                                Release Notes

                                Release 8.2.6

     Release date: 2008-01-07

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.2.5, including fixes
   for significant security issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.2.6

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.2.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     * Repair assorted bugs in the regular-expression package (Tom, Will
       Drewry)
       Suitably crafted regular-expression patterns could cause crashes,
       infinite or near-infinite looping, and/or massive memory
       consumption, all of which pose denial-of-service hazards for
       applications that accept regex search patterns from untrustworthy
       sources. (CVE-2007-4769, CVE-2007-4772, CVE-2007-6067)
     * Require non-superusers who use "/contrib/dblink" to use only
       password authentication, as a security measure (Joe)
       The fix that appeared for this in 8.2.5 was incomplete, as it
       plugged the hole for only some "dblink" functions. (CVE-2007-6601,
       CVE-2007-3278)
     * Fix bugs in WAL replay for GIN indexes (Teodor)
     * Fix GIN index build to work properly when maintenance_work_mem is
       4GB or more (Tom)
     * Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2007k (in particular,
       recent Argentina changes) (Tom)
     * Improve planner's handling of LIKE/regex estimation in non-C
       locales (Tom)
     * Fix planning-speed problem for deep outer-join nests, as well as
       possible poor choice of join order (Tom)
     * Fix planner failure in some cases of WHERE false AND var IN (SELECT
       ...) (Tom)
     * Make "CREATE TABLE ... SERIAL" and "ALTER SEQUENCE ... OWNED BY"
       not change the currval() state of the sequence (Tom)
     * Preserve the tablespace and storage parameters of indexes that are
       rebuilt by "ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN TYPE" (Tom)
     * Make archive recovery always start a new WAL timeline, rather than
       only when a recovery stop time was used (Simon)
       This avoids a corner-case risk of trying to overwrite an existing
       archived copy of the last WAL segment, and seems simpler and
       cleaner than the original definition.
     * Make "VACUUM" not use all of maintenance_work_mem when the table is
       too small for it to be useful (Alvaro)
     * Fix potential crash in translate() when using a multibyte database
       encoding (Tom)
     * Make corr() return the correct result for negative correlation
       values (Neil)
     * Fix overflow in extract(epoch from interval) for intervals
       exceeding 68 years (Tom)
     * Fix PL/Perl to not fail when a UTF-8 regular expression is used in
       a trusted function (Andrew)
     * Fix PL/Perl to cope when platform's Perl defines type bool as int
       rather than char (Tom)
       While this could theoretically happen anywhere, no standard build
       of Perl did things this way ... until Mac OS X 10.5.
     * Fix PL/Python to work correctly with Python 2.5 on 64-bit machines
       (Marko Kreen)
     * Fix PL/Python to not crash on long exception messages (Alvaro)
     * Fix pg_dump to correctly handle inheritance child tables that have
       default expressions different from their parent's (Tom)
     * Fix libpq crash when PGPASSFILE refers to a file that is not a
       plain file (Martin Pitt)
     * ecpg parser fixes (Michael)
     * Make "contrib/pgcrypto" defend against OpenSSL libraries that fail
       on keys longer than 128 bits; which is the case at least on some
       Solaris versions (Marko Kreen)
     * Make "contrib/tablefunc"'s crosstab() handle NULL rowid as a
       category in its own right, rather than crashing (Joe)
     * Fix tsvector and tsquery output routines to escape backslashes
       correctly (Teodor, Bruce)
     * Fix crash of to_tsvector() on huge input strings (Teodor)
     * 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.
     * Update gettimeofday configuration check so that PostgreSQL can be
       built on newer versions of MinGW (Magnus)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.2.5

     Release date: 2007-09-17

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.2.4.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.2.5

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.2.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Prevent index corruption when a transaction inserts rows and then
       aborts close to the end of a concurrent "VACUUM" on the same table
       (Tom)
     * Fix ALTER DOMAIN ADD CONSTRAINT for cases involving domains over
       domains (Tom)
     * Make "CREATE DOMAIN ... DEFAULT NULL" work properly (Tom)
     * Fix some planner problems with outer joins, notably poor size
       estimation for t1 LEFT JOIN t2 WHERE t2.col IS NULL (Tom)
     * Allow the interval data type to accept input consisting only of
       milliseconds or microseconds (Neil)
     * Allow timezone name to appear before the year in timestamp input
       (Tom)
     * Fixes for GIN indexes used by "/contrib/tsearch2" (Teodor)
     * Speed up rtree index insertion (Teodor)
     * Fix excessive logging of SSL error messages (Tom)
     * Fix logging so that log messages are never interleaved when using
       the syslogger process (Andrew)
     * Fix crash when log_min_error_statement logging runs out of memory
       (Tom)
     * Fix incorrect handling of some foreign-key corner cases (Tom)
     * Fix stddev_pop(numeric) and var_pop(numeric) (Tom)
     * Prevent "REINDEX" and "CLUSTER" from failing due to attempting to
       process temporary tables of other sessions (Alvaro)
     * Update the time zone database rules, particularly New Zealand's
       upcoming changes (Tom)
     * Windows socket and semaphore improvements (Magnus)
     * Make "pg_ctl -w" work properly in Windows service mode (Dave Page)
     * Fix memory allocation bug when using MIT Kerberos on Windows
       (Magnus)
     * Suppress timezone name (%Z) in log timestamps on Windows because of
       possible encoding mismatches (Tom)
     * Require non-superusers who use "/contrib/dblink" to use only
       password authentication, as a security measure (Joe)
     * Restrict "/contrib/pgstattuple" functions to superusers, for
       security reasons (Tom)
     * Do not let "/contrib/intarray" try to make its GIN opclass the
       default (this caused problems at dump/restore) (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.2.4

     Release date: 2007-04-23

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.2.3, including a
   security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.2.4

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.2.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 shared_preload_libraries for Windows by forcing reload in each
       backend (Korry Douglas)
     * Fix to_char() so it properly upper/lower cases localized day or
       month names (Pavel Stehule)
     * "/contrib/tsearch2" crash fixes (Teodor)
     * Require "COMMIT PREPARED" to be executed in the same database as
       the transaction was prepared in (Heikki)
     * Allow "pg_dump" to do binary backups larger than two gigabytes on
       Windows (Magnus)
     * New traditional (Taiwan) Chinese FAQ (Zhou Daojing)
     * Prevent the statistics collector from writing to disk too
       frequently (Tom)
     * Fix potential-data-corruption bug in how "VACUUM FULL" handles
       "UPDATE" chains (Tom, Pavan Deolasee)
     * Fix bug in domains that use array types (Tom)
     * Fix "pg_dump" so it can dump a serial column's sequence using "-t"
       when not also dumping the owning table (Tom)
     * Planner fixes, including improving outer join and bitmap scan
       selection logic (Tom)
     * Fix possible wrong answers or crash when a PL/pgSQL function tries
       to RETURN from within an EXCEPTION block (Tom)
     * Fix PANIC during enlargement of a hash index (Tom)
     * Fix POSIX-style timezone specs to follow new USA DST rules (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.2.3

     Release date: 2007-02-07

   This release contains two fixes from 8.2.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.2.3

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.2.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Remove overly-restrictive check for type length in constraints and
       functional indexes(Tom)
     * Fix optimization so MIN/MAX in subqueries can again use indexes
       (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.2.2

     Release date: 2007-02-05

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.2.1, including a
   security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.2.2

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.2.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Remove security vulnerabilities that allowed connected users to
       read backend memory (Tom)
       The vulnerabilities involve suppressing the normal check that a SQL
       function returns the data type it's declared to, and changing the
       data type of a table column (CVE-2007-0555, CVE-2007-0556). These
       errors 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 not-so-rare-anymore bug wherein btree index page splits could
       fail due to choosing an infeasible split point (Heikki Linnakangas)
     * Fix Borland C compile scripts (L Bayuk)
     * Properly handle to_char('CC') for years ending in 00 (Tom)
       Year 2000 is in the twentieth century, not the twenty-first.
     * "/contrib/tsearch2" localization improvements (Tatsuo, Teodor)
     * Fix incorrect permission check in
       information_schema.key_column_usage view (Tom)
       The symptom is "relation with OID nnnnn does not exist" errors. To
       get this fix without using "initdb", use "CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW"
       to install the corrected definition found in
       "share/information_schema.sql". Note you will need to do this in
       each database.
     * Improve "VACUUM" performance for databases with many tables (Tom)
     * Fix for rare Assert() crash triggered by UNION (Tom)
     * Fix potentially incorrect results from index searches using ROW
       inequality conditions (Tom)
     * Tighten security of multi-byte character processing for UTF8
       sequences over three bytes long (Tom)
     * Fix bogus "permission denied" failures occurring on Windows due to
       attempts to fsync already-deleted files (Magnus, Tom)
     * Fix bug that could cause the statistics collector to hang on
       Windows (Magnus)
       This would in turn lead to autovacuum not working.
     * Fix possible crashes when an already-in-use PL/pgSQL function is
       updated (Tom)
     * Improve PL/pgSQL handling of domain types (Sergiy Vyshnevetskiy,
       Tom)
     * Fix possible errors in processing PL/pgSQL exception blocks (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.2.1

     Release date: 2007-01-08

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.2.1

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fix crash with SELECT ... LIMIT ALL (also LIMIT NULL) (Tom)
     * "Several /contrib/tsearch2" fixes (Teodor)
     * On Windows, make log messages coming from the operating system use
       ASCII encoding (Hiroshi Saito)
       This fixes a conversion problem when there is a mismatch between
       the encoding of the operating system and database server.
     * Fix Windows linking of pg_dump using "win32.mak" (Hiroshi Saito)
     * Fix planner mistakes for outer join queries (Tom)
     * Fix several problems in queries involving sub-SELECTs (Tom)
     * Fix potential crash in SPI during subtransaction abort (Tom)
       This affects all PL functions since they all use SPI.
     * Improve build speed of PDF documentation (Peter)
     * Re-add JST (Japan) timezone abbreviation (Tom)
     * Improve optimization decisions related to index scans (Tom)
     * Have psql print multi-byte combining characters as before, rather
       than output as \u (Tom)
     * Improve index usage of regular expressions that use parentheses
       (Tom)
       This improves psql \d performance also.
     * Make pg_dumpall assume that databases have public CONNECT
       privilege, when dumping from a pre-8.2 server (Tom)
       This preserves the previous behavior that anyone can connect to a
       database if allowed by "pg_hba.conf".
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 8.2

     Release date: 2006-12-05
     __________________________________________________________________

Overview

   This release adds many functionality and performance improvements that
   were requested by users, including:

     * Query language enhancements including "INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE
       RETURNING", multirow VALUES lists, and optional target-table alias
       in "UPDATE"/"DELETE"
     * Index creation without blocking concurrent
       "INSERT"/"UPDATE"/"DELETE" operations
     * Many query optimization improvements, including support for
       reordering outer joins
     * Improved sorting performance with lower memory usage
     * More efficient locking with better concurrency
     * More efficient vacuuming
     * Easier administration of warm standby servers
     * New FILLFACTOR support for tables and indexes
     * Monitoring, logging, and performance tuning additions
     * More control over creating and dropping objects
     * Table inheritance relationships can be defined for and removed from
       pre-existing tables
     * "COPY TO" can copy the output of an arbitrary "SELECT" statement
     * Array improvements, including nulls in arrays
     * Aggregate-function improvements, including multiple-input
       aggregates and SQL:2003 statistical functions
     * Many "contrib/" improvements
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.2

   A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate
   data from any previous release.

