Release date: 2003-11-17
Major changes in this release:
IN
/ NOT IN
subqueries are
now much more efficient
In previous releases, IN
/NOT
IN
subqueries were joined to the upper query by
sequentially scanning the subquery looking for a match. The
7.4 code uses the same sophisticated techniques used by
ordinary joins and so is much faster. An
IN
will now usually be as fast as or faster
than an equivalent EXISTS
subquery; this
reverses the conventional wisdom that applied to previous
releases.
GROUP BY
processing by using hash buckets
In previous releases, rows to be grouped had to be sorted
first. The 7.4 code can do GROUP BY
without sorting, by accumulating results into a hash table
with one entry per group. It will still use the sort
technique, however, if the hash table is estimated to be too
large to fit in sort_mem
.
In previous releases, hash joins could only occur on single keys. This release allows multicolumn hash joins.
JOIN
syntax are
now better optimized
Prior releases evaluated queries using the explicit
JOIN
syntax only in the order implied by
the syntax. 7.4 allows full optimization of these queries,
meaning the optimizer considers all possible join orderings
and chooses the most efficient. Outer joins, however, must
still follow the declared ordering.
The entire regular expression module has been replaced with a new version by Henry Spencer, originally written for Tcl. The code greatly improves performance and supports several flavors of regular expressions.
Simple SQL functions can now be inlined by including their SQL in the main query. This improves performance by eliminating per-call overhead. That means simple SQL functions now behave like macros.
Previous releases allowed only IPv4 connections, and the IP data types only supported IPv4 addresses. This release adds full IPv6 support in both of these areas.
Several people very familiar with the SSL API have overhauled our SSL code to improve SSL key negotiation and error recovery.
In previous releases, B-tree index pages that were left empty
because of deleted rows could only be reused by rows with
index values similar to the rows originally indexed on that
page. In 7.4, VACUUM
records empty index
pages and allows them to be reused for any future index rows.
The information schema provides a standardized and stable way to access information about the schema objects defined in a database.
The commands FETCH
and
MOVE
have been overhauled to conform more
closely to the SQL standard.
These cursors are also called holdable cursors.
The new protocol adds error codes, more status information,
faster startup, better support for binary data transmission,
parameter values separated from SQL commands, prepared
statements available at the protocol level, and cleaner
recovery from COPY
failures. The older
protocol is still supported by both server and clients.
While previous libpq releases
already supported threads, this release improves thread safety
by fixing some non-thread-safe code that was used during
database connection startup. The configure
option --enable-thread-safety
must be used to
enable this feature.
A new full-text indexing suite is available in
contrib/tsearch2
.
The new autovacuum tool in
contrib/autovacuum
monitors the database
statistics tables for
INSERT
/UPDATE
/DELETE
activity and automatically vacuums tables when needed.
Many array limitations have been removed, and arrays behave more like fully-supported data types.
A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release.
Observe the following incompatibilities:
The server-side autocommit setting was removed and reimplemented in client applications and languages. Server-side autocommit was causing too many problems with languages and applications that wanted to control their own autocommit behavior, so autocommit was removed from the server and added to individual client APIs as appropriate.
Error message wording has changed substantially in this release. Significant effort was invested to make the messages more consistent and user-oriented. If your applications try to detect different error conditions by parsing the error message, you are strongly encouraged to use the new error code facility instead.
Inner joins using the explicit JOIN
syntax
might behave differently because they are now better
optimized.
A number of server configuration parameters have been renamed for clarity, primarily those related to logging.
FETCH 0
or MOVE 0
now
does nothing. In prior releases, FETCH 0
would fetch all remaining rows, and MOVE 0
would move to the end of the cursor.
FETCH
and MOVE
now return
the actual number of rows fetched/moved, or zero if at the
beginning/end of the cursor. Prior releases would return the
row count passed to the command, not the number of rows
actually fetched or moved.
COPY
now can process files that use
carriage-return or carriage-return/line-feed end-of-line
sequences. Literal carriage-returns and line-feeds are no
longer accepted in data values; use \r
and
\n
instead.
Trailing spaces are now trimmed when converting from type
char(
to
n
)varchar(
or n
)text
.
This is what most people always expected to happen anyway.
The data type float(
now
measures p
)p
in binary digits, not decimal
digits. The new behavior follows the SQL standard.
