already sorted(Hiroshi) Allow commuting of index scan query qualifications (Tom) Prefer index scans in cases where ORDER BY/GROUP BY is required (Tom) Allocate large memory requests in fix-sized chunks for performance (Tom) Fix vacuum's performance by reducing memory allocation requests (Tom) Implement constant-expression simplification (Bernard Frankpitt, Tom) Use secondary columns to be used to determine start of index scan (Hiroshi) Prevent quadruple use of disk space when doing internal sorting (Tom) Faster sorting by calling fewer functions (Tom) Create system indexes to match all system caches (Bruce, Hiroshi) Make system caches use system indexes (Bruce) Make all system indexes unique (Bruce) Improve pg_statistics management for VACUUM speed improvement (Tom) Flush backend cache less frequently (Tom, Hiroshi) COPY now reuses previous memory allocation, improving performance (Tom) Improve optimization cost estimation (Tom) Improve optimizer estimate of range queries x > lowbound AND x < highbound (Tom) Use DNF instead of CNF where appropriate (Tom, Taral) Further cleanup for OR-of-AND WHERE-clauses (Tom) Make use of index in OR clauses (x = 1 AND y = 2) OR (x = 2 AND y = 4) (Tom) Smarter optimizer computations for random index page access (Tom) New SET variable to control optimizer costs (Tom) Optimizer queries based on LIMIT, OFFSET, and EXISTS qualifications (Tom) Reduce optimizer internal housekeeping of join paths for speedup (Tom) Major subquery speedup (Tom) Fewer fsync writes when fsync is not disabled (Tom) Improved LIKE optimizer estimates (Tom) Prevent fsync in SELECT-only queries (Vadim) Make index creation use psort code, because it is now faster (Tom) Allow creation of sort temp tables > 1 Gig Source Tree Changes ------------------- Fix for linux PPC compile New generic expression-tree-walker subroutine (Tom) Change form() to varargform() to prevent portability problems Improved range checking for large integers on Alphas Clean up #include in /include directory (Bruce) Add scripts for checking includes (Bruce) Remove un-needed #include's from *.c files (Bruce) Change #include's to use <> and "" as appropriate (Bruce) Enable Windows compilation of libpq Alpha spinlock fix from Uncle George gatgul@voicenet.com Overhaul of optimizer data structures (Tom) Fix to cygipc library (Yutaka Tanida) Allow pgsql to work on newer Cygwin snapshots (Dan) New catalog version number (Tom) Add Linux ARM Rename heap_replace to heap_update Update for QNX (Dr. Andreas Kardos) New platform-specific regression handling (Tom) Rename oid8 -> oidvector and int28 -> int2vector (Bruce) Included all yacc and lex files into the distribution (Peter E.) Remove lextest, no longer needed (Peter E) Fix for libpq and psql on Windows (Magnus) Internally change datetime and timespan into timestamp and interval (Thomas) Fix for plpgsql on BSD/OS Add SQL_ASCII test case to the regression test (Tatsuo) configure --with-mb now deprecated (Tatsuo) NT fixes NetBSD fixes (Johnny C. Lam lamj@stat.cmu.edu) Fixes for Alpha compiles New multibyte encodings 1999-10-13 This is basically a cleanup release for 6.5.2. We have added a new PgAccess that was missing in 6.5.2, and installed an NT-specific fix. A dump/restore is not required for those running 6.5.*. Updated version of pgaccess 0.98 NT-specific patch Fix dumping rules on inherited tables 1999-09-15 This is basically a cleanup release for 6.5.1. We have fixed a variety of problems reported by 6.5.1 users. A dump/restore is not required for those running 6.5.*. subselect+CASE fixes(Tom) Add SHLIB_LINK setting for solaris_i386 and solaris_sparc ports(Daren Sefcik) Fixes for CASE in WHERE join clauses(Tom) Fix BTScan abort(Tom) Repair the check for redundant UNIQUE and PRIMARY KEY indexes(Thomas) Improve it so that it checks for multicolumn constraints(Thomas) Fix for Windows making problem with MB enabled(Hiroki Kataoka) Allow BSD yacc and bison to compile pl code(Bruce) Fix SET NAMES working int8 fixes(Thomas) Fix vacuum's memory consumption(Hiroshi,Tatsuo) Reduce the total memory consumption of vacuum(Tom) Fix for timestamp(datetime) Rule deparsing bugfixes(Tom) Fix quoting problems in mkMakefile.tcldefs.sh.in and mkMakefile.tkdefs.sh.in(Tom) This is to re-use space on index pages freed by vacuum(Vadim) document -x for pg_dump(Bruce) Fix for unary operators in rule deparser(Tom) Comment out FileUnlink of excess segments during mdtruncate()(Tom) IRIX linking fix from Yu Cao >yucao@falcon.kla-tencor.com< Repair logic error in LIKE: should not return LIKE_ABORT when reach end of pattern before end of text(Tom) Repair incorrect cleanup of heap memory allocation during transaction abort(Tom) Updated version of pgaccess 0.98 1999-07-15 This is basically a cleanup release for 6.5. We have fixed a variety of problems reported by 6.5 users. A dump/restore is not required for those running 6.5. Add NT README file Portability fixes for linux_ppc, IRIX, linux_alpha, OpenBSD, alpha Remove QUERY_LIMIT, use SELECT...LIMIT Fix for EXPLAIN on inheritance(Tom) Patch to allow vacuum on multisegment tables(Hiroshi) R-Tree optimizer selectivity fix(Tom) ACL file descriptor leak fix(Atsushi Ogawa) New expression subtree code(Tom) Avoid disk writes for read-only transactions(Vadim) Fix for removal of temp tables if last transaction was aborted(Bruce) Fix to prevent too large row from being created(Bruce) plpgsql fixes Allow port numbers 32k - 64k(Bruce) Add ^ precedence(Bruce) Rename sort files called pg_temp to pg_sorttemp(Bruce) Fix for microseconds in time values(Tom) Tutorial source cleanup New linux_m68k port Fix for sorting of NULL's in some cases(Tom) Shared library dependencies fixed (Tom) Fixed glitches affecting GROUP BY in subselects(Tom) Fix some compiler warnings (Tomoaki Nishiyama) Add Win1250 (Czech) support (Pavel Behal) 1999-06-09 This release marks a major step in the development team's mastery of the source code we inherited from Berkeley. You will see we are now easily adding major features, thanks to the increasing size and experience of our world-wide development team. Here is a brief summary of the more notable changes: Multiversion concurrency control(MVCC) This removes our old table-level locking, and replaces it with a locking system that is superior to most commercial database systems. In a traditional system, each row that is modified is locked until committed, preventing reads by other users. MVCC uses the natural multiversion nature of PostgreSQL to allow readers to continue reading consistent data during writer activity. Writers continue to use the compact pg_log transaction system. This is all performed without having to allocate a lock for every row like traditional database systems. So, basically, we no longer are restricted by simple table-level locking; we have something better than row-level locking. Hot backups from pg_dump pg_dump takes advantage of the new MVCC features to give a consistent database dump/backup while the database stays online and available for queries. Numeric data type We now have a true numeric data type, with user-specified precision. Temporary tables Temporary tables are guaranteed to have unique names within a database session, and are destroyed on session exit. New SQL features We now have CASE, INTERSECT, and EXCEPT statement support. We have new LIMIT/OFFSET, SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL, SELECT ... FOR UPDATE, and an improved LOCK TABLE command. Speedups We continue to speed up PostgreSQL, thanks to the variety of talents within our team. We have sped up memory allocation, optimization, table joins, and row transfer routines. Ports We continue to expand our port list, this time including Windows NT/ix86 and NetBSD/arm32. Interfaces Most interfaces have new versions, and existing functionality has been improved. Documentation New and updated material is present throughout the documentation. New FAQs have been contributed for SGI and AIX platforms. The Tutorial has introductory information on SQL from Stefan Simkovics. For the User's Guide, there are reference pages covering the postmaster and more utility programs, and a new appendix contains details on date/time behavior. The Administrator's Guide has a new chapter on troubleshooting from Tom Lane. And the Programmer's Guide has a description of query processing, also from Stefan, and details on obtaining the PostgreSQL source tree via anonymous CVS and CVSup. A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release of PostgreSQL. pg_upgrade can not be used to upgrade to this release because the on-disk structure of the tables has changed compared to previous releases. The new Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) features can give somewhat different behaviors in multiuser environments. Read and understand the following section to ensure that your existing applications will give you the behavior you need. Because readers in 6.5 don't lock data, regardless of transaction isolation level, data read by one transaction can be overwritten by another. In other words, if a row is returned by SELECT it doesn't mean that this row really exists at the time it is returned (i.e. sometime after the statement or transaction began) nor that the row is protected from being deleted or updated by concurrent transactions before the current transaction does a commit or rollback. To ensure the actual existence of a row and protect it against concurrent updates one must use SELECT FOR UPDATE or an appropriate LOCK TABLE statement. This should be taken into account when porting applications from previous releases of PostgreSQL and other environments. Keep the above in mind if you are using contrib/refint.