PostgreSQL 8.4beta1 Documentation | ||||
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Release date: 2009-XX-XX, ITEMS CURRENT AS OF 2009-04-08
After many years of development, PostgreSQL has become feature-complete in many areas. This release shows a targeted approach to adding features (e.g. authentication, monitoring, space reuse), and adds capabilities defined in the later SQL standards; the major areas of enhancement are:
Windowing Functions
Common Table Expressions and Recursive Joins
Default and variadic parameters for functions
Parallel Restore
Column Permissions
Per-database locale settings
Improved hash indexes
Improved join performance for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries
Easier-to-use Warm Standby
Automatic sizing of the Free Space Map
Visibility Map (greatly reduces vacuum overhead for slowly-changing tables)
Version-aware psql (backslash commands work against older servers)
Support SSL certificates for authentication
Per-function runtime statistics
Easy editing of functions in psql
New contrib modules: pg_stat_statements, auto_explain, citext, btree_gin
The above items are explained in more detail in the sections below.
A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release.
Observe the following incompatibilities:
Use 64-bit integer datetimes by default (Neil Conway)
This was available previously via a configure --enable-integer-datetimes option.
Remove ipcclean utility command (Bruce)
The utility only worked on a few platforms; users should use their operating system tools instead.
Change postgresql.conf default for log_min_messages to warning (previously notice) to reduce log file volume (Tom)
Have debug_print_parse, debug_print_rewritten, and debug_print_plan output appear at LOG message level, not DEBUG1 as formerly (Tom)
Make debug_pretty_print default to on (Tom)
Make log_temp_files super-user set only, like other logging options (Simon)
Disable appending of the epoch date/time when no % escapes are present in log_filename (Robert Haas)
This change was made because some users wanted a fixed filename, for use with an external log rotation tool.
Remove explain_pretty_print parameter (no longer needed) (Tom)
Remove log_restartpoints from recovery.conf; instead use log_checkpoints (Simon Riggs)
Remove support for the (insecure) crypt authentication method (Magnus)
This breaks compatibility with pre-PostgreSQL 7.2 versions.
Remove krb_realm and krb_server_hostname, now pg_hba.conf-only settings (Magnus)
The pg_hba.conf section below also has extensive changes related to migration.
Force child tables to inherit CHECK constraints from parents (Alex Hunsaker, Nikhil Sontakke, Tom Lane)
Formerly it was possible to delete such a constraint from a child table, allowing rows that violate the constraint to be visible when scanning the parent table. This was deemed inconsistent, as well as contrary to SQL standard.
Change TRUNCATE and LOCK behavior to apply to all child tables (Peter)
There is a new ONLY clause which disables this behavior.
Disallow negative LIMIT or OFFSET values, rather than treating them as zero (Simon)
Disallow LOCK TABLE outside a transaction block (Tom)
Such an operation is useless because the lock would be immediately released.
Have NUMERIC 0 ^ 4.3 return 1, rather than an error, and have 0 ^ 0.0 return 1, rather than error (Bruce)
This was already the float8 behavior.
Remove code that prevented unary minus of floating-point values from producing -0 (Tom)
The changed behavior is more IEEE-standard compliant.
Throw an error if an escape character is the last character in a LIKE pattern (there is nothing to escape) (Tom)
Remove ~=~ and ~<>~ operators formerly used for LIKE index comparisons (Tom)
Pattern indexes now use the regular equality operator.
xpath()
now passes its arguments to libxml
without any changes (Andrew)
This means that the XML argument must be a well-formed XML document. The previous coding attempted to allow XML fragments, but it did not work well.
Make xmlelement()
format attribute values just like
content values (Peter)
Previously, attribute values were formatted according to the normal SQL output behavior, which is sometimes at odds with XML rules.
Have to_char()
's localized month/day names depend
on LC_TIME, not LC_MESSAGES (Euler
Taveira de Oliveira)
Cause to_date()
and to_timestamp()
to more consistently report errors on invalid input (Brendan
Jurd)
Provide consistent rounding for fractional seconds (Ron Mayer) bjm: combine with another item?