Ambiguous date values now must match the ordering specified by
the datestyle
setting. In prior releases, a
date specification of 10/20/03
was interpreted as a
date in October even if datestyle
specified that
the day should be first. 7.4 will throw an error if a date
specification is invalid for the current setting of
datestyle
.
The functions oidrand
,
oidsrand
, and
userfntest
have been removed. These
functions were determined to be no longer useful.
String literals specifying time-varying date/time values, such
as 'now'
or 'today'
will
no longer work as expected in column default expressions; they
now cause the time of the table creation to be the default, not
the time of the insertion. Functions such as
now()
, current_timestamp
, or
current_date
should be used instead.
In previous releases, there was special code so that strings
such as 'now'
were interpreted at
INSERT
time and not at table creation time, but
this work around didn't cover all cases. Release 7.4 now
requires that defaults be defined properly using functions such
as now()
or current_timestamp
. These
will work in all situations.
The dollar sign ($
) is no longer allowed in
operator names. It can instead be a non-first character in
identifiers. This was done to improve compatibility with other
database systems, and to avoid syntax problems when parameter
placeholders ($
) are written
adjacent to operators.
n
Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between release 7.4 and the previous major release.
Allow IPv6 server connections (Nigel Kukard, Johan Jordaan, Bruce, Tom, Kurt Roeckx, Andrew Dunstan)
Fix SSL to handle errors cleanly (Nathan Mueller)
In prior releases, certain SSL API error reports were not handled correctly. This release fixes those problems.
SSL protocol security and performance improvements (Sean Chittenden)
SSL key renegotiation was happening too frequently, causing poor SSL performance. Also, initial key handling was improved.
Print lock information when a deadlock is detected (Tom)
This allows easier debugging of deadlock situations.
Update /tmp
socket modification times
regularly to avoid their removal (Tom)
This should help prevent /tmp
directory
cleaner administration scripts from removing server socket
files.
Enable PAM for macOS (Aaron Hillegass)
Make B-tree indexes fully WAL-safe (Tom)
In prior releases, under certain rare cases, a server crash could cause B-tree indexes to become corrupt. This release removes those last few rare cases.
Allow B-tree index compaction and empty page reuse (Tom)
Fix inconsistent index lookups during split of first root page (Tom)
In prior releases, when a single-page index split into two pages, there was a brief period when another database session could miss seeing an index entry. This release fixes that rare failure case.
Improve free space map allocation logic (Tom)
Preserve free space information between server restarts (Tom)
In prior releases, the free space map was not saved when the postmaster was stopped, so newly started servers had no free space information. This release saves the free space map, and reloads it when the server is restarted.
Add start time to pg_stat_activity
(Neil)
New code to detect corrupt disk pages; erase with zero_damaged_pages
(Tom)
New client/server protocol: faster, no username length limit, allow clean exit from COPY
(Tom)
Add transaction status, table ID, column ID to client/server protocol (Tom)
Add binary I/O to client/server protocol (Tom)
Remove autocommit server setting; move to client applications (Tom)
New error message wording, error codes, and three levels of error detail (Tom, Joe, Peter)
Add hashing for GROUP BY
aggregates (Tom)
Make nested-loop joins be smarter about multicolumn indexes (Tom)
Allow multikey hash joins (Tom)
Improve constant folding (Tom)
Add ability to inline simple SQL functions (Tom)
Reduce memory usage for queries using complex functions (Tom)
In prior releases, functions returning allocated memory would not free it until the query completed. This release allows the freeing of function-allocated memory when the function call completes, reducing the total memory used by functions.
Improve GEQO optimizer performance (Tom)
This release fixes several inefficiencies in the way the GEQO optimizer manages potential query paths.
Allow IN
/NOT IN
to be handled via hash
tables (Tom)
Improve NOT IN (
performance (Tom)
subquery
)
Allow most IN
subqueries to be processed as
joins (Tom)
Pattern matching operations can use indexes regardless of locale (Peter)
There is no way for non-ASCII locales to use the standard
indexes for LIKE
comparisons. This release
adds a way to create a special index for
LIKE
.
Allow the postmaster to preload libraries using preload_libraries
(Joe)
For shared libraries that require a long time to load, this option is available so the library can be preloaded in the postmaster and inherited by all database sessions.