* triggers for referential integrity. Additional techniques are required now. One way is to use LOCK parent_table IN SHARE ROW EXCLUSIVE MODE command if a transaction is going to update/delete a primary key and use LOCK parent_table IN SHARE MODE command if a transaction is going to update/insert a foreign key. Note that if you run a transaction in SERIALIZABLE mode then you must execute the LOCK commands above before execution of any DML statement (SELECT/INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE/FETCH/COPY_TO) in the transaction. These inconveniences will disappear in the future when the ability to read dirty (uncommitted) data (regardless of isolation level) and true referential integrity will be implemented. Bug Fixes --------- Fix text<->float8 and text<->float4 conversion functions(Thomas) Fix for creating tables with mixed-case constraints(Billy) Change exp()/pow() behavior to generate error on underflow/overflow(Jan) Fix bug in pg_dump -z Memory overrun cleanups(Tatsuo) Fix for lo_import crash(Tatsuo) Adjust handling of data type names to suppress double quotes(Thomas) Use type coercion for matching columns and DEFAULT(Thomas) Fix deadlock so it only checks once after one second of sleep(Bruce) Fixes for aggregates and PL/pgsql(Hiroshi) Fix for subquery crash(Vadim) Fix for libpq function PQfnumber and case-insensitive names(Bahman Rafatjoo) Fix for large object write-in-middle, no extra block, memory consumption(Tatsuo) Fix for pg_dump -d or -D and quote special characters in INSERT Repair serious problems with dynahash(Tom) Fix INET/CIDR portability problems Fix problem with selectivity error in ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN(Bruce) Fix executor so mergejoin of different column types works(Tom) Fix for Alpha OR selectivity bug Fix OR index selectivity problem(Bruce) Fix so \d shows proper length for char()/varchar()(Ryan) Fix tutorial code(Clark) Improve destroyuser checking(Oliver) Fix for Kerberos(Rodney McDuff) Fix for dropping database while dirty buffers(Bruce) Fix so sequence nextval() can be case-sensitive(Bruce) Fix !!= operator Drop buffers before destroying database files(Bruce) Fix case where executor evaluates functions twice(Tatsuo) Allow sequence nextval actions to be case-sensitive(Bruce) Fix optimizer indexing not working for negative numbers(Bruce) Fix for memory leak in executor with fjIsNull Fix for aggregate memory leaks(Erik Riedel) Allow user name containing a dash to grant privileges Cleanup of NULL in inet types Clean up system table bugs(Tom) Fix problems of PAGER and \? command(Masaaki Sakaida) Reduce default multisegment file size limit to 1GB(Peter) Fix for dumping of CREATE OPERATOR(Tom) Fix for backward scanning of cursors(Hiroshi Inoue) Fix for COPY FROM STDIN when using \i(Tom) Fix for subselect is compared inside an expression(Jan) Fix handling of error reporting while returning rows(Tom) Fix problems with reference to array types(Tom,Jan) Prevent UPDATE SET oid(Jan) Fix pg_dump so -t option can handle case-sensitive tablenames Fixes for GROUP BY in special cases(Tom, Jan) Fix for memory leak in failed queries(Tom) DEFAULT now supports mixed-case identifiers(Tom) Fix for multisegment uses of DROP/RENAME table, indexes(Ole Gjerde) Disable use of pg_dump with both -o and -d options(Bruce) Allow pg_dump to properly dump group privileges(Bruce) Fix GROUP BY in INSERT INTO table SELECT * FROM table2(Jan) Fix for computations in views(Jan) Fix for aggregates on array indexes(Tom) Fix for DEFAULT handles single quotes in value requiring too many quotes Fix security problem with non-super users importing/exporting large objects(Tom) Rollback of transaction that creates table cleaned up properly(Tom) Fix to allow long table and column names to generate proper serial names(Tom) Enhancements ------------ Add "vacuumdb" utility Speed up libpq by allocating memory better(Tom) EXPLAIN all indexes used(Tom) Implement CASE, COALESCE, NULLIF expression(Thomas) New pg_dump table output format(Constantin) Add string min()/max() functions(Thomas) Extend new type coercion techniques to aggregates(Thomas) New moddatetime contrib(Terry) Update to pgaccess 0.96(Constantin) Add routines for single-byte "char" type(Thomas) Improved substr() function(Thomas) Improved multibyte handling(Tatsuo) Multiversion concurrency control/MVCC(Vadim) New Serialized mode(Vadim) Fix for tables over 2gigs(Peter) New SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL(Vadim) New LOCK TABLE IN ... MODE(Vadim) Update ODBC driver(Byron) New NUMERIC data type(Jan) New SELECT FOR UPDATE(Vadim) Handle "NaN" and "Infinity" for input values(Jan) Improved date/year handling(Thomas) Improved handling of backend connections(Magnus) New options ELOG_TIMESTAMPS and USE_SYSLOG options for log files(Massimo) New TCL_ARRAYS option(Massimo) New INTERSECT and EXCEPT(Stefan) New pg_index.indisprimary for primary key tracking(D'Arcy) New pg_dump option to allow dropping of tables before creation(Brook) Speedup of row output routines(Tom) New READ COMMITTED isolation level(Vadim) New TEMP tables/indexes(Bruce) Prevent sorting if result is already sorted(Jan) New memory allocation optimization(Jan) Allow psql to do \p\g(Bruce) Allow multiple rule actions(Jan) Added LIMIT/OFFSET functionality(Jan) Improve optimizer when joining a large number of tables(Bruce) New intro to SQL from S. Simkovics' Master's Thesis (Stefan, Thomas) New intro to backend processing from S. Simkovics' Master's Thesis (Stefan) Improved int8 support(Ryan Bradetich, Thomas, Tom) New routines to convert between int8 and text/varchar types(Thomas) New bushy plans, where meta-tables are joined(Bruce) Enable right-hand queries by default(Bruce) Allow reliable maximum number of backends to be set at configure time (--with-maxbackends and postmaster switch (-N backends))(Tom) GEQO default now 10 tables because of optimizer speedups(Tom) Allow NULL=Var for MS-SQL portability(Michael, Bruce) Modify contrib check_primary_key() so either "automatic" or "dependent"(Anand) Allow psql \d on a view show query(Ryan) Speedup for LIKE(Bruce) Ecpg fixes/features, see src/interfaces/ecpg/ChangeLog file(Michael) JDBC fixes/features, see src/interfaces/jdbc/CHANGELOG(Peter) Make % operator have precedence like /(Bruce) Add new postgres -O option to allow system table structure changes(Bruce) Update contrib/pginterface/findoidjoins script(Tom) Major speedup in vacuum of deleted rows with indexes(Vadim) Allow non-SQL functions to run different versions based on arguments(Tom) Add -E option that shows actual queries sent by \dt and friends(Masaaki Sakaida) Add version number in start-up banners for psql(Masaaki Sakaida) New contrib/vacuumlo removes large objects not referenced(Peter) New initialization for table sizes so non-vacuumed tables perform better(Tom) Improve error messages when a connection is rejected(Tom) Support for arrays of char() and varchar() fields(Massimo) Overhaul of hash code to increase reliability and performance(Tom) Update to PyGreSQL 2.4(D'Arcy) Changed debug options so -d4 and -d5 produce different node displays(Jan) New pg_options: pretty_plan, pretty_parse, pretty_rewritten(Jan) Better optimization statistics for system table access(Tom) Better handling of non-default block sizes(Massimo) Improve GEQO optimizer memory consumption(Tom) UNION now supports ORDER BY of columns not in target list(Jan) Major libpq++ improvements(Vince Vielhaber) pg_dump now uses -z(ACL's) as default(Bruce) backend cache, memory speedups(Tom) have pg_dump do everything in one snapshot transaction(Vadim) fix for large object memory leakage, fix for pg_dumping(Tom) INET type now respects netmask for comparisons Make VACUUM ANALYZE only use a readlock(Vadim) Allow VIEWs on UNIONS(Jan) pg_dump now can generate consistent snapshots on active databases(Vadim) Source Tree Changes ------------------- Improve port matching(Tom) Portability fixes for SunOS Add Windows NT backend port and enable dynamic loading(Magnus and Daniel Horak) New port to Cobalt Qube(Mips) running Linux(Tatsuo) Port to NetBSD/m68k(Mr. Mutsuki Nakajima) Port to NetBSD/sun3(Mr. Mutsuki Nakajima) Port to NetBSD/macppc(Toshimi Aoki) Fix for tcl/tk configuration(Vince) Removed CURRENT key word for rule queries(Jan) NT dynamic loading now works(Daniel Horak) Add ARM32 support(Andrew McMurry) Better support for HP-UX 11 and UnixWare Improve file handling to be more uniform, prevent file descriptor leak(Tom) New install commands for plpgsql(Jan) 1998-12-20 The 6.4.1 release was improperly packaged. This also has one additional bug fix. A dump/restore is not required for those running 6.4.*. Fix for datetime constant problem on some platforms(Thomas) 1998-12-18 This is basically a cleanup release for 6.4. We have fixed a variety of problems reported by 6.4 users. A dump/restore is not required for those running 6.4. Add pg_dump -N flag to force double quotes around identifiers. This is the default(Thomas) Fix for NOT in where clause causing crash(Bruce) EXPLAIN VERBOSE coredump fix(Vadim) Fix shared-library problems on Linux Fix test for table existence to allow mixed-case and whitespace in the table name(Thomas) Fix a couple of pg_dump bugs Configure matches template/.similar entries better(Tom) Change builtin function names from SPI_* to spi_* OR WHERE clause fix(Vadim) Fixes for mixed-case table names(Billy) contrib/linux/postgres.init.csh/sh fix(Thomas) libpq memory overrun fix SunOS fixes(Tom) Change exp() behavior to generate error on underflow(Thomas) pg_dump fixes for memory leak, inheritance constraints, layout change update pgaccess to 0.93 Fix prototype for 64-bit platforms Multibyte fixes(Tatsuo) New ecpg man page Fix memory overruns(Tatsuo) Fix for lo_import() crash(Bruce) Better search for install program(Tom) Timezone fixes(Tom) HP-UX fixes(Tom) Use implicit type coercion for matching DEFAULT values(Thomas) Add routines to help with single-byte (internal) character type(Thomas) Compilation of libpq for Windows fixes(Magnus) Upgrade to PyGreSQL 2.2(D'Arcy) 1998-10-30 There are many new features and improvements in this release. Thanks to our developers and maintainers, nearly every aspect of the system has received some attention since the previous release. Here is a brief, incomplete summary: Views and rules are now functional thanks to extensive new code in the rewrite rules system from Jan Wieck. He also wrote a chapter on it for the Programmer's Guide. Jan also contributed a second procedural language, PL/pgSQL, to go with the original PL/pgTCL procedural language he contributed last release. We have optional multiple-byte character set support from Tatsuo Ishii to complement our existing locale support. Client/server communications has been cleaned up, with better support for asynchronous messages and interrupts thanks to Tom Lane. The parser will now perform automatic type coercion to match arguments to available operators and functions, and to match columns and expressions with target columns. This uses a generic mechanism which supports the type extensibility features of PostgreSQL. There is a new chapter in the User's Guide which covers this topic. Three new data types have been added. Two types, inet and cidr, support various forms of IP network, subnet, and machine addressing. There is now