Fix to_timestamp()
to not require upper/lower case
matching for meridian (AM/PM) and era
(BC/AD) format designations (Brendan
Jurd)
For example, input value ad now matches the format string AD.
Require the existence of periods in to_timestamp()
meridian (AM/PM) and era
(BC/AD) format designations to match
(Brendan Jurd)
For example, input value AD now does not match format string A.D..
DateStyle no longer controls INTERVAL output (use new variable IntervalStyle)
Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between PostgreSQL 8.4 and the previous major release.
Improve optimizer statistics calculations (Tom, Jan Urbanski)
This includes improved statistics for full text columns.
Allow SELECT DISTINCT and UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT to use hashing (Tom)
This means that these types of queries no longer automatically produce sorted output. The recommended response is to add an ORDER BY clause if needed. As a short-term workaround, the previous behavior can be restored by disabling enable_hashagg, but that is a very performance-expensive fix. SELECT DISTINCT ON never uses hashing.
New semi- and anti-joins (Tom)
While semi-joins merely replace existing IN joins, anti-joins are a new capability for NOT EXISTS clauses. This improves optimization possibilities.
Improve IN/ANY/EXISTS processing (Tom)
IN and EXISTS now provide similar performance for equivalent clauses.
Improve the performance of text_position()
and
related functions by using Boyer-Moore-Horspool searching (David
Rowley)
This is particularly useful for long search patterns.
Improve handling of subqueries by the optimizer (Tom)
Reduce I/O frequency of writing the backend statistics file by writing the file only when requested (Martin Pihlak)
Improve performance for bulk inserts (Robert Haas, Simon)
Increase the default value of default_statistics_target from 10 to 100 (Greg Sabino Mullane, Tom)
The maximum value was also increased from 1000 to 10000.
Modify constraint_exclusion to check for partitioned tables by default when inheritance or UNION ALL is used (Tom)
A new constraint_exclusion setting, partition, was added to match this behavior.
Allow I/O read-ahead for bitmap index scans (Greg Stark)
The amount of read-ahead is controlled by
effective_io_concurrency. This requires
posix_fadvise()
support in the kernel.
Inline simple set-returning SQL functions in FROM clauses (Richard Rowell)
Improve performance of multi-batch hash joins by providing a special case for join key values that are especially common in the outer relation (Bryce Cutt, Ramon Lawrence)
Reduce volume of temporary data in multi-batch hash joins by suppressing "physical tlist" optimization (Michael Henderson, Ramon Lawrence)
Avoid waiting for idle-in-transaction sessions during CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY (Simon)
Convert many postgresql.conf settings to enumerated values so pg_settings can easily display valid values (Magnus)
Add cursor_tuple_fraction parameter to control the fraction of a cursor's rows expected to be requested by the user (Robert Hell)
Allow underscores in postgresql.conf custom variable classes (Tom)
Report appropriate error message for combination of MD5 authentication and db_user_namespace enabled (Bruce)
Support regular expressions in pg_ident.conf (Magnus)
Allow Kerberos/GSSAPI parameters to be changed without restarting the postmaster (Magnus)
Parse pg_hba.conf in the postmaster so errors are reported on reload (Magnus)
Previously errors in the file wouldn't be detected until clients tried to connect, which could leave the system with a broken file loaded.
Remove the sameuser option, making it the default if no usermap is specified (Magnus)
Change all authentication options to be name=value settings (Magnus)
Allow usermap parameter for all external authentication methods (Magnus)
Previously this was only supported for ident authentication.
Allow ident authentication over Unix-domain sockets on Solaris (Garick Hamlin)
Add clientcert option to control requesting of a client certificate (Magnus)
Previously this was controlled by the presence of a root certificate file in the server's data directory.
Add cert authentication method to allow user authentication via SSL certificates (Magnus)
Previously SSL certificates could only verify that the client had access to a certificate, not authenticate a user.
Allow krb5, gssapi and sspi realm and krb5 host settings to be specified in pg_hba.conf (Magnus)
These override the settings in postgresql.conf.