   Observe the following incompatibilities:

     * Set escape_string_warning to on by default (Bruce)
       This issues a warning if backslash escapes are used in non-escape
       (non-E'') strings.
     * Change the row constructor syntax (ROW(...)) so that list elements
       foo.* will be expanded to a list of their member fields, rather
       than creating a nested row type field as formerly (Tom)
       The new behavior is substantially more useful since it allows, for
       example, triggers to check for data changes with IF row(new.*) IS
       DISTINCT FROM row(old.*). The old behavior is still available by
       omitting .*.
     * Make row comparisons follow SQL standard semantics and allow them
       to be used in index scans (Tom)
       Previously, row = and <> comparisons followed the standard but < <=
       > >= did not. A row comparison can now be used as an index
       constraint for a multicolumn index matching the row value.
     * Make row IS [NOT] NULL tests follow SQL standard semantics (Tom)
       The former behavior conformed to the standard for simple cases with
       IS NULL, but IS NOT NULL would return true if any row field was
       non-null, whereas the standard says it should return true only when
       all fields are non-null.
     * Make "SET CONSTRAINT" affect only one constraint (Kris Jurka)
       In previous releases, "SET CONSTRAINT" modified all constraints
       with a matching name. In this release, the schema search path is
       used to modify only the first matching constraint. A schema
       specification is also supported. This more nearly conforms to the
       SQL standard.
     * Remove RULE permission for tables, for security reasons (Tom)
       As of this release, only a table's owner can create or modify rules
       for the table. For backwards compatibility, "GRANT"/"REVOKE RULE"
       is still accepted, but it does nothing.
     * Array comparison improvements (Tom)
       Now array dimensions are also compared.
     * Change array concatenation to match documented behavior (Tom)
       This changes the previous behavior where concatenation would modify
       the array lower bound.
     * Make command-line options of postmaster and postgres identical
       (Peter)
       This allows the postmaster to pass arguments to each backend
       without using -o. Note that some options are now only available as
       long-form options, because there were conflicting single-letter
       options.
     * Deprecate use of postmaster symbolic link (Peter)
       postmaster and postgres commands now act identically, with the
       behavior determined by command-line options. The postmaster
       symbolic link is kept for compatibility, but is not really needed.
     * Change log_duration to output even if the query is not output (Tom)
       In prior releases, log_duration only printed if the query appeared
       earlier in the log.
     * Make to_char(time) and to_char(interval) treat HH and HH12 as
       12-hour intervals
       Most applications should use HH24 unless they want a 12-hour
       display.
     * Zero unmasked bits in conversion from INET to CIDR (Tom)
       This ensures that the converted value is actually valid for CIDR.
     * Remove australian_timezones configuration variable (Joachim
       Wieland)
       This variable has been superseded by a more general facility for
       configuring timezone abbreviations.
     * Improve cost estimation for nested-loop index scans (Tom)
       This might eliminate the need to set unrealistically small values
       of random_page_cost. If you have been using a very small
       random_page_cost, please recheck your test cases.
     * Change behavior of "pg_dump" -n and -t options. (Greg Sabino
       Mullane)
       See the "pg_dump" manual page for details.
     * Change libpq PQdsplen() to return a useful value (Martijn van
       Oosterhout)
     * Declare libpq PQgetssl() as returning void *, rather than SSL *
       (Martijn van Oosterhout)
       This allows applications to use the function without including the
       OpenSSL headers.
     * C-language loadable modules must now include a PG_MODULE_MAGIC
       macro call for version compatibility checking (Martijn van
       Oosterhout)
     * For security's sake, modules used by a PL/PerlU function are no
       longer available to PL/Perl functions (Andrew)

     Note: This also implies that data can no longer be shared between a
     PL/Perl function and a PL/PerlU function. Some Perl installations
     have not been compiled with the correct flags to allow multiple
     interpreters to exist within a single process. In this situation
     PL/Perl and PL/PerlU cannot both be used in a single backend. The
     solution is to get a Perl installation which supports multiple
     interpreters.
     * In "contrib/xml2/", rename xml_valid() to xml_is_well_formed()
       (Tom)
       xml_valid() will remain for backward compatibility, but its
       behavior will change to do schema checking in a future release.
     * Remove "contrib/ora2pg/", now at http://www.samse.fr/GPL/ora2pg
     * Remove contrib modules that have been migrated to PgFoundry:
       "adddepend", "dbase", "dbmirror", "fulltextindex", "mac",
       "userlock"
     * Remove abandoned contrib modules: "mSQL-interface", "tips"
     * Remove QNX and BEOS ports (Bruce)
       These ports no longer had active maintainers.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

   Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between
   PostgreSQL 8.2 and the previous major release.
     __________________________________________________________________

Performance Improvements

     * Allow the planner to reorder outer joins in some circumstances
       (Tom)
       In previous releases, outer joins would always be evaluated in the
       order written in the query. This change allows the query optimizer
       to consider reordering outer joins, in cases where it can determine
       that the join order can be changed without altering the meaning of
       the query. This can make a considerable performance difference for
       queries involving multiple outer joins or mixed inner and outer
       joins.
     * Improve efficiency of IN (list-of-expressions) clauses (Tom)
     * Improve sorting speed and reduce memory usage (Simon, Tom)
     * Improve subtransaction performance (Alvaro, Itagaki Takahiro, Tom)
     * Add FILLFACTOR to table and index creation (ITAGAKI Takahiro)
       This leaves extra free space in each table or index page, allowing
       improved performance as the database grows. This is particularly
       valuable to maintain clustering.
     * Increase default values for shared_buffers and max_fsm_pages
       (Andrew)
     * Improve locking performance by breaking the lock manager tables
       into sections (Tom)
       This allows locking to be more fine-grained, reducing contention.
     * Reduce locking requirements of sequential scans (Qingqing Zhou)
     * Reduce locking required for database creation and destruction (Tom)
     * Improve the optimizer's selectivity estimates for LIKE, ILIKE, and
       regular expression operations (Tom)
     * Improve planning of joins to inherited tables and UNION ALL views
       (Tom)
     * Allow constraint exclusion to be applied to inherited "UPDATE" and
       "DELETE" queries (Tom)
       "SELECT" already honored constraint exclusion.
     * Improve planning of constant WHERE clauses, such as a condition
       that depends only on variables inherited from an outer query level
       (Tom)
     * Protocol-level unnamed prepared statements are re-planned for each
       set of BIND values (Tom)
       This improves performance because the exact parameter values can be
       used in the plan.
     * Speed up vacuuming of B-Tree indexes (Heikki Linnakangas, Tom)
     * Avoid extra scan of tables without indexes during "VACUUM" (Greg
       Stark)
     * Improve multicolumn GiST indexing (Oleg, Teodor)
     * Remove dead index entries before B-Tree page split (Junji Teramoto)
     __________________________________________________________________