an 8-byte integer type available on some platforms. See the chapter on data types in the User's Guide for details. A fourth type, serial, is now supported by the parser as an amalgam of the int4 type, a sequence, and a unique index. Several more SQL92-compatible syntax features have been added, including INSERT DEFAULT VALUES The automatic configuration and installation system has received some attention, and should be more robust for more platforms than it has ever been. A dump/restore using pg_dump or pg_dumpall is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release of PostgreSQL. Bug Fixes --------- Fix for a tiny memory leak in PQsetdb/PQfinish(Bryan) Remove char2-16 data types, use char/varchar(Darren) Pqfn not handles a NOTICE message(Anders) Reduced busywaiting overhead for spinlocks with many backends (dg) Stuck spinlock detection (dg) Fix up "ISO-style" timespan decoding and encoding(Thomas) Fix problem with table drop after rollback of transaction(Vadim) Change error message and remove non-functional update message(Vadim) Fix for COPY array checking Fix for SELECT 1 UNION SELECT NULL Fix for buffer leaks in large object calls(Pascal) Change owner from oid to int4 type(Bruce) Fix a bug in the oracle compatibility functions btrim() ltrim() and rtrim() Fix for shared invalidation cache overflow(Massimo) Prevent file descriptor leaks in failed COPY's(Bruce) Fix memory leak in libpgtcl's pg_select(Constantin) Fix problems with username/passwords over 8 characters(Tom) Fix problems with handling of asynchronous NOTIFY in backend(Tom) Fix of many bad system table entries(Tom) Enhancements ------------ Upgrade ecpg and ecpglib,see src/interfaces/ecpc/ChangeLog(Michael) Show the index used in an EXPLAIN(Zeugswetter) EXPLAIN invokes rule system and shows plan(s) for rewritten queries(Jan) Multibyte awareness of many data types and functions, via configure(Tatsuo) New configure --with-mb option(Tatsuo) New initdb --pgencoding option(Tatsuo) New createdb -E multibyte option(Tatsuo) Select version(); now returns PostgreSQL version(Jeroen) libpq now allows asynchronous clients(Tom) Allow cancel from client of backend query(Tom) psql now cancels query with Control-C(Tom) libpq users need not issue dummy queries to get NOTIFY messages(Tom) NOTIFY now sends sender's PID, so you can tell whether it was your own(Tom) PGresult struct now includes associated error message, if any(Tom) Define "tz_hour" and "tz_minute" arguments to date_part()(Thomas) Add routines to convert between varchar and bpchar(Thomas) Add routines to allow sizing of varchar and bpchar into target columns(Thomas) Add bit flags to support timezonehour and minute in data retrieval(Thomas) Allow more variations on valid floating point numbers (e.g. ".1", "1e6")(Thomas) Fixes for unary minus parsing with leading spaces(Thomas) Implement TIMEZONE_HOUR, TIMEZONE_MINUTE per SQL92 specs(Thomas) Check for and properly ignore FOREIGN KEY column constraints(Thomas) Define USER as synonym for CURRENT_USER per SQL92 specs(Thomas) Enable HAVING clause but no fixes elsewhere yet. Make "char" type a synonym for "char(1)" (actually implemented as bpchar)(Thomas) Save string type if specified for DEFAULT clause handling(Thomas) Coerce operations involving different data types(Thomas) Allow some index use for columns of different types(Thomas) Add capabilities for automatic type conversion(Thomas) Cleanups for large objects, so file is truncated on open(Peter) Readline cleanups(Tom) Allow psql \f \ to make spaces as delimiter(Bruce) Pass pg_attribute.atttypmod to the frontend for column field lengths(Tom,Bruce) Msql compatibility library in /contrib(Aldrin) Remove the requirement that ORDER/GROUP BY clause identifiers be included in the target list(David) Convert columns to match columns in UNION clauses(Thomas) Remove fork()/exec() and only do fork()(Bruce) Jdbc cleanups(Peter) Show backend status on ps command line(only works on some platforms)(Bruce) Pg_hba.conf now has a sameuser option in the database field Make lo_unlink take oid param, not int4 New DISABLE_COMPLEX_MACRO for compilers that cannot handle our macros(Bruce) Libpgtcl now handles NOTIFY as a Tcl event, need not send dummy queries(Tom) libpgtcl cleanups(Tom) Add -error option to libpgtcl's pg_result command(Tom) New locale patch, see docs/README/locale(Oleg) Fix for pg_dump so CONSTRAINT and CHECK syntax is correct(ccb) New contrib/lo code for large object orphan removal(Peter) New psql command "SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'encoding'" for multibytes feature, see /doc/README.mb(Tatsuo) contrib/noupdate code to revoke update permission on a column libpq can now be compiled on Windows(Magnus) Add PQsetdbLogin() in libpq New 8-byte integer type, checked by configure for OS support(Thomas) Better support for quoted table/column names(Thomas) Surround table and column names with double-quotes in pg_dump(Thomas) PQreset() now works with passwords(Tom) Handle case of GROUP BY target list column number out of range(David) Allow UNION in subselects Add auto-size to screen to \d? commands(Bruce) Use UNION to show all \d? results in one query(Bruce) Add \d? field search feature(Bruce) Pg_dump issues fewer \connect requests(Tom) Make pg_dump -z flag work better, document it in manual page(Tom) Add HAVING clause with full support for subselects and unions(Stephan) Full text indexing routines in contrib/fulltextindex(Maarten) Transaction ids now stored in shared memory(Vadim) New PGCLIENTENCODING when issuing COPY command(Tatsuo) Support for SQL92 syntax "SET NAMES"(Tatsuo) Support for LATIN2-5(Tatsuo) Add UNICODE regression test case(Tatsuo) Lock manager cleanup, new locking modes for LLL(Vadim) Allow index use with OR clauses(Bruce) Allows "SELECT NULL ORDER BY 1;" Explain VERBOSE prints the plan, and now pretty-prints the plan to the postmaster log file(Bruce) Add indexes display to \d command(Bruce) Allow GROUP BY on functions(David) New pg_class.relkind for large objects(Bruce) New way to send libpq NOTICE messages to a different location(Tom) New \w write command to psql(Bruce) New /contrib/findoidjoins scans oid columns to find join relationships(Bruce) Allow binary-compatible indexes to be considered when checking for valid Indexes for restriction clauses containing a constant(Thomas) New ISBN/ISSN code in /contrib/isbn_issn Allow NOT LIKE, IN, NOT IN, BETWEEN, and NOT BETWEEN constraint(Thomas) New rewrite system fixes many problems with rules and views(Jan) * Rules on relations work * Event qualifications on insert/update/delete work * New OLD variable to reference CURRENT, CURRENT will be remove in future * Update rules can reference NEW and OLD in rule qualifications/actions * Insert/update/delete rules on views work * Multiple rule actions are now supported, surrounded by parentheses * Regular users can create views/rules on tables they have RULE permits * Rules and views inherit the privileges of the creator * No rules at the column level * No UPDATE NEW/OLD rules * New pg_tables, pg_indexes, pg_rules and pg_views system views * Only a single action on SELECT rules * Total rewrite overhaul, perhaps for 6.5 * handle subselects * handle aggregates on views * handle insert into select from view works System indexes are now multikey(Bruce) Oidint2, oidint4, and oidname types are removed(Bruce) Use system cache for more system table lookups(Bruce) New backend programming language PL/pgSQL in backend/pl(Jan) New SERIAL data type, auto-creates sequence/index(Thomas) Enable assert checking without a recompile(Massimo) User lock enhancements(Massimo) New setval() command to set sequence value(Massimo) Auto-remove unix socket file on start-up if no postmaster running(Massimo) Conditional trace package(Massimo) New UNLISTEN command(Massimo) psql and libpq now compile under Windows using win32.mak(Magnus) Lo_read no longer stores trailing NULL(Bruce) Identifiers are now truncated to 31 characters internally(Bruce) Createuser options now available on the command line Code for 64-bit integer supported added, configure tested, int8 type(Thomas) Prevent file descriptor leaf from failed COPY(Bruce) New pg_upgrade command(Bruce) Updated /contrib directories(Massimo) New CREATE TABLE DEFAULT VALUES statement available(Thomas) New INSERT INTO TABLE DEFAULT VALUES statement available(Thomas) New DECLARE and FETCH feature(Thomas) libpq's internal structures now not exported(Tom) Allow up to 8 key indexes(Bruce) Remove ARCHIVE key word, that is no longer used(Thomas) pg_dump -n flag to suppress quotes around identifiers disable system columns for views(Jan) new INET and CIDR types for network addresses(TomH, Paul) no more double quotes in psql output pg_dump now dumps views(Terry) new SET QUERY_LIMIT(Tatsuo,Jan) Source Tree Changes ------------------- /contrib cleanup(Jun) Inline some small functions called for every row(Bruce) Alpha/linux fixes HP-UX cleanups(Tom) Multibyte regression tests(Soonmyung.) Remove --disabled options from configure Define PGDOC to use POSTGRESDIR by default Make regression optional Remove extra braces code to pgindent(Bruce) Add bsdi shared library support(Bruce) New --without-CXX support configure option(Brook) New FAQ_CVS Update backend flowchart in tools/backend(Bruce) Change atttypmod from int16 to int32(Bruce, Tom) Getrusage() fix for platforms that do not have it(Tom) Add PQconnectdb, PGUSER, PGPASSWORD to libpq man page NS32K platform fixes(Phil Nelson, John Buller) SCO 7/UnixWare 2.x fixes(Billy,others) Sparc/Solaris 2.5 fixes(Ryan) Pgbuiltin.3 is obsolete, move to doc files(Thomas) Even more documentation(Thomas) Nextstep support(Jacek) Aix support(David) pginterface manual page(Bruce) shared libraries all have version numbers merged all OS-specific shared library defines into one file smarter TCL/TK configuration checking(Billy) smarter perl configuration(Brook) configure uses supplied install-sh if no install script found(Tom) new Makefile.shlib for shared library configuration(Tom) 1998-04-07 This is a bug-fix release for 6.3.x. Refer to the release notes for version 6.3 for a more complete summary of new features. Summary: Repairs automatic configuration support for some platforms, including Linux, from breakage inadvertently introduced in version 6.3.1. Correctly handles function calls on the left side of BETWEEN and LIKE clauses. A dump/restore is NOT required for those running 6.3 or 6.3.1. A make distclean, make, and make install is all that is required. This last step should be