Improve optimizer cost computations, particularly for subqueries (Tom)
Avoid sort when subquery ORDER BY
matches upper query (Tom)
Deduce that WHERE a.x = b.y AND b.y = 42
also
means a.x = 42
(Tom)
Allow hash/merge joins on complex joins (Tom)
Allow hash joins for more data types (Tom)
Allow join optimization of explicit inner joins, disable with
join_collapse_limit
(Tom)
Add parameter from_collapse_limit
to control
conversion of subqueries to joins (Tom)
Use faster and more powerful regular expression code from Tcl (Henry Spencer, Tom)
Use bit-mapped relation sets in the optimizer (Tom)
Improve connection startup time (Tom)
The new client/server protocol requires fewer network packets to start a database session.
Improve trigger/constraint performance (Stephan)
Improve speed of col IN (const, const, const, ...)
(Tom)
Fix hash indexes which were broken in rare cases (Tom)
Improve hash index concurrency and speed (Tom)
Prior releases suffered from poor hash index performance, particularly for high concurrency situations. This release fixes that, and the development group is interested in reports comparing B-tree and hash index performance.
Align shared buffers on 32-byte boundary for copy speed improvement (Manfred Spraul)
Certain CPU's perform faster data copies when addresses are 32-byte aligned.
Data type numeric
reimplemented for better performance (Tom)
numeric
used to be stored in base 100. The new code
uses base 10000, for significantly better performance.
Rename server parameter server_min_messages
to log_min_messages
(Bruce)
This was done so most parameters that control the server logs
begin with log_
.
Rename show_*_stats
to log_*_stats
(Bruce)
Rename show_source_port
to log_source_port
(Bruce)
Rename hostname_lookup
to log_hostname
(Bruce)
Add checkpoint_warning
to warn of excessive checkpointing (Bruce)
In prior releases, it was difficult to determine if checkpoint was happening too frequently. This feature adds a warning to the server logs when excessive checkpointing happens.
New read-only server parameters for localization (Tom)
Change debug server log messages to output as DEBUG
rather than LOG
(Bruce)
Prevent server log variables from being turned off by non-superusers (Bruce)
This is a security feature so non-superusers cannot disable logging that was enabled by the administrator.
log_min_messages
/client_min_messages
now
controls debug_*
output (Bruce)
This centralizes client debug information so all debug output can be sent to either the client or server logs.
Add macOS Rendezvous server support (Chris Campbell)
This allows macOS hosts to query the network for available PostgreSQL servers.
Add ability to print only slow statements using
log_min_duration_statement
(Christopher)
This is an often requested debugging feature that allows administrators to see only slow queries in their server logs.
Allow pg_hba.conf
to accept netmasks in CIDR format (Andrew Dunstan)
This allows administrators to merge the host IP address and
netmask fields into a single CIDR field in pg_hba.conf
.
New read-only parameter is_superuser
(Tom)
New parameter log_error_verbosity
to control error detail (Tom)
This works with the new error reporting feature to supply additional error information like hints, file names and line numbers.
postgres --describe-config
now dumps server config variables (Aizaz Ahmed, Peter)
This option is useful for administration tools that need to know the configuration variable names and their minimums, maximums, defaults, and descriptions.
Add new columns in pg_settings
:
context
, type
, source
,
min_val
, max_val
(Joe)
Make default shared_buffers
1000 and
max_connections
100, if possible (Tom)
Prior versions defaulted to 64 shared buffers so PostgreSQL
would start on even very old systems. This release tests the
amount of shared memory allowed by the platform and selects more
reasonable default values if possible. Of course, users are
still encouraged to evaluate their resource load and size
shared_buffers
accordingly.
New pg_hba.conf
record type
hostnossl
to prevent SSL connections (Jon
Jensen)
In prior releases, there was no way to prevent SSL connections if both the client and server supported SSL. This option allows that capability.
Remove parameter geqo_random_seed
(Tom)
Add server parameter regex_flavor
to control regular expression processing (Tom)
Make pg_ctl
better handle nonstandard ports (Greg)
New SQL-standard information schema (Peter)
Add read-only transactions (Peter)
Print key name and value in foreign-key violation messages (Dmitry Tkach)
Allow users to see their own queries in pg_stat_activity
(Kevin Brown)
In prior releases, only the superuser could see query strings
using pg_stat_activity
. Now ordinary users
can see their own query strings.
Fix aggregates in subqueries to match SQL standard (Tom)
The SQL standard says that an aggregate function appearing within a nested subquery belongs to the outer query if its argument contains only outer-query variables. Prior PostgreSQL releases did not handle this fine point correctly.