Server Changes

     * Allow a forced switch to a new transaction log file (Simon, Tom)
       This is valuable for keeping warm standby slave servers in sync
       with the master. Transaction log file switching now also happens
       automatically during pg_stop_backup(). This ensures that all
       transaction log files needed for recovery can be archived
       immediately.
     * Add WAL informational functions (Simon)
       Add functions for interrogating the current transaction log
       insertion point and determining WAL filenames from the hex WAL
       locations displayed by pg_stop_backup() and related functions.
     * Improve recovery from a crash during WAL replay (Simon)
       The server now does periodic checkpoints during WAL recovery, so if
       there is a crash, future WAL recovery is shortened. This also
       eliminates the need for warm standby servers to replay the entire
       log since the base backup if they crash.
     * Improve reliability of long-term WAL replay (Heikki, Simon, Tom)
       Formerly, trying to roll forward through more than 2 billion
       transactions would not work due to XID wraparound. This meant warm
       standby servers had to be reloaded from fresh base backups
       periodically.
     * Add archive_timeout to force transaction log file switches at a
       given interval (Simon)
       This enforces a maximum replication delay for warm standby servers.
     * Add native LDAP authentication (Magnus Hagander)
       This is particularly useful for platforms that do not support PAM,
       such as Windows.
     * Add GRANT CONNECT ON DATABASE (Gevik Babakhani)
       This gives SQL-level control over database access. It works as an
       additional filter on top of the existing "pg_hba.conf" controls.
     * Add support for SSL Certificate Revocation List (CRL) files (Libor
       Hohos)
       The server and libpq both recognize CRL files now.
     * GiST indexes are now clusterable (Teodor)
     * Remove routine autovacuum server log entries (Bruce)
       pg_stat_activity now shows autovacuum activity.
     * Track maximum XID age within individual tables, instead of whole
       databases (Alvaro)
       This reduces the overhead involved in preventing transaction ID
       wraparound, by avoiding unnecessary VACUUMs.
     * Add last vacuum and analyze timestamp columns to the stats
       collector (Larry Rosenman)
       These values now appear in the pg_stat_*_tables system views.
     * Improve performance of statistics monitoring, especially
       stats_command_string (Tom, Bruce)
       This release enables stats_command_string by default, now that its
       overhead is minimal. This means pg_stat_activity will now show all
       active queries by default.
     * Add a waiting column to pg_stat_activity (Tom)
       This allows pg_stat_activity to show all the information included
       in the ps display.
     * Add configuration parameter update_process_title to control whether
       the ps display is updated for every command (Bruce)
       On platforms where it is expensive to update the ps display, it
       might be worthwhile to turn this off and rely solely on
       pg_stat_activity for status information.
     * Allow units to be specified in configuration settings (Peter)
       For example, you can now set shared_buffers to 32MB rather than
       mentally converting sizes.
     * Add support for include directives in "postgresql.conf" (Joachim
       Wieland)
     * Improve logging of protocol-level prepare/bind/execute messages
       (Bruce, Tom)
       Such logging now shows statement names, bind parameter values, and
       the text of the query being executed. Also, the query text is
       properly included in logged error messages when enabled by
       log_min_error_statement.
     * Prevent max_stack_depth from being set to unsafe values
       On platforms where we can determine the actual kernel stack depth
       limit (which is most), make sure that the initial default value of
       max_stack_depth is safe, and reject attempts to set it to unsafely
       large values.
     * Enable highlighting of error location in query in more cases (Tom)
       The server is now able to report a specific error location for some
       semantic errors (such as unrecognized column name), rather than
       just for basic syntax errors as before.
     * Fix "failed to re-find parent key" errors in "VACUUM" (Tom)
     * Clean out "pg_internal.init" cache files during server restart
       (Simon)
       This avoids a hazard that the cache files might contain stale data
       after PITR recovery.
     * Fix race condition for truncation of a large relation across a
       gigabyte boundary by "VACUUM" (Tom)
     * Fix bug causing needless deadlock errors on row-level locks (Tom)
     * Fix bugs affecting multi-gigabyte hash indexes (Tom)
     * Each backend process is now its own process group leader (Tom)
       This allows query cancel to abort subprocesses invoked from a
       backend or archive/recovery process.
     __________________________________________________________________

Query Changes

     * Add "INSERT"/"UPDATE"/"DELETE" RETURNING (Jonah Harris, Tom)
       This allows these commands to return values, such as the computed
       serial key for a new row. In the "UPDATE" case, values from the
       updated version of the row are returned.
     * Add support for multiple-row VALUES clauses, per SQL standard (Joe,
       Tom)
       This allows "INSERT" to insert multiple rows of constants, or
       queries to generate result sets using constants. For example,
       INSERT ... VALUES (...), (...), ...., and SELECT * FROM (VALUES
       (...), (...), ....) AS alias(f1, ...).
     * Allow "UPDATE" and "DELETE" to use an alias for the target table
       (Atsushi Ogawa)
       The SQL standard does not permit an alias in these commands, but
       many database systems allow one anyway for notational convenience.
     * Allow "UPDATE" to set multiple columns with a list of values
       (Susanne Ebrecht)
       This is basically a short-hand for assigning the columns and values
       in pairs. The syntax is UPDATE tab SET (column, ...) = (val, ...).
     * Make row comparisons work per standard (Tom)
       The forms <, <=, >, >= now compare rows lexicographically, that is,
       compare the first elements, if equal compare the second elements,
       and so on. Formerly they expanded to an AND condition across all
       the elements, which was neither standard nor very useful.
     * Add CASCADE option to "TRUNCATE" (Joachim Wieland)
       This causes "TRUNCATE" to automatically include all tables that
       reference the specified table(s) via foreign keys. While
       convenient, this is a dangerous tool -- use with caution!
     * Support FOR UPDATE and FOR SHARE in the same SELECT command (Tom)
     * Add IS NOT DISTINCT FROM (Pavel Stehule)
       This operator is similar to equality (=), but evaluates to true
       when both left and right operands are NULL, and to false when just
       one is, rather than yielding NULL in these cases.
     * Improve the length output used by UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT (Tom)
       When all corresponding columns are of the same defined length, that
       length is used for the result, rather than a generic length.
     * Allow ILIKE to work for multi-byte encodings (Tom)
       Internally, ILIKE now calls lower() and then uses LIKE.
       Locale-specific regular expression patterns still do not work in
       these encodings.
     * Enable standard_conforming_strings to be turned on (Kevin Grittner)
       This allows backslash escaping in strings to be disabled, making
       PostgreSQL more standards-compliant. The default is off for
       backwards compatibility, but future releases will default this to
       on.
     * Do not flatten subqueries that contain volatile functions in their
       target lists (Jaime Casanova)
       This prevents surprising behavior due to multiple evaluation of a
       volatile function (such as random() or nextval()). It might cause
       performance degradation in the presence of functions that are
       unnecessarily marked as volatile.
     * Add system views pg_prepared_statements and pg_cursors to show
       prepared statements and open cursors (Joachim Wieland, Neil)
       These are very useful in pooled connection setups.
     * Support portal parameters in "EXPLAIN" and "EXECUTE" (Tom)
       This allows, for example, JDBC ? parameters to work in these
       commands.
     * If SQL-level "PREPARE" parameters are unspecified, infer their
       types from the content of the query (Neil)
       Protocol-level "PREPARE" already did this.
     * Allow LIMIT and OFFSET to exceed two billion (Dhanaraj M)
     __________________________________________________________________

Object Manipulation Changes

     * Add TABLESPACE clause to "CREATE TABLE AS" (Neil)
       This allows a tablespace to be specified for the new table.
     * Add ON COMMIT clause to "CREATE TABLE AS" (Neil)
       This allows temporary tables to be truncated or dropped on
       transaction commit. The default behavior is for the table to remain
       until the session ends.
     * Add INCLUDING CONSTRAINTS to "CREATE TABLE LIKE" (Greg Stark)
       This allows easy copying of CHECK constraints to a new table.
     * Allow the creation of placeholder (shell) types (Martijn van
       Oosterhout)
       A shell type declaration creates a type name, without specifying
       any of the details of the type. Making a shell type is useful
       because it allows cleaner declaration of the type's input/output
       functions, which must exist before the type can be defined "for
       real". The syntax is "CREATE TYPE typename".
     * Aggregate functions now support multiple input parameters (Sergey
       Koposov, Tom)
     * Add new aggregate creation syntax (Tom)
       The new syntax is "CREATE AGGREGATE aggname (input_type)
       (parameter_list)". This more naturally supports the new
       multi-parameter aggregate functionality. The previous syntax is
       still supported.
     * Add "ALTER ROLE PASSWORD NULL" to remove a previously set role
       password (Peter)
     * Add "DROP" object IF EXISTS for many object types (Andrew)
       This allows "DROP" operations on non-existent objects without
       generating an error.
     * Add DROP OWNED to drop all objects owned by a role (Alvaro)
     * Add REASSIGN OWNED to reassign ownership of all objects owned by a
       role (Alvaro)
       This, and DROP OWNED above, facilitate dropping roles.
     * Add "GRANT ON SEQUENCE" syntax (Bruce)
       This was added for setting sequence-specific permissions. GRANT ON
       TABLE for sequences is still supported for backward compatibility.
     * Add USAGE permission for sequences that allows only currval() and
       nextval(), not setval() (Bruce)
       USAGE permission allows more fine-grained control over sequence
       access. Granting USAGE allows users to increment a sequence, but
       prevents them from setting the sequence to an arbitrary value using
       setval().
     * Add ALTER TABLE [ NO ] INHERIT (Greg Stark)
       This allows inheritance to be adjusted dynamically, rather than
       just at table creation and destruction. This is very valuable when
       using inheritance to implement table partitioning.
     * Allow comments on global objects to be stored globally (Kris Jurka)
       Previously, comments attached to databases were stored in
       individual databases, making them ineffective, and there was no
       provision at all for comments on roles or tablespaces. This change
       adds a new shared catalog pg_shdescription and stores comments on
       databases, roles, and tablespaces therein.
     __________________________________________________________________

Utility Command Changes

     * Add option to allow indexes to be created without blocking
       concurrent writes to the table (Greg Stark, Tom)
       The new syntax is "CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY". The default behavior
       is still to block table modification while a index is being
       created.
     * Provide advisory locking functionality (Abhijit Menon-Sen, Tom)
       This is a new locking API designed to replace what used to be in
       /contrib/userlock. The userlock code is now on pgfoundry.
     * Allow "COPY" to dump a "SELECT" query (Zoltan Boszormenyi, Karel
       Zak)
       This allows "COPY" to dump arbitrary SQL queries. The syntax is
       COPY (SELECT ...) TO.
     * Make the "COPY" command return a command tag that includes the
       number of rows copied (Volkan YAZICI)
     * Allow "VACUUM" to expire rows without being affected by other
       concurrent "VACUUM" operations (Hannu Krossing, Alvaro, Tom)
     * Make initdb detect the operating system locale and set the default
       DateStyle accordingly (Peter)
       This makes it more likely that the installed "postgresql.conf"
       DateStyle value will be as desired.
     * Reduce number of progress messages displayed by initdb (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

Date/Time Changes

     * Allow full timezone names in timestamp input values (Joachim
       Wieland)
       For example, '2006-05-24 21:11 America/New_York'::timestamptz.
     * Support configurable timezone abbreviations (Joachim Wieland)
       A desired set of timezone abbreviations can be chosen via the
       configuration parameter timezone_abbreviations.
     * Add pg_timezone_abbrevs and pg_timezone_names views to show
       supported timezones (Magnus Hagander)
     * Add clock_timestamp(), statement_timestamp(), and
       transaction_timestamp() (Bruce)
       clock_timestamp() is the current wall-clock time,
       statement_timestamp() is the time the current statement arrived at
       the server, and transaction_timestamp() is an alias for now().
     * Allow to_char() to print localized month and day names (Euler
       Taveira de Oliveira)
     * Allow to_char(time) and to_char(interval) to output AM/PM
       specifications (Bruce)
       Intervals and times are treated as 24-hour periods, e.g. 25 hours
       is considered AM.
     * Add new function justify_interval() to adjust interval units (Mark
       Dilger)
     * Allow timezone offsets up to 14:59 away from GMT
       Kiribati uses GMT+14, so we'd better accept that.
     * Interval computation improvements (Michael Glaesemann, Bruce)
     __________________________________________________________________