performed while the postmaster is not running. You should re-link any custom applications that use PostgreSQL libraries. For upgrades from pre-6.3 installations, refer to the installation and migration instructions for version 6.3. Configure detection improvements for tcl/tk(Brook Milligan, Alvin) Manual page improvements(Bruce) BETWEEN and LIKE fix(Thomas) fix for psql \connect used by pg_dump(Oliver Elphick) New odbc driver pgaccess, version 0.86 qsort removed, now uses libc version, cleanups(Jeroen) fix for buffer over-runs detected(Maurice Gittens) fix for buffer overrun in libpgtcl(Randy Kunkee) fix for UNION with DISTINCT or ORDER BY(Bruce) gettimeofday configure check(Doug Winterburn) Fix "indexes not used" bug(Vadim) docs additions(Thomas) Fix for backend memory leak(Bruce) libreadline cleanup(Erwan MAS) Remove DISTDIR(Bruce) Makefile dependency cleanup(Jeroen van Vianen) ASSERT fixes(Bruce) 1998-03-23 Summary: Additional support for multibyte character sets. Repair byte ordering for mixed-endian clients and servers. Minor updates to allowed SQL syntax. Improvements to the configuration autodetection for installation. A dump/restore is NOT required for those running 6.3. A make distclean, make, and make install is all that is required. This last step should be performed while the postmaster is not running. You should re-link any custom applications that use PostgreSQL libraries. For upgrades from pre-6.3 installations, refer to the installation and migration instructions for version 6.3. ecpg cleanup/fixes, now version 1.1(Michael Meskes) pg_user cleanup(Bruce) large object fix for pg_dump and tclsh (alvin) LIKE fix for multiple adjacent underscores fix for redefining builtin functions(Thomas) ultrix4 cleanup upgrade to pg_access 0.83 updated CLUSTER manual page multibyte character set support, see doc/README.mb(Tatsuo) configure --with-pgport fix pg_ident fix big-endian fix for backend communications(Kataoka) SUBSTR() and substring() fix(Jan) several jdbc fixes(Peter) libpgtcl improvements, see libptcl/README(Randy Kunkee) Fix for "Datasize = 0" error(Vadim) Prevent \do from wrapping(Bruce) Remove duplicate Russian character set entries Sunos4 cleanup Allow optional TABLE key word in LOCK and SELECT INTO(Thomas) CREATE SEQUENCE options to allow a negative integer(Thomas) Add "PASSWORD" as an allowed column identifier(Thomas) Add checks for UNION target fields(Bruce) Fix Alpha port(Dwayne Bailey) Fix for text arrays containing quotes(Doug Gibson) Solaris compile fix(Albert Chin-A-Young) Better identify tcl and tk libs and includes(Bruce) 1998-03-01 There are many new features and improvements in this release. Here is a brief, incomplete summary: Many new SQL features, including full SQL92 subselect capability (everything is here but target-list subselects). Support for client-side environment variables to specify time zone and date style. Socket interface for client/server connection. This is the default now so you might need to start postmaster with the -i flag. Better password authorization mechanisms. Default table privileges have changed. Old-style time travel has been removed. Performance has been improved. Bruce Momjian wrote the following notes to introduce the new release. There are some general 6.3 issues that I want to mention. These are only the big items that cannot be described in one sentence. A review of the detailed changes list is still needed. First, we now have subselects. Now that we have them, I would like to mention that without subselects, SQL is a very limited language. Subselects are a major feature, and you should review your code for places where subselects provide a better solution for your queries. I think you will find that there are more uses for subselects than you might think. Vadim has put us on the big SQL map with subselects, and fully functional ones too. The only thing you cannot do with subselects is to use them in the target list. Second, 6.3 uses Unix domain sockets rather than TCP/IP by default. To enable connections from other machines, you have to use the new postmaster -i option, and of course edit pg_hba.conf. Also, for this reason, the format of pg_hba.conf has changed. Third, char() fields will now allow faster access than varchar() or text. Specifically, the text and varchar() have a penalty for access to any columns after the first column of this type. char() used to also have this access penalty, but it no longer does. This might suggest that you redesign some of your tables, especially if you have short character columns that you have defined as varchar() or text. This and other changes make 6.3 even faster than earlier releases. We now have passwords definable independent of any Unix file. There are new SQL USER commands. See the Administrator's Guide for more information. There is a new table, pg_shadow, which is used to store user information and user passwords, and it by default only SELECT-able by the postgres super-user. pg_user is now a view of pg_shadow, and is SELECT-able by PUBLIC. You should keep using pg_user in your application without changes. User-created tables now no longer have SELECT privilege to PUBLIC by default. This was done because the ANSI standard requires it. You can of course GRANT any privileges you want after the table is created. System tables continue to be SELECT-able by PUBLIC. We also have real deadlock detection code. No more sixty-second timeouts. And the new locking code implements a FIFO better, so there should be less resource starvation during heavy use. Many complaints have been made about inadequate documentation in previous releases. Thomas has put much effort into many new manuals for this release. Check out the doc/ directory. For performance reasons, time travel is gone, but can be implemented using triggers (see pgsql/contrib/spi/README). Please check out the new \d command for types, operators, etc. Also, views have their own privileges now, not based on the underlying tables, so privileges on them have to be set separately. Check /pgsql/interfaces for some new ways to talk to PostgreSQL. This is the first release that really required an explanation for existing users. In many ways, this was necessary because the new release removes many limitations, and the work-arounds people were using are no longer needed. A dump/restore using pg_dump or pg_dumpall is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release of PostgreSQL. Bug Fixes --------- Fix binary cursors broken by MOVE implementation(Vadim) Fix for tcl library crash(Jan) Fix for array handling, from Gerhard Hintermayer Fix acl error, and remove duplicate pqtrace(Bruce) Fix psql \e for empty file(Bruce) Fix for textcat on varchar() fields(Bruce) Fix for DBT Sendproc (Zeugswetter Andres) Fix vacuum analyze syntax problem(Bruce) Fix for international identifiers(Tatsuo) Fix aggregates on inherited tables(Bruce) Fix substr() for out-of-bounds data Fix for select 1=1 or 2=2, select 1=1 and 2=2, and select sum(2+2)(Bruce) Fix notty output to show status result. -q option still turns it off(Bruce) Fix for count(*), aggs with views and multiple tables and sum(3)(Bruce) Fix cluster(Bruce) Fix for PQtrace start/stop several times(Bruce) Fix a variety of locking problems like newer lock waiters getting lock before older waiters, and having readlock people not share locks if a writer is waiting for a lock, and waiting writers not getting priority over waiting readers(Bruce) Fix crashes in psql when executing queries from external files(James) Fix problem with multiple order by columns, with the first one having NULL values(Jeroen) Use correct hash table support functions for float8 and int4(Thomas) Re-enable JOIN= option in CREATE OPERATOR statement (Thomas) Change precedence for boolean operators to match expected behavior(Thomas) Generate elog(ERROR) on over-large integer(Bruce) Allow multiple-argument functions in constraint clauses(Thomas) Check boolean input literals for 'true','false','yes','no','1','0' and throw elog(ERROR) if unrecognized(Thomas) Major large objects fix Fix for GROUP BY showing duplicates(Vadim) Fix for index scans in MergeJoin(Vadim) Enhancements ------------ Subselects with EXISTS, IN, ALL, ANY key words (Vadim, Bruce, Thomas) New User Manual(Thomas, others) Speedup by inlining some frequently-called functions Real deadlock detection, no more timeouts(Bruce) Add SQL92 "constants" CURRENT_DATE, CURRENT_TIME, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, CURRENT_USER(Thomas) Modify constraint syntax to be SQL92-compliant(Thomas) Implement SQL92 PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE clauses using indexes(Thomas) Recognize SQL92 syntax for FOREIGN KEY. Throw elog notice(Thomas) Allow NOT NULL UNIQUE constraint clause (each allowed separately before)(Thomas) Allow PostgreSQL-style casting ("::") of non-constants(Thomas) Add support for SQL3 TRUE and FALSE boolean constants(Thomas) Support SQL92 syntax for IS TRUE/IS FALSE/IS NOT TRUE/IS NOT FALSE(Thomas) Allow shorter strings for boolean literals (e.g. "t", "tr", "tru")(Thomas) Allow SQL92 delimited identifiers(Thomas) Implement SQL92 binary and hexadecimal string decoding (b'10' and x'1F')(Thomas) Support SQL92 syntax for type coercion of literal strings (e.g. "DATETIME 'now'")(Thomas) Add conversions for int2, int4, and OID types to and from text(Thomas) Use shared lock when building indexes(Vadim) Free memory allocated for a user query inside transaction block after this query is done, was turned off in <= 6.2.1(Vadim) New SQL statement CREATE PROCEDURAL LANGUAGE(Jan) New PostgreSQL Procedural Language (PL) backend interface(Jan) Rename pg_dump -H option to -h(Bruce) Add Java support for passwords, European dates(Peter) Use indexes for LIKE and ~, !~ operations(Bruce) Add hash functions for datetime and timespan(Thomas) Time Travel removed(Vadim, Bruce) Add paging for \d and \z, and fix \i(Bruce) Add Unix domain socket support to backend and to frontend library(Goran) Implement CREATE DATABASE/WITH LOCATION and initlocation utility(Thomas) Allow more SQL92 and/or PostgreSQL reserved words as column identifiers(Thomas) Augment support for SQL92 SET TIME ZONE...