Add krb5, gssapi, and sspi include_realm parameter (Magnus)
This allows identical usernames from different realms to be authenticated as different database users using usermaps.
Show all parsing errors instead of aborting after the first one (Selena Deckelmann)
Provide an option to pg_start_backup()
to force its
implied checkpoint to finish as quickly as possible (Tom)
The default behavior avoids excess I/O consumption, but that is pointless if no concurrent query activity is going on.
Have pg_stop_backup()
wait for modified WAL
files to be archived (Simon)
This guarantees that the backup is valid at the time
pg_stop_backup()
completes.
Prevent normal shutdown if a continuous archiving base backup is in progress (Laurenz Albe)
Cancel a continuous archiving base backup if a fast shutdown is requested (Laurenz Albe)
Allow recovery.conf boolean variables to take the same range of string values as postgresql.conf (Bruce)
Add pg_conf_load_time()
to report when
the Postgres configuration files were last loaded (George
Gensure)
Add pg_terminate_backend()
to safely terminate a
backend (the SIGTERM signal works also) (Tom, Bruce)
Add ability to track user-defined functions call counts and runtimes via parameter track_functions (Martin Pihlak)
Function statistics appear in a new system table, pg_stat_user_functions. However, inlined SQL functions are not tracked.
Allow specification of the maximum pg_stat_activity query string size via track_activity_query_size parameter (Thomas Lee)
Improve syslog performance by increasing the maximum line length (Tom)
Add read-only postgresql.conf variables segment_size, wal_block_size, and wal_segment_size (Bernd Helmle)
When reporting a deadlock, report all session queries involved in the deadlock to the server log (Itagaki Takahiro)
New pg_stat_get_activity(pid)
function to return
information about a specific process id (Magnus)
Move the server statistics file into the subdirectory pg_stat_tmp and allow its location to be specified via stats_temp_directory (Magnus)
This allows the statistics file to be placed in a RAM-resident directory to reduce I/O requirements. On startup/shutdown, the file is copied to the top-level $PGDATA directory so it is preserved between restarts.
Add support for WINDOW functions (Hitoshi Harada)
Add WITH clauses support, including WITH RECURSIVE (Yoshiyuki Asaba, Tatsuo Ishii, Tom)
New TABLE command (Peter)
TABLE tablename is a short-hand for SELECT * FROM tablename.
Allow AS to be optional when specifying a SELECT (or RETURNING) column output label (assuming the label is not an SQL keyword) (Hiroshi Saito)
Support set-returning functions in the output of aggregation and grouping queries (Tom)
Allow SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE to work on inheritance trees (Tom)
Add infrastructure for SQL/MED (Martin Pihlak, Peter)
There are no remote or external SQL/MED capabilities yet, but this change provides a standardized and future-proof system for managing connection information for modules like dblink and plproxy.
Invalidate cached plans when referenced schemas, functions, operators, or operator classes are modified (Martin Pihlak, Tom)
This improves the system's ability to respond to on-the-fly DDL changes.
Allow comparison of composite types and allow arrays of anonymous composite types (Tom)
Specifically this allows array[row(1,2), row(3,4)] and row(1,1.1) = any (array[row(7,7.7), row(1,1.0)]). This is particularly useful for recursive queries.
Add support for Unicode string and identifier specifications using code points, e.g. U&'d\0061t\+000061' (Peter)
Improve the parser's ability to report error locations (Tom)
Support statement-level ON TRUNCATE triggers (Simon)
Add TRUNCATE TABLE ... RESTART/CONTINUE IDENTITY clauses (Zoltan Boszormenyi)
The start value of a sequence can be changed by ALTER SEQUENCE START WITH.
Allow TRUNCATE tab1, tab1 to succeed (Bruce)
Add a separate TRUNCATE permission (Robert Haas)
Have EXPLAIN VERBOSE show the output columns of a query (Tom)
Previously EXPLAIN VERBOSE output an internal representation of the query plan. (That behavior is now available via debug_print_plan.)