Add option to prevent auto-addition of tables referenced in query (Nigel J. Andrews)
By default, tables mentioned in the query are automatically
added to the FROM
clause if they are not already
there. This is compatible with historic
POSTGRES behavior but is contrary to
the SQL standard. This option allows selecting
standard-compatible behavior.
Allow UPDATE ... SET col = DEFAULT
(Rod)
This allows UPDATE
to set a column to its
declared default value.
Allow expressions to be used in LIMIT
/OFFSET
(Tom)
In prior releases, LIMIT
/OFFSET
could
only use constants, not expressions.
Implement CREATE TABLE AS EXECUTE
(Neil, Peter)
Make CREATE SEQUENCE
grammar more conforming to SQL:2003 (Neil)
Add statement-level triggers (Neil)
While this allows a trigger to fire at the end of a statement, it does not allow the trigger to access all rows modified by the statement. This capability is planned for a future release.
Add check constraints for domains (Rod)
This greatly increases the usefulness of domains by allowing them to use check constraints.
Add ALTER DOMAIN
(Rod)
This allows manipulation of existing domains.
Fix several zero-column table bugs (Tom)
PostgreSQL supports zero-column tables. This fixes various bugs that occur when using such tables.
Have ALTER TABLE ... ADD PRIMARY KEY
add not-null constraint (Rod)
In prior releases, ALTER TABLE ... ADD
PRIMARY
would add a unique index, but not a not-null
constraint. That is fixed in this release.
Add ALTER TABLE ... WITHOUT OIDS
(Rod)
This allows control over whether new and updated rows will have an OID column. This is most useful for saving storage space.
Add ALTER SEQUENCE
to modify minimum, maximum,
increment, cache, cycle values (Rod)
Add ALTER TABLE ... CLUSTER ON
(Alvaro Herrera)
This command is used by pg_dump
to record the
cluster column for each table previously clustered. This
information is used by database-wide cluster to cluster all
previously clustered tables.
Improve automatic type casting for domains (Rod, Tom)
Allow dollar signs in identifiers, except as first character (Tom)
Disallow dollar signs in operator names, so x=$1
works (Tom)
Allow copying table schema using LIKE
, also SQL:2003
feature subtable
INCLUDING DEFAULTS
(Rod)
Add WITH GRANT OPTION
clause to
GRANT
(Peter)
This enabled GRANT
to give other users the
ability to grant privileges on an object.
Add ON COMMIT
clause to CREATE TABLE
for temporary tables (Gavin)
This adds the ability for a table to be dropped or all rows deleted on transaction commit.
Allow cursors outside transactions using WITH HOLD
(Neil)
In previous releases, cursors were removed at the end of the
transaction that created them. Cursors can now be created with
the WITH HOLD
option, which allows them to
continue to be accessed after the creating transaction has
committed.
FETCH 0
and MOVE 0
now do nothing (Bruce)
In previous releases, FETCH 0
fetched all
remaining rows, and MOVE 0
moved to the end
of the cursor.
Cause FETCH
and MOVE
to
return the number of rows fetched/moved, or zero if at the
beginning/end of cursor, per SQL standard (Bruce)
In prior releases, the row count returned by
FETCH
and MOVE
did not
accurately reflect the number of rows processed.
Properly handle SCROLL
with cursors, or
report an error (Neil)
Allowing random access (both forward and backward scrolling) to
some kinds of queries cannot be done without some additional
work. If SCROLL
is specified when the cursor
is created, this additional work will be performed. Furthermore,
if the cursor has been created with NO SCROLL
,
no random access is allowed.
Implement SQL-compatible options FIRST
,
LAST
, ABSOLUTE
,
n
RELATIVE
for
n
FETCH
and MOVE
(Tom)
Allow EXPLAIN
on DECLARE CURSOR
(Tom)
Allow CLUSTER
to use index marked as pre-clustered by default (Alvaro Herrera)
Allow CLUSTER
to cluster all tables (Alvaro Herrera)
This allows all previously clustered tables in a database to be reclustered with a single command.
Prevent CLUSTER
on partial indexes (Tom)
Allow DOS and Mac line-endings in COPY
files (Bruce)
Disallow literal carriage return as a data value,
backslash-carriage-return and \r
are still allowed
(Bruce)
COPY
changes (binary, \.