(Thomas) SET/SHOW/RESET TIME ZONE uses TZ backend environment variable(Thomas) Implement SET keyword = DEFAULT and SET TIME ZONE DEFAULT(Thomas) Enable SET TIME ZONE using TZ environment variable(Thomas) Add PGDATESTYLE environment variable to frontend and backend initialization(Thomas) Add PGTZ, PGCOSTHEAP, PGCOSTINDEX, PGRPLANS, PGGEQO frontend library initialization environment variables(Thomas) Regression tests time zone automatically set with "setenv PGTZ PST8PDT"(Thomas) Add pg_description table for info on tables, columns, operators, types, and aggregates(Bruce) Increase 16 char limit on system table/index names to 32 characters(Bruce) Rename system indexes(Bruce) Add 'GERMAN' option to SET DATESTYLE(Thomas) Define an "ISO-style" timespan output format with "hh:mm:ss" fields(Thomas) Allow fractional values for delta times (e.g. '2.5 days')(Thomas) Validate numeric input more carefully for delta times(Thomas) Implement day of year as possible input to date_part()(Thomas) Define timespan_finite() and text_timespan() functions(Thomas) Remove archive stuff(Bruce) Allow for a pg_password authentication database that is separate from the system password file(Todd) Dump ACLs, GRANT, REVOKE privileges(Matt) Define text, varchar, and bpchar string length functions(Thomas) Fix Query handling for inheritance, and cost computations(Bruce) Implement CREATE TABLE/AS SELECT (alternative to SELECT/INTO)(Thomas) Allow NOT, IS NULL, IS NOT NULL in constraints(Thomas) Implement UNIONs for SELECT(Bruce) Add UNION, GROUP, DISTINCT to INSERT(Bruce) varchar() stores only necessary bytes on disk(Bruce) Fix for BLOBs(Peter) Mega-Patch for JDBC...see README_6.3 for list of changes(Peter) Remove unused "option" from PQconnectdb() New LOCK command and lock manual page describing deadlocks(Bruce) Add new psql \da, \dd, \df, \do, \dS, and \dT commands(Bruce) Enhance psql \z to show sequences(Bruce) Show NOT NULL and DEFAULT in psql \d table(Bruce) New psql .psqlrc file start-up(Andrew) Modify sample start-up script in contrib/linux to show syslog(Thomas) New types for IP and MAC addresses in contrib/ip_and_mac(TomH) Unix system time conversions with date/time types in contrib/unixdate(Thomas) Update of contrib stuff(Massimo) Add Unix socket support to DBD::Pg(Goran) New python interface (PyGreSQL 2.0)(D'Arcy) New frontend/backend protocol has a version number, network byte order(Phil) Security features in pg_hba.conf enhanced and documented, many cleanups(Phil) CHAR() now faster access than VARCHAR() or TEXT ecpg embedded SQL preprocessor Reduce system column overhead(Vadmin) Remove pg_time table(Vadim) Add pg_type attribute to identify types that need length (bpchar, varchar) Add report of offending line when COPY command fails Allow VIEW privileges to be set separately from the underlying tables. For security, use GRANT/REVOKE on views as appropriate(Jan) Tables now have no default GRANT SELECT TO PUBLIC. You must explicitly grant such privileges. Clean up tutorial examples(Darren) Source Tree Changes ------------------- Add new html development tools, and flow chart in /tools/backend Fix for SCO compiles Stratus computer port Robert Gillies Added support for shlib for BSD44_derived & i386_solaris Make configure more automated(Brook) Add script to check regression test results Break parser functions into smaller files, group together(Bruce) Rename heap_create to heap_create_and_catalog, rename heap_creatr to heap_create()(Bruce) Sparc/Linux patch for locking(TomS) Remove PORTNAME and reorganize port-specific stuff(Marc) Add optimizer README file(Bruce) Remove some recursion in optimizer and clean up some code there(Bruce) Fix for NetBSD locking(Henry) Fix for libptcl make(Tatsuo) AIX patch(Darren) Change IS TRUE, IS FALSE, ... to expressions using "=" rather than function calls to istrue() or isfalse() to allow optimization(Thomas) Various fixes NetBSD/Sparc related(TomH) Alpha linux locking(Travis,Ryan) Change elog(WARN) to elog(ERROR)(Bruce) FAQ for FreeBSD(Marc) Bring in the PostODBC source tree as part of our standard distribution(Marc) A minor patch for HP/UX 10 vs 9(Stan) New pg_attribute.atttypmod for type-specific info like varchar length(Bruce) UnixWare patches(Billy) New i386 'lock' for spinlock asm(Billy) Support for multiplexed backends is removed Start an OpenBSD port Start an AUX port Start a Cygnus port Add string functions to regression suite(Thomas) Expand a few function names formerly truncated to 16 characters(Thomas) Remove un-needed malloc() calls and replace with palloc()(Bruce) 1997-10-17 6.2.1 is a bug-fix and usability release on 6.2. Summary: Allow strings to span lines, per SQL92. Include example trigger function for inserting user names on table updates. This is a minor bug-fix release on 6.2. For upgrades from pre-6.2 systems, a full dump/reload is required. Refer to the 6.2 release notes for instructions. This is a minor bug-fix release. A dump/reload is not required from version 6.2, but is required from any release prior to 6.2. In upgrading from version 6.2, if you choose to dump/reload you will find that avg(money) is now calculated correctly. All other bug fixes take effect upon updating the executables. Another way to avoid dump/reload is to use the following SQL command from psql to update the existing system table: update pg_aggregate set aggfinalfn = 'cash_div_flt8' where aggname = 'avg' and aggbasetype = 790; This will need to be done to every existing database, including template1. Allow TIME and TYPE column names(Thomas) Allow larger range of true/false as boolean values(Thomas) Support output of "now" and "current"(Thomas) Handle DEFAULT with INSERT of NULL properly(Vadim) Fix for relation reference counts problem in buffer manager(Vadim) Allow strings to span lines, like ANSI(Thomas) Fix for backward cursor with ORDER BY(Vadim) Fix avg(cash) computation(Thomas) Fix for specifying a column twice in ORDER/GROUP BY(Vadim) Documented new libpq function to return affected rows, PQcmdTuples(Bruce) Trigger function for inserting user names for INSERT/UPDATE(Brook Milligan) 1997-10-02 A dump/restore is required for those wishing to migrate data from previous releases of PostgreSQL. This migration requires a complete dump of the 6.1 database and a restore of the database in 6.2. Note that the pg_dump and pg_dumpall utility from 6.2 should be used to dump the 6.1 database. Those migrating from earlier 1.* releases should first upgrade to 1.09 because the COPY output format was improved from the 1.02 release. Bug Fixes --------- Fix problems with pg_dump for inheritance, sequences, archive tables(Bruce) Fix compile errors on overflow due to shifts, unsigned, and bad prototypes from Solaris(Diab Jerius) Fix bugs in geometric line arithmetic (bad intersection calculations)(Thomas) Check for geometric intersections at endpoints to avoid rounding ugliness(Thomas) Catch non-functional delete attempts(Vadim) Change time function names to be more consistent(Michael Reifenberg) Check for zero divides(Michael Reifenberg) Fix very old bug which made rows changed/inserted by a command visible to the command itself (so we had multiple update of updated rows, etc.)(Vadim) Fix for SELECT null, 'fail' FROM pg_am (Patrick) SELECT NULL as EMPTY_FIELD now allowed(Patrick) Remove un-needed signal stuff from contrib/pginterface Fix OR (where x != 1 or x isnull didn't return rows with x NULL) (Vadim) Fix time_cmp function (Vadim) Fix handling of functions with non-attribute first argument in WHERE clauses (Vadim) Fix GROUP BY when order of entries is different from order in target list (Vadim) Fix pg_dump for aggregates without sfunc1 (Vadim) Enhancements ------------ Default genetic optimizer GEQO parameter is now 8(Bruce) Allow use parameters in target list having aggregates in functions(Vadim) Added JDBC driver as an interface(Adrian & Peter) pg_password utility Return number of rows inserted/affected by INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE etc.(Vadim) Triggers implemented with CREATE TRIGGER (SQL3)(Vadim) SPI (Server Programming Interface) allows execution of queries inside C-functions (Vadim) NOT NULL implemented (SQL92)(Robson Paniago de Miranda) Include reserved words for string handling, outer joins, and unions(Thomas) Implement extended comments ("/* ... */") using exclusive states(Thomas) Add "//" single-line comments(Bruce) Remove some restrictions on characters in operator names(Thomas) DEFAULT and CONSTRAINT for tables implemented (SQL92)(Vadim & Thomas) Add text concatenation operator and function (SQL92)(Thomas) Support WITH TIME ZONE syntax (SQL92)(Thomas) Support INTERVAL unit TO unit syntax (SQL92)(Thomas) Define types DOUBLE PRECISION, INTERVAL, CHARACTER, and CHARACTER VARYING (SQL92)(Thomas) Define type FLOAT(p) and rudimentary DECIMAL(p,s), NUMERIC(p,s) (SQL92)(Thomas) Define EXTRACT(), POSITION(), SUBSTRING(), and TRIM() (SQL92)(Thomas) Define CURRENT_DATE, CURRENT_TIME, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP (SQL92)(Thomas) Add syntax and warnings for UNION, HAVING, INNER and OUTER JOIN (SQL92)(Thomas) Add more reserved words, mostly for SQL92 compliance(Thomas) Allow hh:mm:ss time entry for timespan/reltime types(Thomas) Add center() routines for lseg, path, polygon(Thomas) Add distance() routines for circle-polygon, polygon-polygon(Thomas) Check explicitly for points and polygons contained within polygons using an axis-crossing algorithm(Thomas) Add routine to convert circle-box(Thomas) Merge conflicting operators for different geometric data types(Thomas) Replace distance operator "<===>" with "<->"(Thomas) Replace "above" operator "!^" with ">^" and "below" operator "!