Make EXPLAIN identify subplans and initplans with individual labels (Tom)
Have EXPLAIN honor debug_print_plan (Tom)
Allow EXPLAIN on CREATE TABLE AS (Peter)
Allow LIMIT and OFFSET to use subselects as arguments (Tom)
Document that LIMIT NULL and OFFSET NULL have no effect (Tom)
Add SQL-standard syntax for LIMIT/OFFSET capabilities (Peter)
To wit, OFFSET num {ROW|ROWS} FETCH {FIRST|NEXT} [num] {ROW|ROWS} ONLY.
Add support for column-level privileges (Stephen Frost, KaiGai Kohei)
Improve reporting of dependencies during DROP commands (Alex Hunsaker)
Refactor multi-object DROP operations so conflicting dependencies do not generate an error (Alex Hunsaker)
Add WITH [NO] DATA clause to CREATE TABLE AS, per the SQL standard (Tom, Peter)
Add support for user-defined I/O conversion casts (Heikki)
Allow CREATE AGGREGATE to use an internal transition datatype (for super-users only) (Tom)
Add LIKE clause to CREATE TYPE (Tom)
This simplifies creation of data types that use the same internal representation as an existing type.
Allow CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW to add columns to the end of a view (Robert Haas)
Add ALTER TYPE RENAME (Petr Jelinek)
Add ALTER SEQUENCE ... RESTART (no parameter) to reset a sequence to its initial value (Zoltan Boszormenyi) bjm: compatibility problem?
Modify the ALTER TABLE syntax to allow all reasonable combinations for tables, indexes, sequences, and views (Tom)
New syntax supported (these formerly required ALTER TABLE)
ALTER SEQUENCE OWNER TO
ALTER VIEW ALTER COLUMN SET/DROP DEFAULT
ALTER VIEW OWNER TO
ALTER VIEW SET SCHEMA
Add support for the syntax ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET DATA TYPE (Peter)
This is SQL-standard syntax for functionality that was already supported.
Have ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS rewrite the table to remove OID values (Tom)
Also, add ALTER TABLE SET WITH OIDS to rewrite the table to add OIDs.
Improve reporting of CREATE/DROP/RENAME DATABASE failure when uncommitted prepared transactions are the cause (Tom)
Make LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE database-level settings (Radek Strnad, Heikki)
This makes collation similar to encoding, which was always configurable per database.
Improve checks that the database encoding, collation (LC_COLLATE), and character classes (LC_CTYPE) match (Heikki)
Add ALTER DATABASE SET TABLESPACE to move a database to a new tablespace (Guillaume Lelarge, Bernd Helmle)
Add verbose option to the CLUSTER command and clusterdb (Jim Cox)
Decrease memory requirements for recording pending trigger events (Tom)
Dramatically improve the speed of building and accessing hash indexes (Tom Raney, Shreya Bhargava, Kenneth Marshall)
This allows hash indexes to be sometimes faster than btree indexes. However, hash indexes are still not crash-safe.
Have hash indexes store only the hashed value, not the full indexed columns (Xiao Meng)
This greatly reduces the size of hash indexes for long indexed values, and improves performance.
Implement fast update for GIN indexes (Teodor, Oleg)
This option greatly improves update speed at a small penalty in search speed.
xxx_pattern_ops indexes can now be used for simple equality comparisons, not only LIKE (Tom)
Remove the requirement to use @@@ when doing GIN weighted lookups on full text indexes (Tom)
The normal @@ text search operator can be used instead.
Add an optimizer selectivity function for @@ text search operations (Jan Urbanski)
Add partial match support for GIN indexes (Teodor Sigaev, Oleg Bartunov)
Allow prefix matching in full text searches (Teodor Sigaev, Oleg Bartunov)
Improve support for Nepali language and Devanagari alphabet (Teodor)
Support multi-column GIN indexes (Teodor Sigaev)
Allow relation forks to track free space (Heikki)
This allows the recording of all free space discovered by vacuum in *.fsm files, rather than having to limit recording to a fixed-sized shared memory area; max_fsm_pages and max_fsm_relations settings have been removed.
New visibility map file to track pages that do not require vacuum (Heikki)
This allows VACUUM to avoid sequentially scanning a table when only a portion of the table needs vacuuming.