Other Data Type and Function Changes

     * Allow arrays to contain NULL elements (Tom)
     * Allow assignment to array elements not contiguous with the existing
       entries (Tom)
       The intervening array positions will be filled with nulls. This is
       per SQL standard.
     * New built-in operators for array-subset comparisons (@>, <@, &&)
       (Teodor, Tom)
       These operators can be indexed for many data types using GiST or
       GIN indexes.
     * Add convenient arithmetic operations on INET/CIDR values (Stephen
       R. van den Berg)
       The new operators are & (and), | (or), ~ (not), inet + int8, inet -
       int8, and inet - inet.
     * Add new aggregate functions from SQL:2003 (Neil)
       The new functions are var_pop(), var_samp(), stddev_pop(), and
       stddev_samp(). var_samp() and stddev_samp() are merely renamings of
       the existing aggregates variance() and stddev(). The latter names
       remain available for backward compatibility.
     * Add SQL:2003 statistical aggregates (Sergey Koposov)
       New functions: regr_intercept(), regr_slope(), regr_r2(), corr(),
       covar_samp(), covar_pop(), regr_avgx(), regr_avgy(), regr_sxy(),
       regr_sxx(), regr_syy(), regr_count().
     * Allow domains to be based on other domains (Tom)
     * Properly enforce domain CHECK constraints everywhere (Neil, Tom)
       For example, the result of a user-defined function that is declared
       to return a domain type is now checked against the domain's
       constraints. This closes a significant hole in the domain
       implementation.
     * Fix problems with dumping renamed SERIAL columns (Tom)
       The fix is to dump a SERIAL column by explicitly specifying its
       DEFAULT and sequence elements, and reconstructing the SERIAL column
       on reload using a new "ALTER SEQUENCE OWNED BY" command. This also
       allows dropping a SERIAL column specification.
     * Add a server-side sleep function pg_sleep() (Joachim Wieland)
     * Add all comparison operators for the tid (tuple id) data type (Mark
       Kirkwood, Greg Stark, Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

PL/PgSQL Server-Side Language Changes

     * Add TG_table_name and TG_table_schema to trigger parameters
       (Andrew)
       TG_relname is now deprecated. Comparable changes have been made in
       the trigger parameters for the other PLs as well.
     * Allow FOR statements to return values to scalars as well as records
       and row types (Pavel Stehule)
     * Add a BY clause to the FOR loop, to control the iteration increment
       (Jaime Casanova)
     * Add STRICT to "SELECT INTO" (Matt Miller)
       STRICT mode throws an exception if more or less than one row is
       returned by the "SELECT", for Oracle PL/SQL compatibility.
     __________________________________________________________________

PL/Perl Server-Side Language Changes

     * Add table_name and table_schema to trigger parameters (Adam
       Sjøgren)
     * Add prepared queries (Dmitry Karasik)
     * Make $_TD trigger data a global variable (Andrew)
       Previously, it was lexical, which caused unexpected sharing
       violations.
     * Run PL/Perl and PL/PerlU in separate interpreters, for security
       reasons (Andrew)
       In consequence, they can no longer share data nor loaded modules.
       Also, if Perl has not been compiled with the requisite flags to
       allow multiple interpreters, only one of these languages can be
       used in any given backend process.
     __________________________________________________________________

PL/Python Server-Side Language Changes

     * Named parameters are passed as ordinary variables, as well as in
       the args[] array (Sven Suursoho)
     * Add table_name and table_schema to trigger parameters (Andrew)
     * Allow returning of composite types and result sets (Sven Suursoho)
     * Return result-set as list, iterator, or generator (Sven Suursoho)
     * Allow functions to return void (Neil)
     * Python 2.5 is now supported (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

psql Changes

     * Add new command \password for changing role password with
       client-side password encryption (Peter)
     * Allow \c to connect to a new host and port number (David, Volkan
       YAZICI)
     * Add tablespace display to \l+ (Philip Yarra)
     * Improve \df slash command to include the argument names and modes
       (OUT or INOUT) of the function (David Fetter)
     * Support binary "COPY" (Andreas Pflug)
     * Add option to run the entire session in a single transaction
       (Simon)
       Use option -1 or --single-transaction.
     * Support for automatically retrieving "SELECT" results in batches
       using a cursor (Chris Mair)
       This is enabled using "\set FETCH_COUNT n". This feature allows
       large result sets to be retrieved in psql without attempting to
       buffer the entire result set in memory.
     * Make multi-line values align in the proper column (Martijn van
       Oosterhout)
       Field values containing newlines are now displayed in a more
       readable fashion.
     * Save multi-line statements as a single entry, rather than one line
       at a time (Sergey E. Koposov)
       This makes up-arrow recall of queries easier. (This is not
       available on Windows, because that platform uses the native
       command-line editing present in the operating system.)
     * Make the line counter 64-bit so it can handle files with more than
       two billion lines (David Fetter)
     * Report both the returned data and the command status tag for
       "INSERT"/"UPDATE"/"DELETE RETURNING" (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

pg_dump Changes

     * Allow complex selection of objects to be included or excluded by
       pg_dump (Greg Sabino Mullane)
       pg_dump now supports multiple -n (schema) and -t (table) options,
       and adds -N and -T options to exclude objects. Also, the arguments
       of these switches can now be wild-card expressions rather than
       single object names, for example -t 'foo*', and a schema can be
       part of a -t or -T switch, for example -t schema1.table1.
     * Add pg_restore --no-data-for-failed-tables option to suppress
       loading data if table creation failed (i.e., the table already
       exists) (Martin Pitt)
     * Add pg_restore option to run the entire session in a single
       transaction (Simon)
       Use option -1 or --single-transaction.
     __________________________________________________________________

libpq Changes

     * Add PQencryptPassword() to encrypt passwords (Tom)
       This allows passwords to be sent pre-encrypted for commands like
       "ALTER ROLE ... PASSWORD".
     * Add function PQisthreadsafe() (Bruce)
       This allows applications to query the thread-safety status of the
       library.
     * Add PQdescribePrepared(), PQdescribePortal(), and related functions
       to return information about previously prepared statements and open
       cursors (Volkan YAZICI)
     * Allow LDAP lookups from "pg_service.conf" (Laurenz Albe)
     * Allow a hostname in "~/.pgpass" to match the default socket
       directory (Bruce)
       A blank hostname continues to match any Unix-socket connection, but
       this addition allows entries that are specific to one of several
       postmasters on the machine.
     __________________________________________________________________

ecpg Changes

     * Allow "SHOW" to put its result into a variable (Joachim Wieland)
     * Add "COPY TO STDOUT" (Joachim Wieland)
     * Add regression tests (Joachim Wieland, Michael)
     * Major source code cleanups (Joachim Wieland, Michael)
     __________________________________________________________________

Windows Port

     * Allow MSVC to compile the PostgreSQL server (Magnus, Hiroshi Saito)
     * Add MSVC support for utility commands and pg_dump (Hiroshi Saito)
     * Add support for Windows code pages 1253, 1254, 1255, and 1257 (Kris
       Jurka)
     * Drop privileges on startup, so that the server can be started from
       an administrative account (Magnus)
     * Stability fixes (Qingqing Zhou, Magnus)
     * Add native semaphore implementation (Qingqing Zhou)
       The previous code mimicked SysV semaphores.
     __________________________________________________________________

Source Code Changes

     * Add GIN (Generalized Inverted iNdex) index access method (Teodor,
       Oleg)
     * Remove R-tree indexing (Tom)
       Rtree has been re-implemented using GiST. Among other differences,
       this means that rtree indexes now have support for crash recovery
       via write-ahead logging (WAL).
     * Reduce libraries needlessly linked into the backend (Martijn van
       Oosterhout, Tom)
     * Add a configure flag to allow libedit to be preferred over GNU
       readline (Bruce)
       Use configure --with-libedit-preferred.
     * Allow installation into directories containing spaces (Peter)
     * Improve ability to relocate installation directories (Tom)
     * Add support for Solaris x86_64 using the Solaris compiler (Pierre
       Girard, Theo Schlossnagle, Bruce)
     * Add DTrace support (Robert Lor)
     * Add PG_VERSION_NUM for use by third-party applications wanting to
       test the backend version in C using > and < comparisons (Bruce)
     * Add XLOG_BLCKSZ as independent from BLCKSZ (Mark Wong)
     * Add LWLOCK_STATS define to report locking activity (Tom)
     * Emit warnings for unknown configure options (Martijn van
       Oosterhout)
     * Add server support for "plugin" libraries that can be used for
       add-on tasks such as debugging and performance measurement (Korry
       Douglas)
       This consists of two features: a table of "rendezvous variables"
       that allows separately-loaded shared libraries to communicate, and
       a new configuration parameter local_preload_libraries that allows
       libraries to be loaded into specific sessions without explicit
       cooperation from the client application. This allows external
       add-ons to implement features such as a PL/PgSQL debugger.
     * Rename existing configuration parameter preload_libraries to
       shared_preload_libraries (Tom)
       This was done for clarity in comparison to local_preload_libraries.
     * Add new configuration parameter server_version_num (Greg Sabino
       Mullane)
       This is like server_version, but is an integer, e.g. 80200. This
       allows applications to make version checks more easily.
     * Add a configuration parameter seq_page_cost (Tom)
     * Re-implement the regression test script as a C program (Magnus,
       Tom)
     * Allow loadable modules to allocate shared memory and lightweight
       locks (Marc Munro)
     * Add automatic initialization and finalization of dynamically loaded
       libraries (Ralf Engelschall, Tom)
       New functions _PG_init() and _PG_fini() are called if the library
       defines such symbols. Hence we no longer need to specify an
       initialization function in shared_preload_libraries; we can assume
       that the library used the _PG_init() convention instead.
     * Add PG_MODULE_MAGIC header block to all shared object files
       (Martijn van Oosterhout)
       The magic block prevents version mismatches between loadable object
       files and servers.
     * Add shared library support for AIX (Laurenz Albe)
     * New XML documentation section (Bruce)
     __________________________________________________________________