|" with "<^"(Thomas) Add routines for text trimming on both ends, substring, and string position(Thomas) Added conversion routines circle(box) and poly(circle)(Thomas) Allow internal sorts to be stored in memory rather than in files(Bruce & Vadim) Allow functions and operators on internally-identical types to succeed(Bruce) Speed up backend start-up after profiling analysis(Bruce) Inline frequently called functions for performance(Bruce) Reduce open() calls(Bruce) psql: Add PAGER for \h and \?,\C fix Fix for psql pager when no tty(Bruce) New entab utility(Bruce) General trigger functions for referential integrity (Vadim) General trigger functions for time travel (Vadim) General trigger functions for AUTOINCREMENT/IDENTITY feature (Vadim) MOVE implementation (Vadim) Source Tree Changes ------------------- HP-UX 10 patches (Vladimir Turin) Added SCO support, (Daniel Harris) MkLinux patches (Tatsuo Ishii) Change geometric box terminology from "length" to "width"(Thomas) Deprecate temporary unstored slope fields in geometric code(Thomas) Remove restart instructions from INSTALL(Bruce) Look in /usr/ucb first for install(Bruce) Fix c++ copy example code(Thomas) Add -o to psql manual page(Bruce) Prevent relname unallocated string length from being copied into database(Bruce) Cleanup for NAMEDATALEN use(Bruce) Fix pg_proc names over 15 chars in output(Bruce) Add strNcpy() function(Bruce) remove some (void) casts that are unnecessary(Bruce) new interfaces directory(Marc) Replace fopen() calls with calls to fd.c functions(Bruce) Make functions static where possible(Bruce) enclose unused functions in #ifdef NOT_USED(Bruce) Remove call to difftime() in timestamp support to fix SunOS(Bruce & Thomas) Changes for Digital Unix Portability fix for pg_dumpall(Bruce) Rename pg_attribute.attnvals to attdispersion(Bruce) "intro/unix" manual page now "pgintro"(Bruce) "built-in" manual page now "pgbuiltin"(Bruce) "drop" manual page now "drop_table"(Bruce) Add "create_trigger", "drop_trigger" manual pages(Thomas) Add constraints regression test(Vadim & Thomas) Add comments syntax regression test(Thomas) Add PGINDENT and support program(Bruce) Massive commit to run PGINDENT on all *.c and *.h files(Bruce) Files moved to /src/tools directory(Bruce) SPI and Trigger programming guides (Vadim & D'Arcy) 1997-07-22 This is a minor bug-fix release. A dump/reload is not required from version 6.1, but is required from any release prior to 6.1. Refer to the release notes for 6.1 for more details. fix for SET with options (Thomas) allow pg_dump/pg_dumpall to preserve ownership of all tables/objects(Bruce) new psql \connect option allows changing usernames without changing databases fix for initdb --debug option(Yoshihiko Ichikawa)) lextest cleanup(Bruce) hash fixes(Vadim) fix date/time month boundary arithmetic(Thomas) fix timezone daylight handling for some ports(Thomas, Bruce, Tatsuo) timestamp overhauled to use standard functions(Thomas) other code cleanup in date/time routines(Thomas) psql's \d now case-insensitive(Bruce) psql's backslash commands can now have trailing semicolon(Bruce) fix memory leak in psql when using \g(Bruce) major fix for endian handling of communication to server(Thomas, Tatsuo) Fix for Solaris assembler and include files(Yoshihiko Ichikawa) allow underscores in usernames(Bruce) pg_dumpall now returns proper status, portability fix(Bruce) 1997-06-08 The regression tests have been adapted and extensively modified for the 6.1 release of PostgreSQL. Three new data types (datetime, timespan, and circle) have been added to the native set of PostgreSQL types. Points, boxes, paths, and polygons have had their output formats made consistent across the data types. The polygon output in misc.out has only been spot-checked for correctness relative to the original regression output. PostgreSQL 6.1 introduces a new, alternate optimizer which uses genetic algorithms. These algorithms introduce a random behavior in the ordering of query results when the query contains multiple qualifiers or multiple tables (giving the optimizer a choice on order of evaluation). Several regression tests have been modified to explicitly order the results, and hence are insensitive to optimizer choices. A few regression tests are for data types which are inherently unordered (e.g. points and time intervals) and tests involving those types are explicitly bracketed with set geqo to 'off' and reset geqo. The interpretation of array specifiers (the curly braces around atomic values) appears to have changed sometime after the original regression tests were generated. The current ./expected/*.out files reflect this new interpretation, which might not be correct! The float8 regression test fails on at least some platforms. This is due to differences in implementations of pow() and exp() and the signaling mechanisms used for overflow and underflow conditions. The random results in the random test should cause the random test to be failed, since the regression tests are evaluated using a simple diff. However, random does not seem to produce random results on my test machine (Linux/gcc/i686). This migration requires a complete dump of the 6.0 database and a restore of the database in 6.1. Those migrating from earlier 1.* releases should first upgrade to 1.09 because the COPY output format was improved from the 1.02 release. Bug Fixes --------- packet length checking in library routines lock manager priority patch check for under/over flow of float8(Bruce) multitable join fix(Vadim) SIGPIPE crash fix(Darren) large object fixes(Sven) allow btree indexes to handle NULLs(Vadim) timezone fixes(D'Arcy) select SUM(x) can return NULL on no rows(Thomas) internal optimizer, executor bug fixes(Vadim) fix problem where inner loop in < or <= has no rows(Vadim) prevent re-commuting join index clauses(Vadim) fix join clauses for multiple tables(Vadim) fix hash, hashjoin for arrays(Vadim) fix btree for abstime type(Vadim) large object fixes(Raymond) fix buffer leak in hash indexes (Vadim) fix rtree for use in inner scan (Vadim) fix gist for use in inner scan, cleanups (Vadim, Andrea) avoid unnecessary local buffers allocation (Vadim, Massimo) fix local buffers leak in transaction aborts (Vadim) fix file manager memmory leaks, cleanups (Vadim, Massimo) fix storage manager memmory leaks (Vadim) fix btree duplicates handling (Vadim) fix deleted rows reincarnation caused by vacuum (Vadim) fix SELECT varchar()/char() INTO TABLE made zero-length fields(Bruce) many psql, pg_dump, and libpq memory leaks fixed using Purify (Igor) Enhancements ------------ attribute optimization statistics(Bruce) much faster new btree bulk load code(Paul) BTREE UNIQUE added to bulk load code(Vadim) new lock debug code(Massimo) massive changes to libpg++(Leo) new GEQO optimizer speeds table multitable optimization(Martin) new WARN message for non-unique insert into unique key(Marc) update x=-3, no spaces, now valid(Bruce) remove case-sensitive identifier handling(Bruce,Thomas,Dan) debug backend now pretty-prints tree(Darren) new Oracle character functions(Edmund) new plaintext password functions(Dan) no such class or insufficient privilege changed to distinct messages(Dan) new ANSI timestamp function(Dan) new ANSI Time and Date types (Thomas) move large chunks of data in backend(Martin) multicolumn btree indexes(Vadim) new SET var TO value command(Martin) update transaction status on reads(Dan) new locale settings for character types(Oleg) new SEQUENCE serial number generator(Vadim) GROUP BY function now possible(Vadim) re-organize regression test(Thomas,Marc) new optimizer operation weights(Vadim) new psql \z grant/permit option(Marc) new MONEY data type(D'Arcy,Thomas) tcp socket communication speed improved(Vadim) new VACUUM option for attribute statistics, and for certain columns (Vadim) many geometric type improvements(Thomas,Keith) additional regression tests(Thomas) new datestyle variable(Thomas,Vadim,Martin) more comparison operators for sorting types(Thomas) new conversion functions(Thomas) new more compact btree format(Vadim) allow pg_dumpall to preserve database ownership(Bruce) new SET GEQO=# and R_PLANS variable(Vadim) old (!GEQO) optimizer can use right-sided plans (Vadim) typechecking improvement in SQL parser(Bruce) new SET, SHOW, RESET commands(Thomas,Vadim) new \connect database USER option new destroydb -i option (Igor) new \dt and \di psql commands (Darren) SELECT "\n" now escapes newline (A. Duursma) new geometry conversion functions from old format (Thomas) Source tree changes ------------------- new configuration script(Marc) readline configuration option added(Marc) OS-specific configuration options removed(Marc) new OS-specific template files(Marc) no more need to edit Makefile.global(Marc) re-arrange include files(Marc) nextstep patches (Gregor Hoffleit) removed Windows-specific code(Bruce) removed postmaster -e option, now only postgres -e option (Bruce) merge duplicate library code in front/backends(Martin) now works with eBones, international Kerberos(Jun) more shared library support c++ include file cleanup(Bruce) warn about buggy flex(Bruce) DG/UX, Ultrix, IRIX, AIX portability fixes 1997-01-29 A dump/restore is required for those wishing to migrate data from previous releases of PostgreSQL. This migration requires a complete dump of the 1.09 database and a restore of the database in 6.0. Those migrating from earlier 1.* releases should first upgrade to 1.09 because the COPY output format was improved from the 1.02 release. Bug Fixes --------- ALTER TABLE bug - running postgres process needs to re-read table definition Allow vacuum to be run on one table or entire database(Bruce) Array fixes Fix array over-runs of memory writes(Kurt) Fix elusive btree range/non-range bug(Dan) Fix for hash indexes on some types like time and date Fix for pg_log size explosion Fix permissions on lo_export()(Bruce) Fix uninitialized reads of memory(Kurt) Fixed ALTER TABLE ... char(3) bug(Bruce) Fixed a few small memory leaks Fixed EXPLAIN handling of options and changed full_path option name Fixed output of group acl privileges Memory leaks (hunt and destroy with tools like Purify(Kurt) Minor improvements to rules system NOTIFY fixes New asserts for run-checking Overhauled parser/analyze code to properly report errors and increase speed Pg_dump -d now handles NULL's properly(Bruce) Prevent SELECT NULL from crashing server (Bruce) Properly report errors when INSERT ... SELECT columns did not match Properly report errors when insert column names were not correct psql \g filename now works(Bruce) psql fixed problem with multiple statements on one line with multiple outputs Removed duplicate system OIDs SELECT * INTO TABLE . GROUP/ORDER BY gives unlink error if table exists(Bruce) Several fixes for queries that crashed the backend Starting quote in insert string errors(Bruce) Submitting an empty query now returns empty status, not just " " query(Bruce) Enhancements ------------ Add EXPLAIN manual page(Bruce) Add UNIQUE index capability(Dan) Add hostname/user level access control rather than just hostname and user Add synonym of != for <>(Bruce) Allow "select oid,* from table" Allow BY,ORDER BY to specify columns by number, or by non-alias table.column(Bruce) Allow COPY from the frontend(Bryan) Allow GROUP BY to use alias column name(Bruce) Allow actual compression, not just reuse on the same page(Vadim) Allow installation-configuration option to auto-add all local users(Bryan) Allow libpq to distinguish between text value '' and null(Bruce) Allow non-postgres users with createdb privs to destroydb's Allow restriction on who can create C functions(Bryan) Allow restriction on who can do backend