Track explicit transaction snapshots (Alvaro)
This improves space reuse by vacuum in the presence of long-running transactions.
Add vacuum_freeze_table_age parameter to control when VACUUM should ignore the visibility map and do a full table scan to set frozen xids (Heikki)
Add ability to specify autovacuum and TOAST parameters in CREATE TABLE (Alvaro, Euler Taveira de Oliveira)
Autovacuum options used to be stored in a system table.
Add --freeze option to vacuumdb (Bruce)
Add a CaseSensitive option for text search synonym dictionaries (Simon)
Improve the precision of NUMERIC division (Tom)
Add int2 with int8 basic arithmetic operators (Tom)
This simplifies casting requirements.
Allow UUID input to accept optional hyphens after every four digits (Robert Haas)
Accept on/off as boolean data type values (Itagaki Takahiro)
Allow spaces around NaN in the input string for type numeric (Sam Mason)
Reject year 0 BC and years 000 and 0000 (Tom)
Previously these were interpreted as 1 BC; years 0 and 00 are assumed to be the year 2000.
Include SGT (Singapore time) as a valid time zone abbreviation (Tom)
Support the IS0 8601 interval syntax (Tom, Kevin Grittner)
For example, INTERVAL 'P1Y2M3DT4H5M6.7S' is now supported.
Allow INTERVAL precision to be specified after the last field, for SQL-standards compliance (Tom)
Formerly the precision had to be specified after the keyword INTERVAL (this syntax is still supported). Data type definitions will now be output using the new format.
Support infinite dates (Tom)
Add IntervalStyle parameter which controls how INTERVAL values are output (Ron Mayer)
Valid value are: postgres, postgres_verbose, sql_standard, iso_8601. This also controls the handling of negative INTERVAL input when only some fields have positive/negative designations.
Make INTERVAL seconds rounding more consistent across output formats (Ron Mayer)
Have cast on ARRAY apply to all elements, not just the array result (Brendan Jurd)
This allows NULL ARRAY entries as long as they are properly cast.
Make SQL-syntax ARRAY dimensions optional to match the SQL standard (Peter)
Add array_ndims()
to return the number
of dimensions of an array (Robert Haas)
Add array_length()
to return the length
of an array for the specified dimensions (Jim Nasby, Robert
Haas, Peter Eisentraut)
Add new aggregate function array_agg()
, which
returns all aggregated values as a single array (Robert Haas,
Jeff Davis, Peter)
Add unnest()
, which converts an array to
individual row values (Tom)
This is the opposite of array_agg()
.
Add array_fill()
to create arrays initialized with
a value (Pavel Stehule)
Add generate_subscripts()
to generate array
subscripts (Pavel Stehule)
Generate proper error if a SERIAL array is specified (Tom)
Consider TOAST compression on values as short as 32 bytes (previously 256 bytes) (Tom)
Require 25% of space savings before using TOAST compression (previously 20%) (Tom)
Be more aggressive in storing EXTERNAL and EXTENDED column values in TOAST(Tom)
Document that setseed()
allows values from
-1 to 1 (not just 0 to
1), and enforce the valid range (Kris Jurka)
Add server side function lo_import(filename, oid)
(Tatsuo)
Add quote_nullable()
, which behaves like
quote_literal()
but returns NULL for
a null argument (Brendan Jurd)
Improve full text search headline()
generation to
allow several fragments (Sushant Sinha)
Add suppress_redundant_updates_trigger()
trigger
function to avoid non-data-changing updates (Andrew)
Add div(NUMERIC, NUMERIC)
for NUMERIC
division, without rounding (Tom)
Add TIMESTAMP and TIMESTAMPTZ versions of
generate_series()
(Hitoshi Harada)
Implement current_query()
for use by functions
that need to know the currently running query (Tomas Doran)
Add pg_get_keywords()
to return predefined
parser keywords (Dave Page)
Add pg_get_functiondef()
to see a functions
definition (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
Modify pg_relation_size()
to handle free space
map (*.fsm) files (Heikki)
Modify pg_relation_size()
to use regclass
(Heikki)
pg_relation_size(data_type_name)
no longer works.