) (Tom)
Recover from COPY
failure cleanly (Tom)
Prevent possible memory leaks in COPY
(Tom)
Make TRUNCATE
transaction-safe (Rod)
TRUNCATE
can now be used inside a
transaction. If the transaction aborts, the changes made by the
TRUNCATE
are automatically rolled back.
Allow prepare/bind of utility commands like
FETCH
and EXPLAIN
(Tom)
Add EXPLAIN EXECUTE
(Neil)
Improve VACUUM
performance on indexes by reducing WAL traffic (Tom)
Functional indexes have been generalized into indexes on expressions (Tom)
In prior releases, functional indexes only supported a simple function applied to one or more column names. This release allows any type of scalar expression.
Have SHOW TRANSACTION ISOLATION
match input
to SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION
(Tom)
Have COMMENT ON DATABASE
on nonlocal
database generate a warning, rather than an error (Rod)
Database comments are stored in database-local tables so comments on a database have to be stored in each database.
Improve reliability of LISTEN
/NOTIFY
(Tom)
Allow REINDEX
to reliably reindex nonshared system catalog indexes (Tom)
This allows system tables to be reindexed without the
requirement of a standalone session, which was necessary in
previous releases. The only tables that now require a standalone
session for reindexing are the global system tables
pg_database
, pg_shadow
, and
pg_group
.
New server parameter extra_float_digits
to
control precision display of floating-point numbers (Pedro
Ferreira, Tom)
This controls output precision which was causing regression testing problems.
Allow +1300
as a numeric time-zone specifier, for FJST (Tom)
Remove rarely used functions oidrand
,
oidsrand
, and userfntest
functions
(Neil)
Add md5()
function to main server, already in contrib/pgcrypto
(Joe)
An MD5 function was frequently requested. For more complex
encryption capabilities, use
contrib/pgcrypto
.
Increase date range of timestamp
(John Cochran)
Change EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM timestamp)
so
timestamp without time zone
is assumed to be in
local time, not GMT (Tom)
Trap division by zero in case the operating system doesn't prevent it (Tom)
Change the numeric
data type internally to base 10000 (Tom)
New hostmask()
function (Greg Wickham)
Fixes for to_char()
and to_timestamp()
(Karel)
Allow functions that can take any argument data type and return
any data type, using anyelement
and
anyarray
(Joe)
This allows the creation of functions that can work with any data type.
Arrays can now be specified as ARRAY[1,2,3]
,
ARRAY[['a','b'],['c','d']]
, or
ARRAY[ARRAY[ARRAY[2]]]
(Joe)
Allow proper comparisons for arrays, including ORDER
BY
and DISTINCT
support
(Joe)
Allow indexes on array columns (Joe)
Allow array concatenation with ||
(Joe)
Allow WHERE
qualification
(Joe)
expr
op
ANY/SOME/ALL
(array_expr
)
This allows arrays to behave like a list of values, for purposes
like SELECT * FROM tab WHERE col IN
(array_val)
.
New array functions array_append
,
array_cat
, array_lower
,
array_prepend
, array_to_string
,
array_upper
, string_to_array
(Joe)
Allow user defined aggregates to use polymorphic functions (Joe)
Allow assignments to empty arrays (Joe)
Allow 60 in seconds fields of time
,
timestamp
, and interval
input values
(Tom)
Sixty-second values are needed for leap seconds.
Allow cidr
data type to be cast to text
(Tom)
Disallow invalid time zone names in SET TIMEZONE
Trim trailing spaces when char
is cast to
varchar
or text
(Tom)
Make float(
measure the precision
p
)p
in binary digits, not decimal digits
(Tom)
Add IPv6 support to the inet
and cidr
data types (Michael Graff)
Add family()
function to report whether address is IPv4 or IPv6 (Michael Graff)
Have SHOW datestyle
generate output similar
to that used by SET datestyle
(Tom)
Make EXTRACT(TIMEZONE)
and SET/SHOW
TIME ZONE
follow the SQL convention for the sign of
time zone offsets, i.e., positive is east from UTC (Tom)
Fix date_trunc('quarter', ...)
(Böjthe Zoltán)
Prior releases returned an incorrect value for this function call.
Make initcap()
more compatible with Oracle (Mike Nolan)
initcap()
now uppercases a letter appearing
after any non-alphanumeric character, rather than only after
whitespace.