COPY(Bryan) Can shrink tables, pg_time and pg_log(Vadim & Erich) Change debug level 2 to print queries only, changed debug heading layout(Bruce) Change default decimal constant representation from float4 to float8(Bruce) European date format now set when postmaster is started Execute lowercase function names if not found with exact case Fixes for aggregate/GROUP processing, allow 'select sum(func(x),sum(x+y) from z' Gist now included in the distribution(Marc) Idend authentication of local users(Bryan) Implement BETWEEN qualifier(Bruce) Implement IN qualifier(Bruce) libpq has PQgetisnull()(Bruce) libpq++ improvements New options to initdb(Bryan) Pg_dump allow dump of OIDs(Bruce) Pg_dump create indexes after tables are loaded for speed(Bruce) Pg_dumpall dumps all databases, and the user table Pginterface additions for NULL values(Bruce) Prevent postmaster from being run as root psql \h and \? is now readable(Bruce) psql allow backslashed, semicolons anywhere on the line(Bruce) psql changed command prompt for lines in query or in quotes(Bruce) psql char(3) now displays as (bp)char in \d output(Bruce) psql return code now more accurate(Bryan?) psql updated help syntax(Bruce) Re-visit and fix vacuum(Vadim) Reduce size of regression diffs, remove timezone name difference(Bruce) Remove compile-time parameters to enable binary distributions(Bryan) Reverse meaning of HBA masks(Bryan) Secure Authentication of local users(Bryan) Speed up vacuum(Vadim) Vacuum now had VERBOSE option(Bruce) Source tree changes ------------------- All functions now have prototypes that are compared against the calls Allow asserts to be disabled easily from Makefile.global(Bruce) Change oid constants used in code to #define names Decoupled sparc and solaris defines(Kurt) Gcc -Wall compiles cleanly with warnings only from unfixable constructs Major include file reorganization/reduction(Marc) Make now stops on compile failure(Bryan) Makefile restructuring(Bryan, Marc) Merge bsdi_2_1 to bsdi(Bruce) Monitor program removed Name change from Postgres95 to PostgreSQL New config.h file(Marc, Bryan) PG_VERSION now set to 6.0 and used by postmaster Portability additions, including Ultrix, DG/UX, AIX, and Solaris Reduced the number of #define's, centralized #define's Remove duplicate OIDS in system tables(Dan) Remove duplicate system catalog info or report mismatches(Dan) Removed many os-specific #define's Restructured object file generation/location(Bryan, Marc) Restructured port-specific file locations(Bryan, Marc) Unused/uninitialized variables corrected 1996-11-04 Sorry, we didn't keep track of changes from 1.02 to 1.09. Some of the changes listed in 6.0 were actually included in the 1.02.1 to 1.09 releases. 1996-08-01 Here is a new migration file for 1.02.1. It includes the 'copy' change and a script to convert old ASCII files. The following notes are for the benefit of users who want to migrate databases from Postgres95 1.01 and 1.02 to Postgres95 1.02.1. If you are starting afresh with Postgres95 1.02.1 and do not need to migrate old databases, you do not need to read any further. In order to upgrade older Postgres95 version 1.01 or 1.02 databases to version 1.02.1, the following steps are required: Start up a new 1.02.1 postmaster Add the new built-in functions and operators of 1.02.1 to 1.01 or 1.02 databases. This is done by running the new 1.02.1 server against your own 1.01 or 1.02 database and applying the queries attached at the end of the file. This can be done easily through psql. If your 1.01 or 1.02 database is named testdb and you have cut the commands from the end of this file and saved them in addfunc.sql: % psql testdb -f addfunc.sql Those upgrading 1.02 databases will get a warning when executing the last two statements in the file because they are already present in 1.02. This is not a cause for concern. If you are trying to reload a pg_dump or text-mode, copy tablename to stdout generated with a previous version, you will need to run the attached sed script on the ASCII file before loading it into the database. The old format used '.' as end-of-data, while '\.' is now the end-of-data marker. Also, empty strings are now loaded in as '' rather than NULL. See the copy manual page for full details. sed 's/^\.$/\\./g' <in_file >out_file If you are loading an older binary copy or non-stdout copy, there is no end-of-data character, and hence no conversion necessary. -- following lines added by agc to reflect the case-insensitive -- regexp searching for varchar (in 1.02), and bpchar (in 1.02.1) create operator ~* (leftarg = bpchar, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregexeq); create operator !~* (leftarg = bpchar, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregexne); create operator ~* (leftarg = varchar, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregexeq); create operator !~* (leftarg = varchar, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregexne); Source code maintenance and development * worldwide team of volunteers * the source tree now in CVS at ftp.ki.net Enhancements * psql (and underlying libpq library) now has many more options for formatting output, including HTML * pg_dump now output the schema and/or the data, with many fixes to enhance completeness. * psql used in place of monitor in administration shell scripts. monitor to be deprecated in next release. * date/time functions enhanced * NULL insert/update/comparison fixed/enhanced * TCL/TK lib and shell fixed to work with both tck7.4/tk4.0 and tcl7.5/tk4.1 Bug Fixes (almost too numerous to mention) * indexes * storage management * check for NULL pointer before dereferencing * Makefile fixes New Ports * added SolarisX86 port * added BSD/OS 2.1 port * added DG/UX port 1996-02-23 The following notes are for the benefit of users who want to migrate databases from Postgres95 1.0 to Postgres95 1.01. If you are starting afresh with Postgres95 1.01 and do not need to migrate old databases, you do not need to read any further. In order to Postgres95 version 1.01 with databases created with Postgres95 version 1.0, the following steps are required: Set the definition of NAMEDATALEN in src/Makefile.global to 16 and OIDNAMELEN to 20. Decide whether you want to use Host based authentication. If you do, you must create a file name pg_hba in your top-level data directory (typically the value of your $PGDATA). src/libpq/pg_hba shows an example syntax. If you do not want host-based authentication, you can comment out the line: HBA = 1 in src/Makefile.global Note that host-based authentication is turned on by default, and if you do not take steps A or B above, the out-of-the-box 1.01 will not allow you to connect to 1.0 databases. Compile and install 1.01, but DO NOT do the initdb step. Before doing anything else, terminate your 1.0 postmaster, and backup your existing $PGDATA directory. Set your PGDATA environment variable to your 1.0 databases, but set up path up so that 1.01 binaries are being used. Modify the file $PGDATA/PG_VERSION from 5.0 to 5.1 Start up a new 1.01 postmaster Add the new built-in functions and operators of 1.01 to 1.0 databases. This is done by running the new 1.01 server against your own 1.0 database and applying the queries attached and saving in the file 1.0_to_1.01.sql. This can be done easily through psql. If your 1.0 database is name testdb: % psql testdb -f 1.0_to_1.01.sql and then execute the following commands (cut and paste from here): -- add builtin functions that are new to 1.01 create function int4eqoid (int4, oid) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function oideqint4 (oid, int4) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function char2icregexeq (char2, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function char2icregexne (char2, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function char4icregexeq (char4, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function char4icregexne (char4, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function char8icregexeq (char8, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function char8icregexne (char8, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function char16icregexeq (char16, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function char16icregexne (char16, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function texticregexeq (text, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; create function texticregexne (text, text) returns bool as 'foo' language 'internal'; -- add builtin functions that are new to 1.01 create operator = (leftarg = int4, rightarg = oid, procedure = int4eqoid); create operator = (leftarg = oid, rightarg = int4, procedure = oideqint4); create operator ~* (leftarg = char2, rightarg = text, procedure = char2icregexeq); create operator !~* (leftarg = char2, rightarg = text, procedure = char2icregexne); create operator ~* (leftarg = char4, rightarg = text, procedure = char4icregexeq); create operator !~* (leftarg = char4, rightarg = text, procedure = char4icregexne); create operator ~* (leftarg = char8, rightarg = text, procedure = char8icregexeq); create operator !~* (leftarg = char8, rightarg = text, procedure = char8icregexne); create operator ~* (leftarg = char16, rightarg = text, procedure = char16icregexeq); create operator !~* (leftarg = char16, rightarg = text, procedure = char16icregexne); create operator ~* (leftarg = text, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregexeq); create operator !~* (leftarg = text, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregexne); Incompatibilities: * 1.01 is backwards compatible with 1.0 database provided the user follow the steps outlined in the MIGRATION_from_1.0_to_1.01 file. If those steps are not taken, 1.01 is not compatible with 1.0 database. Enhancements: * added PQdisplayTuples() to libpq and changed monitor and psql to use it * added NeXT port (requires SysVIPC implementation) * added CAST .. AS ... syntax * added ASC and DESC key words * added 'internal' as a possible language for CREATE FUNCTION internal functions are C functions which have been statically linked into the postgres backend. * a new type "name" has been added for system identifiers (table names, attribute names, etc.) This replaces the old char16 type. The of name is set by the NAMEDATALEN #define in src/Makefile.global * a readable reference manual that describes the query language. * added host-based access control. A configuration file ($PGDATA/pg_hba) is used to hold the configuration data. If host-based access control is not desired, comment out HBA=1 in src/Makefile.global. * changed regex handling to be uniform use of Henry Spencer's regex code regardless of platform. The regex code is included in the distribution * added functions and operators for case-insensitive regular expressions. The operators are ~* and !