Add boot_val and reset_val columns to pg_settings output (Greg Smith)
Add support for CURRENT_CATALOG, CURRENT_SCHEMA, SET CATALOG, SET SCHEMA (Peter)
These are SQL-standard capabilities.
Add pg_typeof()
which returns the data type
of any value (Brendan Jurd)
Have version()
return information about whether
the server is a 32 or 64-bit binary (Bruce)
Fix the behavior of information schema columns is_insertable_into and is_updatable to be consistent (Peter)
Convert remaining builtin set-returning functions to use OUT parameters (Jaime Casanova)
This makes it possible to call these functions without specifying
a column list: pg_show_all_settings()
,
pg_lock_status()
, pg_prepared_xact()
,
pg_prepared_statement()
, pg_cursor()
Have pg_*_is_visible()
and
has_*_privilege()
functions return NULL
for invalid oids, rather than generate an error (Tom)
Add has_column_privilege()
and
has_any_column_privilege()
functions (Stephen
Frost, Tom)
Support variadic functions (functions with a variable number of arguments) (Pavel Stehule)
Only trailing arguments can be optional, and they all must be of the same data type.
Allow DEFAULT values for function arguments (Pavel Stehule)
Add CREATE FUNCTION ... RETURNS TABLE clause (Pavel Stehule)
Allow SQL-language functions to return the output of an INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE RETURNING clause (Tom)
Formerly only SELECT was supported.
Support EXECUTE USING (Pavel Stehule)
Allow looping over an open cursor using a FOR loop (Pavel Stehule)
Support RETURN QUERY EXECUTE (Pavel Stehule)
Improve the RAISE command: (Pavel Stehule)
Support DETAIL and HINT fields
Support SQLSTATE error codes
Support an exception name parameter
Allow RAISE without parameters in an exception block to rethrow the current error
Allow specification of SQLSTATE numeric codes in EXCEPTION lists (Pavel Stehule)
This is useful for handling custom SQLSTATE codes.
Support the CASE statement (Pavel Stehule)
Add FOUND and GET DIAGNOSTICS support for the RETURN QUERY statement (Pavel Stehule)
Make FETCH and MOVE set the GET DIAGNOSTICS ROW_COUNT variable (Andrew Gierth)
Add message translation support (Alvaro)
Avoid memory leakage when the same function is called at varying exception-block nesting depths (Tom)
Fix pg_ctl restart to preserve command-line arguments (Bruce)
Add -w/--no-password option that suppresses password prompts to all utilities that have a -W/--password option (Peter)
Remove -q (quiet) option for create* and drop* utility commands (Peter)
These options have had no effect since PostgreSQL 8.3.
Remove startup banner; now just suggest help (Joshua Drake)
Have help show common backslash commands (Greg Sabino Mullane)
Add \pset format wrapped mode to wrap output to the screen width, or file/pipe output too if \pset columns is set (Bryce Nesbitt)
Use the pager for wide output (Bruce)
Require a space between a backslash command and the first argument (Bernd Helmle)
Display access control rights on multiple lines (Brendan Jurd, Andreas Scherbaum)
Improve tab completion support for schema qualified and quoted identifiers (Greg Sabino Mullane)
Allow the normal range of boolean values in \pset, rather than just on and off (Bruce)
Add optional on/off arguments for \timing (David Fetter)
Have \l show access privileges (Andrew Gilligan)
Have \l+ show database sizes, if permissions allow (Andrew Gilligan)
Add the \ef command to edit function definitions (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
\ef without a function name creates an empty function template for editing.
Have \d show cases where this table is referenced as a foreign-key constraint (Kenneth D'Souza)
Have \d show the value of sequence columns (Euler Taveira de Oliveira)
Add column storage type and other relation options to the \d+ display (Gregory Stark, Euler Taveira de Oliveira)
Show relation size in \d+ output (Dickson S. Guedes)
Make \d* commands that do not have a pattern argument show system objects only if the S modifier is specified (Greg Sabino Mullane, Bruce)
The former behavior was inconsistent across different variants of \d, and provided no easy way to see just user objects.