Allow only datestyle
field order for date values not in ISO-8601 format (Greg)
Add new datestyle
values MDY
,
DMY
, and YMD
to set input field order;
honor US
and European
for backward
compatibility (Tom)
String literals like 'now'
or
'today'
will no longer work as a column
default. Use functions such as now()
,
current_timestamp
instead. (change
required for prepared statements) (Tom)
Treat NaN as larger than any other value in min()
/max()
(Tom)
NaN was already sorted after ordinary numeric values for most
purposes, but min()
and max()
didn't
get this right.
Prevent interval from suppressing :00
seconds display
New functions pg_get_triggerdef(prettyprint)
and pg_conversion_is_visible()
(Christopher)
Allow time to be specified as 040506
or 0405
(Tom)
Input date order must now be YYYY-MM-DD
(with 4-digit year) or
match datestyle
Make pg_get_constraintdef
support
unique, primary-key, and check constraints (Christopher)
Prevent PL/pgSQL crash when RETURN NEXT
is
used on a zero-row record variable (Tom)
Make PL/Python's spi_execute
interface
handle null values properly (Andrew Bosma)
Allow PL/pgSQL to declare variables of composite types without %ROWTYPE
(Tom)
Fix PL/Python's _quote()
function to handle big integers
Make PL/Python an untrusted language, now called plpythonu
(Kevin Jacobs, Tom)
The Python language no longer supports a restricted execution environment, so the trusted version of PL/Python was removed. If this situation changes, a version of PL/Python that can be used by non-superusers will be readded.
Allow polymorphic PL/pgSQL functions (Joe, Tom)
Allow polymorphic SQL functions (Joe)
Improved compiled function caching mechanism in PL/pgSQL with full support for polymorphism (Joe)
Add new parameter $0
in PL/pgSQL representing the
function's actual return type (Joe)
Allow PL/Tcl and PL/Python to use the same trigger on multiple tables (Tom)
Fixed PL/Tcl's spi_prepare
to accept fully
qualified type names in the parameter type list
(Jan)
Add \pset pager always
to always use pager (Greg)
This forces the pager to be used even if the number of rows is less than the screen height. This is valuable for rows that wrap across several screen rows.
Improve tab completion (Rod, Ross Reedstrom, Ian Barwick)
Reorder \?
help into groupings (Harald Armin Massa, Bruce)
Add backslash commands for listing schemas, casts, and conversions (Christopher)
\encoding
now changes based on the server parameter
client_encoding
(Tom)
In previous versions, \encoding
was not aware
of encoding changes made using SET
client_encoding
.
Save editor buffer into readline history (Ross)
When \e
is used to edit a query, the result is saved
in the readline history for retrieval using the up arrow.
Improve \d
display (Christopher)
Enhance HTML mode to be more standards-conforming (Greg)
New \set AUTOCOMMIT off
capability (Tom)
This takes the place of the removed server parameter autocommit
.
New \set VERBOSITY
to control error detail (Tom)
This controls the new error reporting details.
New prompt escape sequence %x
to show transaction status (Tom)
Long options for psql are now available on all platforms
Multiple pg_dump fixes, including tar format and large objects
Allow pg_dump to dump specific schemas (Neil)
Make pg_dump preserve column storage characteristics (Christopher)
This preserves ALTER TABLE ... SET STORAGE
information.
Make pg_dump preserve CLUSTER
characteristics (Christopher)
Have pg_dumpall use GRANT
/REVOKE
to dump database-level privileges (Tom)
Allow pg_dumpall to support the options -a
,
-s
, -x
of pg_dump (Tom)
Prevent pg_dump from lowercasing identifiers specified on the command line (Tom)
pg_dump options --use-set-session-authorization
and --no-reconnect
now do nothing, all dumps
use SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION
pg_dump no longer reconnects to switch users, but instead always
uses SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION
. This will
reduce password prompting during restores.
Long options for pg_dump are now available on all platforms
PostgreSQL now includes its own long-option processing routines.
Add function PQfreemem
for freeing memory on
Windows, suggested for NOTIFY
(Bruce)
Windows requires that memory allocated in a library be freed by
a function in the same library, hence
free()
doesn't work for freeing memory
allocated by libpq. PQfreemem
is the proper
way to free libpq memory, especially on Windows, and is
recommended for other platforms as well.