~*. * pg_dump uses COPY instead of SELECT loop for better performance Bug fixes: * fixed an optimizer bug that was causing core dumps when functions calls were used in comparisons in the WHERE clause * changed all uses of getuid to geteuid so that effective uids are used * psql now returns non-zero status on errors when using -c * applied public patches 1-14 1995-09-05 Copyright change: * The copyright of Postgres 1.0 has been loosened to be freely modifiable and modifiable for any purpose. Please read the COPYRIGHT file. Thanks to Professor Michael Stonebraker for making this possible. Incompatibilities: * date formats have to be MM-DD-YYYY (or DD-MM-YYYY if you're using EUROPEAN STYLE). This follows SQL-92 specs. * "delimiters" is now a key word Enhancements: * sql LIKE syntax has been added * copy command now takes an optional USING DELIMITER specification. delimiters can be any single-character string. * IRIX 5.3 port has been added. Thanks to Paul Walmsley and others. * updated pg_dump to work with new libpq * \d has been added psql Thanks to Keith Parks * regexp performance for architectures that use POSIX regex has been improved due to caching of precompiled patterns. Thanks to Alistair Crooks * a new version of libpq++ Thanks to William Wanders Bug fixes: * arbitrary userids can be specified in the createuser script * \c to connect to other databases in psql now works. * bad pg_proc entry for float4inc() is fixed * users with usecreatedb field set can now create databases without having to be usesuper * remove access control entries when the entry no longer has any privileges * fixed non-portable datetimes implementation * added kerberos flags to the src/backend/Makefile * libpq now works with kerberos * typographic errors in the user manual have been corrected. * btrees with multiple index never worked, now we tell you they don't work when you try to use them 1995-07-21 Incompatible changes: * BETA-0.3 IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH DATABASES CREATED WITH PREVIOUS VERSIONS (due to system catalog changes and indexing structure changes). * double-quote (") is deprecated as a quoting character for string literals; you need to convert them to single quotes ('). * name of aggregates (eg. int4sum) are renamed in accordance with the SQL standard (eg. sum). * CHANGE ACL syntax is replaced by GRANT/REVOKE syntax. * float literals (eg. 3.14) are now of type float4 (instead of float8 in previous releases); you might have to do typecasting if you depend on it being of type float8. If you neglect to do the typecasting and you assign a float literal to a field of type float8, you might get incorrect values stored! * LIBPQ has been totally revamped so that frontend applications can connect to multiple backends * the usesysid field in pg_user has been changed from int2 to int4 to allow wider range of Unix user ids. * the netbsd/freebsd/bsd o/s ports have been consolidated into a single BSD44_derived port. (thanks to Alistair Crooks) SQL standard-compliance (the following details changes that makes postgres95 more compliant to the SQL-92 standard): * the following SQL types are now built-in: smallint, int(eger), float, real, char(N), varchar(N), date and time. The following are aliases to existing postgres types: smallint -> int2 integer, int -> int4 float, real -> float4 char(N) and varchar(N) are implemented as truncated text types. In addition, char(N) does blank-padding. * single-quote (') is used for quoting string literals; '' (in addition to \') is supported as means of inserting a single quote in a string * SQL standard aggregate names (MAX, MIN, AVG, SUM, COUNT) are used (Also, aggregates can now be overloaded, i.e. you can define your own MAX aggregate to take in a user-defined type.) * CHANGE ACL removed. GRANT/REVOKE syntax added. - Privileges can be given to a group using the "GROUP" key word. For example: GRANT SELECT ON foobar TO GROUP my_group; The key word 'PUBLIC' is also supported to mean all users. Privileges can only be granted or revoked to one user or group at a time. "WITH GRANT OPTION" is not supported. Only class owners can change access control - The default access control is to grant users readonly access. You must explicitly grant insert/update access to users. To change this, modify the line in src/backend/utils/acl.h that defines ACL_WORLD_DEFAULT Bug fixes: * the bug where aggregates of empty tables were not run has been fixed. Now, aggregates run on empty tables will return the initial conditions of the aggregates. Thus, COUNT of an empty table will now properly return 0. MAX/MIN of an empty table will return a row of value NULL. * allow the use of \; inside the monitor * the LISTEN/NOTIFY asynchronous notification mechanism now work * NOTIFY in rule action bodies now work * hash indexes work, and access methods in general should perform better. creation of large btree indexes should be much faster. (thanks to Paul Aoki) Other changes and enhancements: * addition of an EXPLAIN statement used for explaining the query execution plan (eg. "EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM EMP" prints out the execution plan for the query). * WARN and NOTICE messages no longer have timestamps on them. To turn on timestamps of error messages, uncomment the line in src/backend/utils/elog.h: /* define ELOG_TIMESTAMPS */ * On an access control violation, the message "Either no such class or insufficient privilege" will be given. This is the same message that is returned when a class is not found. This dissuades non-privileged users from guessing the existence of privileged classes. * some additional system catalog changes have been made that are not visible to the user. libpgtcl changes: * The -oid option has been added to the "pg_result" tcl command. pg_result -oid returns oid of the last row inserted. If the last command was not an INSERT, then pg_result -oid returns "". * the large object interface is available as pg_lo* tcl commands: pg_lo_open, pg_lo_close, pg_lo_creat, etc. Portability enhancements and New Ports: * flex/lex problems have been cleared up. Now, you should be able to use flex instead of lex on any platforms. We no longer make assumptions of what lexer you use based on the platform you use. * The Linux-ELF port is now supported. Various configuration have been tested: The following configuration is known to work: kernel 1.2.10, gcc 2.6.3, libc 4.7.2, flex 2.5.2, bison 1.24 with everything in ELF format, New utilities: * ipcclean added to the distribution ipcclean usually does not need to be run, but if your backend crashes and leaves shared memory segments hanging around, ipcclean will clean them up for you. New documentation: * the user manual has been revised and libpq documentation added. 1995-05-25 Incompatible changes: * The SQL statement for creating a database is 'CREATE DATABASE' instead of 'CREATEDB'. Similarly, dropping a database is 'DROP DATABASE' instead of 'DESTROYDB'. However, the names of the executables 'createdb' and 'destroydb' remain the same. New tools: * pgperl - a Perl (4.036) interface to Postgres95 * pg_dump - a utility for dumping out a postgres database into a script file containing query commands. The script files are in an ASCII format and can be used to reconstruct the database, even on other machines and other architectures. (Also good for converting a Postgres 4.2 database to Postgres95 database.) The following ports have been incorporated into postgres95-beta-0.02: * the NetBSD port by Alistair Crooks * the AIX port by Mike Tung * the Windows NT port by Jon Forrest (more stuff but not done yet) * the Linux ELF port by Brian Gallew The following bugs have been fixed in postgres95-beta-0.02: * new lines not escaped in COPY OUT and problem with COPY OUT when first attribute is a '.' * cannot type return to use the default user id in createuser * SELECT DISTINCT on big tables crashes * Linux installation problems * monitor doesn't allow use of 'localhost' as PGHOST * psql core dumps when doing \c or \l * the "pgtclsh" target missing from src/bin/pgtclsh/Makefile * libpgtcl has a hard-wired default port number * SELECT DISTINCT INTO TABLE hangs * CREATE TYPE doesn't accept 'variable' as the internallength * wrong result using more than 1 aggregate in a SELECT 1995-05-01 Initial release. These timing results are from running the regression test with the commands % cd src/test/regress % make all % time make runtest Timing under Linux 2.0.27 seems to have a roughly 5% variation from run to run, presumably due to the scheduling vagaries of multitasking systems. As has been the case for previous releases, timing between releases is not directly comparable since new regression tests have been added. In general, 6.5 is faster than previous releases. Timing with fsync() disabled: Time System 02:00 Dual Pentium Pro 180, 224MB, UW-SCSI, Linux 2.0.36, gcc 2.7.2.3 -O2 -m486 04:38 Sparc Ultra 1 143MHz, 64MB, Solaris 2.6 Timing with fsync() enabled: Time System 04:21 Dual Pentium Pro 180, 224MB, UW-SCSI, Linux 2.0.36, gcc 2.7.2.3 -O2 -m486 For the Linux system above, using UW-SCSI disks rather than (older) IDE disks leads to a 50% improvement in speed on the regression test. The times for this release are not directly comparable to those for previous releases since some additional regression tests have been included. In general, however, 6.4 should be slightly faster than the previous release (thanks, Bruce!). Time System 02:26 Dual Pentium Pro 180, 96MB, UW-SCSI, Linux 2.0.30, gcc 2.7.2.1 -O2 -m486 The times for this release are not directly comparable to those for previous releases since some additional regression tests have been included and some obsolete tests involving time travel have been removed. In general, however, 6.3 is substantially faster than previous releases (thanks, Bruce!). Time System 02:30 Dual Pentium Pro 180, 96MB, UW-SCSI, Linux 2.0.30, gcc 2.7.2.1 -O2 -m486 04:12 Dual Pentium Pro 180, 96MB, EIDE, Linux 2.0.30, gcc 2.7.2.1 -O2 -m486 Time System 06:12 Pentium Pro 180, 32MB, EIDE, Linux 2.0.30, gcc 2.7.2 -O2 -m486 12:06 P-100, 48MB, Linux 2.0.29, gcc 39:58 Sparc IPC 32MB, Solaris 2.5, gcc 2.7.2.1 -O -g ]]>