Make \d and \dt consistent in their display of system tables (Bruce)
Previously, \d pg_class would show pg_class while \dt pg_class would not.
Show enumerated values in \dT+ (David Fetter)
Allow \dC to accept wildcard patterns (Tom)
Allow \d* commands to work with versions of PostgreSQL back to 7.4 (Guillaume Lelarge)
Make \df not hide functions that take or return type cstring (Tom)
Previously, such functions were hidden because most of them are datatype I/O functions, which were deemed uninteresting. The new policy about hiding system functions by default makes this wart unnecessary.
Add a --no-tablespaces option to pg_dump/pg_dumpall/pg_restore so dumps can be restored to clusters that have non-matching tablespace layouts (Gavin Roy)
Remove -d and -D options from pg_dump and pg_dumpall (Tom)
These options were too frequently confused with the option to select a database name in other PostgreSQL client applications. The functionality is still available, but you must spell out the long option name --inserts or --column-inserts.
Remove -i/--ignore-version option from pg_dump and pg_dumpall (Tom)
Use of this option does not throw an error, but it has no effect. This option was removed because the version checks are considered necessary.
Disable statement_timeout during dump and restore (Joshua Drake)
Add pg_dump/pg_dumpall option --lock-wait-timeout (David Gould)
This allows dumps to fail if unable to acquire a shared lock within the specified amount of time.
Reorder pg_dump --data-only output to dump primary-key tables referenced by foreign keys before the foreign-key referencing tables (Tom)
This allows data loads when foreign keys are already present. If circular references make this impossible, a NOTICE is issued.
Allow pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and pg_restore to use a specified role (Benedek László)
Allow pg_restore of a custom format archive to use multiple concurrent connections to do the restore (Andrew)
The number of concurrent connections is controlled by the option --jobs.
Add new pg_dump --binary-upgrade option for use by binary upgrade utilities (Bruce)
Allow the OID to be specified when importing large
objects using lo_import_with_oid()
(Tatsuo)
Add events support (Andrew Chernow, Merlin Moncure)
This adds the ability to register callbacks to handle private data for connection and result creation and destruction.
Improve error handling to allow the return of multiple error messages as multi-line error reports (Magnus)
Have PQexecParams()
return
PGRES_EMPTY_QUERY for an empty query (Tom)
It previously returned PGRES_COMMAND_OK.
Document how to avoid the overhead of WSACleanup()
on Windows (Andrew Chernow)
Fix certificate validation for SSL connections (Magnus)
libpq now verifies both the certificate and the name of the server by default when making SSL connections. If a root certificate is not available to use for verification, SSL connections will fail. The sslverify parameter can be used to disable the host and certificate verification if required.
Allow the file locations for client certificates to be specified (Mark Woodward, Alvaro, Magnus)
Add connection parameter sslverify to control the verification of the server's certificate (Magnus)
The default is full verification.
Add a PQinitOpenSSL
function to allow greater control
over OpenSSL/libcrypto initialization (Andrew Chernow)
Properly unregister OpenSSL callbacks when libpq is done with all connections (Bruce, Magnus, Russell Smith)
This is required for applications that unload the libpq library, otherwise invalid OpenSSL callbacks will remain.
Add localization support for messages (Euler Taveira de Oliveira)
ecpg parser is now automatically generated from the server parser (Michael)
Previously a separate ecpg parser was maintained.
Add support for single-use plans with out-of-line parameters (Tom)
Add new SPI_OK_REWRITTEN return code to
SPI_execute()
(Heikki)
This is used when a command is rewritten to another type of command.
Support 64-bit time zone data files (Heikki)
This adds support for daylight saving time (DST) calculations beyond year 2038.
Fix bug in handling of the time zone database when cross-compiling (Richard Evans)
Update build system to use Autoconf 2.61 (Peter)
Require GNU bison for source code builds (Peter)
This has been a requirement for several years but this removes the infrastructure for supporting other parser tools.