Document service capability, and add sample file (Bruce)
This allows clients to look up connection information in a central file on the client machine.
Make PQsetdbLogin
have the same defaults as
PQconnectdb
(Tom)
Allow libpq to cleanly fail when result sets are too large (Tom)
Improve performance of function PQunescapeBytea
(Ben Lamb)
Allow thread-safe libpq with configure
option --enable-thread-safety
(Lee Kindness,
Philip Yarra)
Allow function pqInternalNotice
to accept a
format string and arguments instead of just a preformatted
message (Tom, Sean Chittenden)
Control SSL negotiation with sslmode
values
disable
, allow
,
prefer
, and require
(Jon
Jensen)
Allow new error codes and levels of text (Tom)
Allow access to the underlying table and column of a query result (Tom)
This is helpful for query-builder applications that want to know the underlying table and column names associated with a specific result set.
Allow access to the current transaction status (Tom)
Add ability to pass binary data directly to the server (Tom)
Add function PQexecPrepared
and
PQsendQueryPrepared
functions which perform
bind/execute of previously prepared statements (Tom)
Allow setNull
on updateable result sets
Allow executeBatch
on a prepared statement (Barry)
Support SSL connections (Barry)
Handle schema names in result sets (Paul Sorenson)
Add refcursor support (Nic Ferrier)
Prevent possible memory leak or core dump during libpgtcl shutdown (Tom)
Add Informix compatibility to ECPG (Michael)
This allows ECPG to process embedded C programs that were written using certain Informix extensions.
Add type decimal
to ECPG that is fixed length, for Informix (Michael)
Allow thread-safe embedded SQL programs with
configure
option
--enable-thread-safety
(Lee Kindness, Bruce)
This allows multiple threads to access the database at the same time.
Moved Python client PyGreSQL to http://www.pygresql.org (Marc)
Prevent need for separate platform geometry regression result files (Tom)
Improved PPC locking primitive (Reinhard Max)
New function palloc0
to allocate and clear memory (Bruce)
Fix locking code for s390x CPU (64-bit) (Tom)
Allow OpenBSD to use local ident credentials (William Ahern)
Make query plan trees read-only to executor (Tom)
Add macOS startup scripts (David Wheeler)
Allow libpq to compile with Borland C++ compiler (Lester Godwin, Karl Waclawek)
Use our own version of getopt_long()
if needed (Peter)
Convert administration scripts to C (Peter)
Bison >= 1.85 is now required to build the PostgreSQL grammar, if building from CVS
Merge documentation into one book (Peter)
Add Windows compatibility functions (Bruce)
Allow client interfaces to compile under MinGW (Bruce)
New ereport()
function for error reporting (Tom)
Support Intel compiler on Linux (Peter)
Improve Linux startup scripts (Slawomir Sudnik, Darko Prenosil)
Add support for AMD Opteron and Itanium (Jeffrey W. Baker, Bruce)
Remove --enable-recode
option from configure
This was no longer needed now that we have CREATE CONVERSION
.
Generate a compile error if spinlock code is not found (Bruce)
Platforms without spinlock code will now fail to compile, rather
than silently using semaphores. This failure can be disabled
with a new configure
option.
Change dbmirror license to BSD
Improve earthdistance (Bruno Wolff III)
Portability improvements to pgcrypto (Marko Kreen)
Prevent crash in xml (John Gray, Michael Richards)
Update oracle
Update mysql
Update cube (Bruno Wolff III)
Update earthdistance to use cube (Bruno Wolff III)
Update btree_gist (Oleg)
New tsearch2 full-text search module (Oleg, Teodor)
Add hash-based crosstab function to tablefuncs (Joe)
Add serial column to order connectby()
siblings in tablefuncs (Nabil Sayegh,Joe)
Add named persistent connections to dblink (Shridhar Daithanka)
New pg_autovacuum allows automatic VACUUM
(Matthew T. O'Connor)
Make pgbench honor environment variables PGHOST
, PGPORT
, PGUSER
(Tatsuo)
Improve intarray (Teodor Sigaev)
Improve pgstattuple (Rod)
Fix bug in metaphone()
in fuzzystrmatch
Improve adddepend (Rod)
Update spi/timetravel (Böjthe Zoltán)
Fix dbase -s
option and improve non-ASCII handling (Thomas Behr, Márcio Smiderle)
Remove array module because features now included by default (Joe)