Contrib Changes

     * Major tsearch2 improvements (Oleg, Teodor)
          + multibyte encoding support, including UTF8
          + query rewriting support
          + improved ranking functions
          + thesaurus dictionary support
          + Ispell dictionaries now recognize MySpell format, used by
            OpenOffice
          + GIN support
     * Add adminpack module containing Pgadmin administration functions
       (Dave)
       These functions provide additional file system access routines not
       present in the default PostgreSQL server.
     * Add sslinfo module (Victor Wagner)
       Reports information about the current connection's SSL certificate.
     * Add pgrowlocks module (Tatsuo)
       This shows row locking information for a specified table.
     * Add hstore module (Oleg, Teodor)
     * Add isn module, replacing isbn_issn (Jeremy Kronuz)
       This new implementation supports EAN13, UPC, ISBN (books), ISMN
       (music), and ISSN (serials).
     * Add index information functions to pgstattuple (ITAGAKI Takahiro,
       Satoshi Nagayasu)
     * Add pg_freespacemap module to display free space map information
       (Mark Kirkwood)
     * pgcrypto now has all planned functionality (Marko Kreen)
          + Include iMath library in pgcrypto to have the public-key
            encryption functions always available.
          + Add SHA224 algorithm that was missing in OpenBSD code.
          + Activate builtin code for SHA224/256/384/512 hashes on older
            OpenSSL to have those algorithms always available.
          + New function gen_random_bytes() that returns cryptographically
            strong randomness. Useful for generating encryption keys.
          + Remove digest_exists(), hmac_exists() and cipher_exists()
            functions.
     * Improvements to cube module (Joshua Reich)
       New functions are cube(float[]), cube(float[], float[]), and
       cube_subset(cube, int4[]).
     * Add async query capability to dblink (Kai Londenberg, Joe Conway)
     * New operators for array-subset comparisons (@>, <@, &&) (Tom)
       Various contrib packages already had these operators for their
       datatypes, but the naming wasn't consistent. We have now added
       consistently named array-subset comparison operators to the core
       code and all the contrib packages that have such functionality.
       (The old names remain available, but are deprecated.)
     * Add uninstall scripts for all contrib packages that have install
       scripts (David, Josh Drake)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 8.1.11

     Release date: 2008-01-07

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.10, including fixes
   for significant security issues.

   This is the last 8.1.X release for which the PostgreSQL community will
   produce binary packages for Windows. Windows users are encouraged to
   move to 8.2.X or later, since there are Windows-specific fixes in 8.2.X
   that are impractical to back-port. 8.1.X will continue to be supported
   on other platforms.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.11

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.2, see the release notes
   for 8.1.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     * Repair assorted bugs in the regular-expression package (Tom, Will
       Drewry)
       Suitably crafted regular-expression patterns could cause crashes,
       infinite or near-infinite looping, and/or massive memory
       consumption, all of which pose denial-of-service hazards for
       applications that accept regex search patterns from untrustworthy
       sources. (CVE-2007-4769, CVE-2007-4772, CVE-2007-6067)
     * Require non-superusers who use "/contrib/dblink" to use only
       password authentication, as a security measure (Joe)
       The fix that appeared for this in 8.1.10 was incomplete, as it
       plugged the hole for only some "dblink" functions. (CVE-2007-6601,
       CVE-2007-3278)
     * Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2007k (in particular,
       recent Argentina changes) (Tom)
     * Improve planner's handling of LIKE/regex estimation in non-C
       locales (Tom)
     * Fix planner failure in some cases of WHERE false AND var IN (SELECT
       ...) (Tom)
     * Preserve the tablespace of indexes that are rebuilt by "ALTER TABLE
       ... ALTER COLUMN TYPE" (Tom)
     * Make archive recovery always start a new WAL timeline, rather than
       only when a recovery stop time was used (Simon)
       This avoids a corner-case risk of trying to overwrite an existing
       archived copy of the last WAL segment, and seems simpler and
       cleaner than the original definition.
     * Make "VACUUM" not use all of maintenance_work_mem when the table is
       too small for it to be useful (Alvaro)
     * Fix potential crash in translate() when using a multibyte database
       encoding (Tom)
     * Fix overflow in extract(epoch from interval) for intervals
       exceeding 68 years (Tom)
     * Fix PL/Perl to not fail when a UTF-8 regular expression is used in
       a trusted function (Andrew)
     * Fix PL/Perl to cope when platform's Perl defines type bool as int
       rather than char (Tom)
       While this could theoretically happen anywhere, no standard build
       of Perl did things this way ... until Mac OS X 10.5.
     * Fix PL/Python to not crash on long exception messages (Alvaro)
     * Fix pg_dump to correctly handle inheritance child tables that have
       default expressions different from their parent's (Tom)
     * Fix libpq crash when PGPASSFILE refers to a file that is not a
       plain file (Martin Pitt)
     * ecpg parser fixes (Michael)
     * Make "contrib/pgcrypto" defend against OpenSSL libraries that fail
       on keys longer than 128 bits; which is the case at least on some
       Solaris versions (Marko Kreen)
     * Make "contrib/tablefunc"'s crosstab() handle NULL rowid as a
       category in its own right, rather than crashing (Joe)
     * Fix tsvector and tsquery output routines to escape backslashes
       correctly (Teodor, Bruce)
     * Fix crash of to_tsvector() on huge input strings (Teodor)
     * 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 8.1.10

     Release date: 2007-09-17

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.9.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.10

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.2, see the release notes
   for 8.1.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     * Allow the interval data type to accept input consisting only of
       milliseconds or microseconds (Neil)
     * Speed up rtree index insertion (Teodor)
     * Fix excessive logging of SSL error messages (Tom)
     * Fix logging so that log messages are never interleaved when using
       the syslogger process (Andrew)
     * Fix crash when log_min_error_statement logging runs out of memory
       (Tom)
     * Fix incorrect handling of some foreign-key corner cases (Tom)
     * Prevent "REINDEX" and "CLUSTER" from failing due to attempting to
       process temporary tables of other sessions (Alvaro)
     * Update the time zone database rules, particularly New Zealand's
       upcoming changes (Tom)
     * Windows socket improvements (Magnus)
     * Suppress timezone name (%Z) in log timestamps on Windows because of
       possible encoding mismatches (Tom)
     * Require non-superusers who use "/contrib/dblink" to use only
       password authentication, as a security measure (Joe)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.1.9

     Release date: 2007-04-23

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.8, including a
   security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.9

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.2, see the release notes
   for 8.1.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     * "/contrib/tsearch2" crash fixes (Teodor)
     * Require "COMMIT PREPARED" to be executed in the same database as
       the transaction was prepared in (Heikki)
     * Fix potential-data-corruption bug in how "VACUUM FULL" handles
       "UPDATE" chains (Tom, Pavan Deolasee)
     * Planner fixes, including improving outer join and bitmap scan
       selection logic (Tom)
     * Fix PANIC during enlargement of a hash index (bug introduced in
       8.1.6) (Tom)
     * Fix POSIX-style timezone specs to follow new USA DST rules (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.1.8

     Release date: 2007-02-07

   This release contains one fix from 8.1.7.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.8

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.2, see the release notes
   for 8.1.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Remove overly-restrictive check for type length in constraints and
       functional indexes(Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.1.7

     Release date: 2007-02-05

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.6, including a
   security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.7

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.2, see the release notes
   for 8.1.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Remove security vulnerabilities that allowed connected users to
       read backend memory (Tom)
       The vulnerabilities involve suppressing the normal check that a SQL
       function returns the data type it's declared to, and changing the
       data type of a table column (CVE-2007-0555, CVE-2007-0556). These
       errors 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)
     * Improve "VACUUM" performance for databases with many tables (Tom)
     * Fix autovacuum to avoid leaving non-permanent transaction IDs in
       non-connectable databases (Alvaro)
       This bug affects the 8.1 branch only.
     * Fix for rare Assert() crash triggered by UNION (Tom)
     * Tighten security of multi-byte character processing for UTF8
       sequences over three bytes long (Tom)
     * Fix bogus "permission denied" failures occurring on Windows due to
       attempts to fsync already-deleted files (Magnus, Tom)
     * Fix possible crashes when an already-in-use PL/pgSQL function is
       updated (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.1.6

     Release date: 2007-01-08

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.5.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.6

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.2, see the release notes
   for 8.1.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Improve handling of getaddrinfo() on AIX (Tom)
       This fixes a problem with starting the statistics collector, among
       other things.
     * Fix pg_restore to handle a tar-format backup that contains large
       objects (blobs) with comments (Tom)
     * Fix "failed to re-find parent key" errors in "VACUUM" (Tom)
     * Clean out "pg_internal.init" cache files during server restart
       (Simon)
       This avoids a hazard that the cache files might contain stale data
       after PITR recovery.
     * Fix race condition for truncation of a large relation across a
       gigabyte boundary by "VACUUM" (Tom)
     * Fix bug causing needless deadlock errors on row-level locks (Tom)
     * Fix bugs affecting multi-gigabyte hash indexes (Tom)
     * Fix possible deadlock in Windows signal handling (Teodor)
     * Fix error when constructing an ARRAY[] made up of multiple empty
       elements (Tom)
     * Fix ecpg memory leak during connection (Michael)
     * Fix for Darwin (OS X) compilation (Tom)
     * 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.
     * Update timezone database
       This affects Australian and Canadian daylight-savings rules in
       particular.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.1.5

     Release date: 2006-10-16

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.4.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.5