Add pg_config --htmldir option (Peter)
Pass float4 by value inside the server (Zoltan Boszormenyi)
Add configure option --disable-float4-byval to use the old behavior.
Pass float8 and int8 by value in the server where possible (Zoltan Boszormenyi)
Add configure option --disable-float8-byval to use the old behavior.
Add configure options --with-segsize, --with-blocksize, --with-wal-blocksize, --with-wal-segsize (Zdenek Kotala, Tom)
This allows compile-time control over several constants that affect how tables and WAL files are segmented and their internal block sizes.
Allow threaded builds on Solaris 2.5 (Bruce)
Use the system's getopt_long()
on Solaris
(Zdenek Kotala, Tom)
This makes option processing more consistent with what Solaris users expect.
Add support for the Sun Studio compiler on Linux (Julius Stroffek)
Append the major version number to the gettext domain, and the soname major version number to libraries (Peter)
This simplifies parallel installations.
Allow out-of-tree builds on Mingw and Cygwin (Richard Evans)
Fix the use of Mingw as a cross-compiling source platform (Peter)
Fix problem when setting LC_MESSAGES on MSVC-built systems (Hiroshi Inoue, Hiroshi Saito, Magnus) bjm: details?
Link backend object files in one step, rather than in stages (Peter)
Improve gettext support to allow better translation of plurals (Peter)
Add DTrace probes (Robert Lor)
Add DTrace support on Mac OS X Leopard (Robert Lor)
Add new cstring to text conversion functions (Brendan Jurd, Tom)
Add a relistemp column to pg_class to ease identification of temporary tables (Tom)
Improve logic for shared cache invalidation (Tom)
Make name char-aligned (Tom)
Add function hook to let plug-ins control the executor (Itagaki Takahiro)
Add a hook to allow the planner statistics lookup behavior to be overridden (Simon Riggs)
Add shmem_startup_hook()
for custom shared memory
requirements (Tom)
Replace pg_class column reltriggers with boolean relhastriggers (Simon)
Also remove unused pg_class columns relukeys, relfkeys, and relrefs.
Move SQL-command manual pages from the manl (man-el) section to man7 (Peter)
Move platform FAQs into the main documentation (Peter)
Prevent parser input files from being built with any conflicts (Peter)
Add support for the KOI8U (Ukrainian) encoding (Peter)
Add Japanese message translations (Japan PostgreSQL Users Group)
This used to be maintained as a separate project.
Add query mode option to /contrib/pgbench (Itagaki Takahiro)
Add duration option to /contrib/pgbench (Itagaki Takahiro)
Fix /contrib/pgstattuple to handle tables and indexes with over 2 billion pages (Tatsuhito Kasahara)
Add Levenshtein string-distance function to /contrib/fuzzystrmatch that allows the user to specify the cost of insertion, deletion, and substitution (Volkan Yazici)
Remove dblink_current_query()
from
/contrib/dblink; it should now use
current_query()
(Tomas Doran)
Have /contrib/ltree support multibyte encodings (laser)
Add /contrib/btree_gin to allow GIN indexes to handle more datatypes (Oleg, Teodor)
Add /contrib/citext as a case-insensitive, multibyte-aware text data type (David Wheeler)
Make sure /contrib/dblink uses a password supplied by the user, and not accidentally from the server's .pgpass file (Joe Conway)
This is a security enhancement.
Add fsm_page_contents()
to/contrib/pageinspect (Heikki)
Modify get_raw_page()
to support free space map
(*.fsm) files. Also update
/contrib/pg_freespacemap.
Add support for multibyte encodings to /contrib/pg_trgm (Teodor)
Rewrite /contrib/intagg to user new server-side
functions array_agg()
and unnest()
(Tom)
Remove /contrib/intarray's definitions of the <@ and @> operators (Tom)
This avoids confusion with the equivalent built-in operators. If necessary, the /contrib/intarray implementations are still available under their historical names @ and ~.
Add /contrib/auto_explain to automatically run EXPLAIN on queries exceeding a specified duration (Itagaki Takahiro, Tom)
Add /contrib/pg_stat_statements for server-wide tracking of statement execution statistics (Itagaki Takahiro)