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.2, see the release notes
   for 8.1.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Disallow aggregate functions in "UPDATE" commands, except within
       sub-SELECTs (Tom)
       The behavior of such an aggregate was unpredictable, and in 8.1.X
       could cause a crash, so it has been disabled. The SQL standard does
       not allow this either.
     * Fix core dump when an untyped literal is taken as ANYARRAY
     * Fix core dump in duration logging for extended query protocol when
       a "COMMIT" or "ROLLBACK" is executed
     * Fix mishandling of AFTER triggers when query contains a SQL
       function returning multiple rows (Tom)
     * Fix "ALTER TABLE ... TYPE" to recheck NOT NULL for USING clause
       (Tom)
     * Fix string_to_array() to handle overlapping matches for the
       separator string
       For example, string_to_array('123xx456xxx789', 'xx').
     * Fix to_timestamp() for AM/PM formats (Bruce)
     * Fix autovacuum's calculation that decides whether "ANALYZE" is
       needed (Alvaro)
     * Fix corner cases in pattern matching for psql's \d commands
     * Fix index-corrupting bugs in /contrib/ltree (Teodor)
     * Numerous robustness fixes in ecpg (Joachim Wieland)
     * Fix backslash escaping in /contrib/dbmirror
     * Minor fixes in /contrib/dblink and /contrib/tsearch2
     * Efficiency improvements in hash tables and bitmap index scans (Tom)
     * Fix instability of statistics collection on Windows (Tom, Andrew)
     * Fix statement_timeout to use the proper units on Win32 (Bruce)
       In previous Win32 8.1.X versions, the delay was off by a factor of
       100.
     * Fixes for MSVC and Borland C++ compilers (Hiroshi Saito)
     * Fixes for AIX and Intel compilers (Tom)
     * Fix rare bug in continuous archiving (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.1.4

     Release date: 2006-05-23

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.3, including patches
   for extremely serious security issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.4

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.2, see the release notes
   for 8.1.2.

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 and standard_conforming_strings
       This fixes libpq-using applications for the security issues
       described in CVE-2006-2313 and CVE-2006-2314, and also
       future-proofs them against the planned changeover to SQL-standard
       string literal syntax. 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 weak key selection in pgcrypto (Marko Kreen)
       Errors in fortuna PRNG reseeding logic could cause a predictable
       session key to be selected by pgp_sym_encrypt() in some cases. This
       only affects non-OpenSSL-using builds.
     * Fix some incorrect encoding conversion functions
       win1251_to_iso, win866_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)
     * Make autovacuum visible in pg_stat_activity (Alvaro)
     * Disable full_page_writes (Tom)
       In certain cases, having full_page_writes off would cause crash
       recovery to fail. A proper fix will appear in 8.2; for now it's
       just disabled.
     * Various planner fixes, particularly for bitmap index scans and
       MIN/MAX optimization (Tom)
     * Fix incorrect optimization in merge join (Tom)
       Outer joins could sometimes emit multiple copies of unmatched rows.
     * Fix crash from using and modifying a plpgsql function in the same
       transaction
     * Fix WAL replay for case where a B-Tree index has been truncated
     * Fix SIMILAR TO for patterns involving | (Tom)
     * Fix "SELECT INTO" and "CREATE TABLE AS" to create tables in the
       default tablespace, not the base directory (Kris Jurka)
     * Fix server to use custom DH SSL parameters correctly (Michael Fuhr)
     * Improve qsort performance (Dann Corbit)
       Currently this code is only used on Solaris.
     * Fix for OS/X Bonjour on x86 systems (Ashley Clark)
     * Fix various minor memory leaks
     * Fix problem with password prompting on some Win32 systems (Robert
       Kinberg)
     * Improve pg_dump's handling of default values for domains
     * Fix pg_dumpall to handle identically-named users and groups
       reasonably (only possible when dumping from a pre-8.1 server) (Tom)
       The user and group will be merged into a single role with LOGIN
       permission. Formerly the merged role wouldn't have LOGIN
       permission, making it unusable as a user.
     * Fix pg_restore -n to work as documented (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.1.3

     Release date: 2006-02-14

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.2, including one very
   serious security issue.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.3

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.2, see the release notes
   for 8.1.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fix bug that allowed any logged-in user to "SET ROLE" to any other
       database user id (CVE-2006-0553)
       Due to inadequate validity checking, a user could exploit the
       special case that "SET ROLE" normally uses to restore the previous
       role setting after an error. This allowed ordinary users to acquire
       superuser status, for example. The escalation-of-privilege risk
       exists only in 8.1.0-8.1.2. However, in all releases back to 7.3
       there is a related bug in "SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION" that allows
       unprivileged users to crash the server, if it 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 8.0.4, 7.4.9, and 7.3.11 releases.
     * Fix race condition that could lead to "file already exists" errors
       during pg_clog and pg_subtrans file creation (Tom)
     * Fix cases that could lead to crashes if a cache-invalidation
       message arrives at just the wrong time (Tom)
     * Properly check DOMAIN constraints for UNKNOWN parameters in
       prepared statements (Neil)
     * Ensure "ALTER COLUMN TYPE" will process FOREIGN KEY, UNIQUE, and
       PRIMARY KEY constraints in the proper order (Nakano Yoshihisa)
     * Fixes to allow restoring dumps that have cross-schema references to
       custom operators or operator classes (Tom)
     * Allow pg_restore to continue properly after a "COPY" failure;
       formerly it tried to treat the remaining "COPY" data as SQL
       commands (Stephen Frost)
     * Fix pg_ctl unregister crash when the data directory is not
       specified (Magnus)
     * Fix libpq PQprint HTML tags (Christoph Zwerschke)
     * Fix ecpg crash on AMD64 and PPC (Neil)
     * Allow SETOF and %TYPE to be used together in function result type
       declarations
     * Recover properly if error occurs during argument passing in
       PL/python (Neil)
     * Fix memory leak in plperl_return_next (Neil)
     * Fix PL/perl's handling of locales on Win32 to match the backend
       (Andrew)
     * Various optimizer fixes (Tom)
     * Fix crash when log_min_messages is set to DEBUG3 or above in
       "postgresql.conf" on Win32 (Bruce)
     * Fix pgxs -L library path specification for Win32, Cygwin, OS X, AIX
       (Bruce)
     * Check that SID is enabled while checking for Win32 admin privileges
       (Magnus)
     * Properly reject out-of-range date inputs (Kris Jurka)
     * Portability fix for testing presence of finite and isinf during
       configure (Tom)
     * Improve speed of "COPY IN" via libpq, by avoiding a kernel call per
       data line (Alon Goldshuv)
     * Improve speed of "/contrib/tsearch2" index creation (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.1.2

     Release date: 2006-01-09

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.1.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.2

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, you
   might need to "REINDEX" indexes on textual columns after updating, if
   you are affected by the locale or plperl issues described below.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fix Windows code so that postmaster will continue rather than exit
       if there is no more room in ShmemBackendArray (Magnus)
       The previous behavior could lead to a denial-of-service situation
       if too many connection requests arrive close together. This applies
       *only* to the Windows port.
     * Fix bug introduced in 8.0 that could allow ReadBuffer to return an
       already-used page as new, potentially causing loss of
       recently-committed data (Tom)
     * Fix for protocol-level Describe messages issued outside a
       transaction or in a failed transaction (Tom)
     * 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.
     * Allow more flexible relocation of installation directories (Tom)
       Previous releases supported relocation only if all installation
       directory paths were the same except for the last component.
     * Prevent crashes caused by the use of ISO-8859-5 and ISO-8859-9
       encodings (Tatsuo)
     * Fix longstanding bug in strpos() and regular expression handling in
       certain rarely used Asian multi-byte character sets (Tatsuo)
     * Fix bug where COPY CSV mode considered any \. to terminate the copy
       data
       The new code requires \. to appear alone on a line, as per
       documentation.
     * Make COPY CSV mode quote a literal data value of \. to ensure it
       cannot be interpreted as the end-of-data marker (Bruce)
     * Various fixes for functions returning RECORDs (Tom)
     * Fix processing of "postgresql.conf" so a final line with no newline
       is processed properly (Tom)
     * 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 autovacuum crash when processing expression indexes
     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.1.1

     Release date: 2005-12-12

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.0.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1.1

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fix incorrect optimizations of outer-join conditions (Tom)
     * Fix problems with wrong reported column names in cases involving
       sub-selects flattened by the optimizer (Tom)
     * Fix update failures in scenarios involving CHECK constraints,
       toasted columns, *and* indexes (Tom)
     * Fix bgwriter problems after recovering from errors (Tom)
       The background writer was found to leak buffer pins after write
       errors. While not fatal in itself, this might lead to mysterious
       blockages of later VACUUM commands.
     * Prevent failure if client sends Bind protocol message when current
       transaction is already aborted
     * "/contrib/tsearch2" and "/contrib/ltree" fixes (Teodor)
     * Fix problems with translated error messages in languages that
       require word reordering, such as Turkish; also problems with
       unexpected truncation of output strings and wrong display of the
       smallest possible bigint value (Andrew, Tom)
       These problems only appeared on platforms that were using our
       "port/snprintf.c" code, which includes BSD variants if --enable-nls
       was given, and perhaps others. In addition, a different form of the
       translated-error-message problem could appear on Windows depending
       on which version of "libintl" was used.
     * Re-allow AM/PM, HH, HH12, and D format specifiers for to_char(time)
       and to_char(interval). (to_char(interval) should probably use
       HH24.) (Bruce)
     * AIX, HPUX, and MSVC compile fixes (Tom, Hiroshi Saito)
     * Optimizer improvements (Tom)
     * Retry file reads and writes after Windows NO_SYSTEM_RESOURCES error
       (Qingqing Zhou)
     * Prevent autovacuum from crashing during ANALYZE of expression index
       (Alvaro)
     * Fix problems with ON COMMIT DELETE ROWS temp tables
     * Fix problems when a trigger alters the output of a SELECT DISTINCT
       query
     * Add 8.1.0 release note item on how to migrate invalid UTF-8 byte
       sequences (Paul Lindner)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 8.1

     Release date: 2005-11-08
     __________________________________________________________________

Overview

   Major changes in this release:

   Improve concurrent access to the shared buffer cache (Tom)
          Access to the shared buffer cache was identified as a
          significant scalability problem, particularly on multi-CPU
          systems. In this release, the way that locking is done in the
          buffer manager has been overhauled to reduce lock contention and
          improve scalability. The buffer manager has also been changed to
          use a "clock sweep" replacement policy.

   Allow index scans to use an intermediate in-memory bitmap (Tom)
          In previous releases, only a single index could be used to do
          lookups on a table. With this feature, if a query has "WHERE
          tab.col1 = 4 and tab.col2 = 9", and there is no multicolumn
          index on col1 and col2, but there is an index on col1 and
          another on col2, it is possible to search both indexes and
          combine the results in memory, then do heap fetches for only the
          rows matching both the col1 and col2 restrictions. This is very
          useful in environments that have a lot of unstructured queries
          where it is impossible to create indexes that match all possible
          access conditions. Bitmap scans are useful even with a single
          index, as they reduce the amount of random access needed; a
          bitmap index scan is efficient for retrieving fairly large
          fractions of the complete table, whereas plain index scans are
          not.

   Add two-phase commit (Heikki Linnakangas, Alvaro, Tom)
          Two-phase commit allows transactions to be "prepared" on several
          computers, and once all computers have successfully prepared
          their transactions (none failed), all transactions can be
          committed. Even if a machine crashes after a prepare, the
          prepared transaction can be committed after the machine is
          restarted. New syntax includes "PREPARE TRANSACTION" and
          "COMMIT/ROLLBACK PREPARED". A new system view pg_prepared_xacts
          has also been added.

   Create a new role system that replaces users and groups (Stephen Frost)
          Roles are a combination of users and groups. Like users, they
          can have login capability, and like groups, a role can have
          other roles as members. Roles basically remove the distinction
          between users and groups. For example, a role can:

          + Have login capability (optionally)
          + Own objects
          + Hold access permissions for database objects
          + Inherit permissions from other roles it is a member of

          Once a user logs into a role, she obtains capabilities of the
          login role plus any inherited roles, and can use "SET ROLE" to
          switch to other roles she is a member of. This feature is a
          generalization of the SQL standard's concept of roles. This
          change also replaces pg_shadow and pg_group by new role-capable
          catalogs pg_authid and pg_auth_members. The old tables are
          redefined as read-only views on the new role tables.

   Automatically use indexes for MIN() and MAX() (Tom)
          In previous releases, the only way to use an index for MIN() or
          MAX() was to rewrite the query as "SELECT col FROM tab ORDER BY
          col LIMIT 1". Index usage now happens automatically.

   Move /contrib/pg_autovacuum into the main server (Alvaro)
          Integrating autovacuum into the server allows it to be
          automatically started and stopped in sync with the database
          server, and allows autovacuum to be configured from
          "postgresql.conf".

   Add shared row level locks using SELECT ... FOR SHARE (Alvaro)
          While PostgreSQL's MVCC locking allows "SELECT" to never be
          blocked by writers and therefore does not need shared row locks
          for typical operations, shared locks are useful for applications
          that require shared row locking. In particular this reduces the
          locking requirements imposed by referential integrity checks.

   Add dependencies on shared objects, specifically roles (Alvaro)
          This extension of the dependency mechanism prevents roles from
          being dropped while there are still database objects they own.
          Formerly it was possible to accidentally "orphan" objects by
          deleting their owner. While this could be recovered from, it was
          messy and unpleasant.

   Improve performance for partitioned tables (Simon)
          The new constraint_exclusion configuration parameter avoids
          lookups on child tables where constraints indicate that no
          matching rows exist in the child table.

          This allows for a basic type of table partitioning. If child
          tables store separate key ranges and this is enforced using
          appropriate "CHECK" constraints, the optimizer will skip child
          table accesses when the constraint guarantees no matching rows
          exist in the child table.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.1

   A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate
   data from any previous release.

   The 8.0 release announced that the to_char() function for intervals
   would be removed in 8.1. However, since no better API has been
   suggested, to_char(interval) has been enhanced in 8.1 and will remain
   in the server.

   Observe the following incompatibilities:

     * add_missing_from is now false by default (Neil)
       By default, we now generate an error if a table is used in a query
       without a FROM reference. The old behavior is still available, but
       the parameter must be set to 'true' to obtain it.
       It might be necessary to set add_missing_from to true in order to
       load an existing dump file, if the dump contains any views or rules
       created using the implicit-FROM syntax. This should be a one-time
       annoyance, because PostgreSQL 8.1 will convert such views and rules
       to standard explicit-FROM syntax. Subsequent dumps will therefore
       not have the problem.
     * Cause input of a zero-length string ('') for float4/float8/oid to
       throw an error, rather than treating it as a zero (Neil)
       This change is consistent with the current handling of zero-length
       strings for integers. The schedule for this change was announced in
       8.0.
     * default_with_oids is now false by default (Neil)
       With this option set to false, user-created tables no longer have
       an OID column unless "WITH OIDS" is specified in "CREATE TABLE".
       Though OIDs have existed in all releases of PostgreSQL, their use
       is limited because they are only four bytes long and the counter is
       shared across all installed databases. The preferred way of
       uniquely identifying rows is via sequences and the SERIAL type,
       which have been supported since PostgreSQL 6.4.
     * Add E'' syntax so eventually ordinary strings can treat backslashes
       literally (Bruce)
       Currently PostgreSQL processes a backslash in a string literal as
       introducing a special escape sequence, e.g. \n or \010. While this
       allows easy entry of special values, it is nonstandard and makes
       porting of applications from other databases more difficult. For
       this reason, the PostgreSQL project is planning to remove the
       special meaning of backslashes in strings. For backward
       compatibility and for users who want special backslash processing,
       a new string syntax has been created. This new string syntax is
       formed by writing an E immediately preceding the single quote that
       starts the string, e.g. E'hi\n'. While this release does not change
       the handling of backslashes in strings, it does add new
       configuration parameters to help users migrate applications for
       future releases:
          + standard_conforming_strings -- does this release treat
            backslashes literally in ordinary strings?
          + escape_string_warning -- warn about backslashes in ordinary
            (non-E) strings
       The standard_conforming_strings value is read-only. Applications
       can retrieve the value to know how backslashes are processed.
       (Presence of the parameter can also be taken as an indication that
       E'' string syntax is supported.) In a future release,
       standard_conforming_strings will be true, meaning backslashes will
       be treated literally in non-E strings. To prepare for this change,
       use E'' strings in places that need special backslash processing,
       and turn on escape_string_warning to find additional strings that
       need to be converted to use E''. Also, use two single-quotes ('')
       to embed a literal single-quote in a string, rather than the
       PostgreSQL-supported syntax of backslash single-quote (\'). The
       former is standards-conforming and does not require the use of the
       E'' string syntax. You can also use the $$ string syntax, which
       does not treat backslashes specially.
     * Make "REINDEX DATABASE" reindex all indexes in the database (Tom)
       Formerly, "REINDEX DATABASE" reindexed only system tables. This new
       behavior seems more intuitive. A new command "REINDEX SYSTEM"
       provides the old functionality of reindexing just the system
       tables.
     * Read-only large object descriptors now obey MVCC snapshot semantics
       When a large object is opened with INV_READ (and not INV_WRITE),
       the data read from the descriptor will now reflect a "snapshot" of
       the large object's state at the time of the transaction snapshot in
       use by the query that called lo_open(). To obtain the old behavior
       of always returning the latest committed data, include INV_WRITE in
       the mode flags for lo_open().
     * Add proper dependencies for arguments of sequence functions (Tom)
       In previous releases, sequence names passed to nextval(),
       currval(), and setval() were stored as simple text strings, meaning
       that renaming or dropping a sequence used in a DEFAULT clause made
       the clause invalid. This release stores all newly-created sequence
       function arguments as internal OIDs, allowing them to track
       sequence renaming, and adding dependency information that prevents
       improper sequence removal. It also makes such DEFAULT clauses
       immune to schema renaming and search path changes.
       Some applications might rely on the old behavior of run-time lookup
       for sequence names. This can still be done by explicitly casting
       the argument to text, for example nextval('myseq'::text).
       Pre-8.1 database dumps loaded into 8.1 will use the old text-based
       representation and therefore will not have the features of
       OID-stored arguments. However, it is possible to update a database
       containing text-based DEFAULT clauses. First, save this query into
       a file, such as "fixseq.sql":
SELECT  'ALTER TABLE ' ||
   pg_catalog.quote_ident(n.nspname) || '.' ||
   pg_catalog.quote_ident(c.relname) ||
   ' ALTER COLUMN ' || pg_catalog.quote_ident(a.attname) ||
   ' SET DEFAULT ' ||
   regexp_replace(d.adsrc,
                  $$val\(\(('[^']*')::text\)::regclass$$,
                  $$val(\1$$,
                  'g') ||
   ';'
FROM    pg_namespace n, pg_class c, pg_attribute a, pg_attrdef d
WHERE   n.oid = c.relnamespace AND
   c.oid = a.attrelid AND
   a.attrelid = d.adrelid AND
   a.attnum = d.adnum AND
   d.adsrc ~ $$val\(\('[^']*'::text\)::regclass$$;
       Next, run the query against a database to find what adjustments are
       required, like this for database db1:
psql -t -f fixseq.sql db1
       This will show the "ALTER TABLE" commands needed to convert the
       database to the newer OID-based representation. If the commands
       look reasonable, run this to update the database:
psql -t -f fixseq.sql db1 | psql -e db1
       This process must be repeated in each database to be updated.
     * In psql, treat unquoted \{digit}+ sequences as octal (Bruce)
       In previous releases, \{digit}+ sequences were treated as decimal,
       and only \0{digit}+ were treated as octal. This change was made for
       consistency.
     * Remove grammar productions for prefix and postfix % and ^ operators
       (Tom)
       These have never been documented and complicated the use of the
       modulus operator (%) with negative numbers.
     * Make &< and &> for polygons consistent with the box "over"
       operators (Tom)
     * "CREATE LANGUAGE" can ignore the provided arguments in favor of
       information from pg_pltemplate (Tom)
       A new system catalog pg_pltemplate has been defined to carry
       information about the preferred definitions of procedural languages
       (such as whether they have validator functions). When an entry
       exists in this catalog for the language being created, "CREATE
       LANGUAGE" will ignore all its parameters except the language name
       and instead use the catalog information. This measure was taken
       because of increasing problems with obsolete language definitions
       being loaded by old dump files. As of 8.1, pg_dump will dump
       procedural language definitions as just "CREATE LANGUAGE name",
       relying on a template entry to exist at load time. We expect this
       will be a more future-proof representation.
     * Make pg_cancel_backend(int) return a boolean rather than an integer
       (Neil)
     * Some users are having problems loading UTF-8 data into 8.1.X. This
       is because previous versions allowed invalid UTF-8 byte sequences
       to be entered into the database, and this release properly accepts
       only valid UTF-8 sequences. One way to correct a dumpfile is to run
       the command "iconv -c -f UTF-8 -t UTF-8 -o cleanfile.sql
       dumpfile.sql". The -c option removes invalid character sequences. A
       diff of the two files will show the sequences that are invalid.
       "iconv" reads the entire input file into memory so it might be
       necessary to use split to break up the dump into multiple smaller
       files for processing.
     __________________________________________________________________

Additional Changes

   Below you will find a detailed account of the additional changes
   between PostgreSQL 8.1 and the previous major release.
     __________________________________________________________________

Performance Improvements

     * Improve GiST and R-tree index performance (Neil)
     * Improve the optimizer, including auto-resizing of hash joins (Tom)
     * Overhaul internal API in several areas
     * Change WAL record CRCs from 64-bit to 32-bit (Tom)
       We determined that the extra cost of computing 64-bit CRCs was
       significant, and the gain in reliability too marginal to justify
       it.
     * Prevent writing large empty gaps in WAL pages (Tom)
     * Improve spinlock behavior on SMP machines, particularly Opterons
       (Tom)
     * Allow nonconsecutive index columns to be used in a multicolumn
       index (Tom)
       For example, this allows an index on columns a,b,c to be used in a
       query with "WHERE a = 4 and c = 10".
     * Skip WAL logging for "CREATE TABLE AS" / "SELECT INTO" (Simon)
       Since a crash during "CREATE TABLE AS" would cause the table to be
       dropped during recovery, there is no reason to WAL log as the table
       is loaded. (Logging still happens if WAL archiving is enabled,
       however.)
     * Allow concurrent GiST index access (Teodor, Oleg)
     * Add configuration parameter full_page_writes to control writing
       full pages to WAL (Bruce)
       To prevent partial disk writes from corrupting the database,
       PostgreSQL writes a complete copy of each database disk page to WAL
       the first time it is modified after a checkpoint. This option turns
       off that functionality for more speed. This is safe to use with
       battery-backed disk caches where partial page writes cannot happen.
     * Use O_DIRECT if available when using O_SYNC for wal_sync_method
       (Itagaki Takahiro)
       O_DIRECT causes disk writes to bypass the kernel cache, and for WAL
       writes, this improves performance.
     * Improve "COPY FROM" performance (Alon Goldshuv)
       This was accomplished by reading "COPY" input in larger chunks,
       rather than character by character.
     * Improve the performance of COUNT(), SUM, AVG(), STDDEV(), and
       VARIANCE() (Neil, Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

Server Changes

     * Prevent problems due to transaction ID (XID) wraparound (Tom)
       The server will now warn when the transaction counter approaches
       the wraparound point. If the counter becomes too close to
       wraparound, the server will stop accepting queries. This ensures
       that data is not lost before needed vacuuming is performed.
     * Fix problems with object IDs (OIDs) conflicting with existing
       system objects after the OID counter has wrapped around (Tom)
     * Add warning about the need to increase max_fsm_relations and
       max_fsm_pages during "VACUUM" (Ron Mayer)
     * Add temp_buffers configuration parameter to allow users to
       determine the size of the local buffer area for temporary table
       access (Tom)
     * Add session start time and client IP address to pg_stat_activity
       (Magnus)
     * Adjust pg_stat views for bitmap scans (Tom)
       The meanings of some of the fields have changed slightly.
     * Enhance pg_locks view (Tom)
     * Log queries for client-side "PREPARE" and "EXECUTE" (Simon)
     * Allow Kerberos name and user name case sensitivity to be specified
       in "postgresql.conf" (Magnus)
     * Add configuration parameter krb_server_hostname so that the server
       host name can be specified as part of service principal (Todd
       Kover)
       If not set, any service principal matching an entry in the keytab
       can be used. This is new Kerberos matching behavior in this
       release.
     * Add log_line_prefix options for millisecond timestamps (%m) and
       remote host (%h) (Ed L.)
     * Add WAL logging for GiST indexes (Teodor, Oleg)
       GiST indexes are now safe for crash and point-in-time recovery.
     * Remove old "*.backup" files when we do pg_stop_backup() (Bruce)
       This prevents a large number of "*.backup" files from existing in
       "pg_xlog/".
     * Add configuration parameters to control TCP/IP keep-alive times for
       idle, interval, and count (Oliver Jowett)
       These values can be changed to allow more rapid detection of lost
       client connections.
     * Add per-user and per-database connection limits (Petr Jelinek)
       Using "ALTER USER" and "ALTER DATABASE", limits can now be enforced
       on the maximum number of sessions that can concurrently connect as
       a specific user or to a specific database. Setting the limit to
       zero disables user or database connections.
     * Allow more than two gigabytes of shared memory and per-backend work
       memory on 64-bit machines (Koichi Suzuki)
     * New system catalog pg_pltemplate allows overriding obsolete
       procedural-language definitions in dump files (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

Query Changes

     * Add temporary views (Koju Iijima, Neil)
     * Fix "HAVING" without any aggregate functions or "GROUP BY" so that
       the query returns a single group (Tom)
       Previously, such a case would treat the "HAVING" clause the same as
       a "WHERE" clause. This was not per spec.
     * Add "USING" clause to allow additional tables to be specified to
       "DELETE" (Euler Taveira de Oliveira, Neil)
       In prior releases, there was no clear method for specifying
       additional tables to be used for joins in a "DELETE" statement.
       "UPDATE" already has a FROM clause for this purpose.
     * Add support for \x hex escapes in backend and ecpg strings (Bruce)
       This is just like the standard C \x escape syntax. Octal escapes
       were already supported.
     * Add "BETWEEN SYMMETRIC" query syntax (Pavel Stehule)
       This feature allows "BETWEEN" comparisons without requiring the
       first value to be less than the second. For example, "2 BETWEEN
       [ASYMMETRIC] 3 AND 1" returns false, while "2 BETWEEN SYMMETRIC 3
       AND 1" returns true. "BETWEEN ASYMMETRIC" was already supported.
     * Add "NOWAIT" option to "SELECT ... FOR UPDATE/SHARE" (Hans-Juergen
       Schoenig)
       While the statement_timeout configuration parameter allows a query
       taking more than a certain amount of time to be cancelled, the
       "NOWAIT" option allows a query to be canceled as soon as a "SELECT
       ... FOR UPDATE/SHARE" command cannot immediately acquire a row
       lock.
     __________________________________________________________________

Object Manipulation Changes

     * Track dependencies of shared objects (Alvaro)
       PostgreSQL allows global tables (users, databases, tablespaces) to
       reference information in multiple databases. This addition adds
       dependency information for global tables, so, for example, user
       ownership can be tracked across databases, so a user who owns
       something in any database can no longer be removed. Dependency
       tracking already existed for database-local objects.
     * Allow limited "ALTER OWNER" commands to be performed by the object
       owner (Stephen Frost)
       Prior releases allowed only superusers to change object owners.
       Now, ownership can be transferred if the user executing the command
       owns the object and would be able to create it as the new owner
       (that is, the user is a member of the new owning role and that role
       has the CREATE permission that would be needed to create the object
       afresh).
     * Add "ALTER" object "SET SCHEMA" capability for some object types
       (tables, functions, types) (Bernd Helmle)
       This allows objects to be moved to different schemas.
     * Add "ALTER TABLE ENABLE/DISABLE TRIGGER" to disable triggers
       (Satoshi Nagayasu)
     __________________________________________________________________

Utility Command Changes

     * Allow "TRUNCATE" to truncate multiple tables in a single command
       (Alvaro)
       Because of referential integrity checks, it is not allowed to
       truncate a table that is part of a referential integrity
       constraint. Using this new functionality, "TRUNCATE" can be used to
       truncate such tables, if both tables involved in a referential
       integrity constraint are truncated in a single "TRUNCATE" command.
     * Properly process carriage returns and line feeds in "COPY CSV" mode
       (Andrew)
       In release 8.0, carriage returns and line feeds in "CSV COPY TO"
       were processed in an inconsistent manner. (This was documented on
       the TODO list.)
     * Add "COPY WITH CSV HEADER" to allow a header line as the first line
       in "COPY" (Andrew)
       This allows handling of the common "CSV" usage of placing the
       column names on the first line of the data file. For "COPY TO", the
       first line contains the column names, and for "COPY FROM", the
       first line is ignored.
     * On Windows, display better sub-second precision in "EXPLAIN
       ANALYZE" (Magnus)
     * Add trigger duration display to "EXPLAIN ANALYZE" (Tom)
       Prior releases included trigger execution time as part of the total
       execution time, but did not show it separately. It is now possible
       to see how much time is spent in each trigger.
     * Add support for \x hex escapes in "COPY" (Sergey Ten)
       Previous releases only supported octal escapes.
     * Make "SHOW ALL" include variable descriptions (Matthias Schmidt)
       "SHOW" varname still only displays the variable's value and does
       not include the description.
     * Make initdb create a new standard database called postgres, and
       convert utilities to use postgres rather than template1 for
       standard lookups (Dave)
       In prior releases, template1 was used both as a default connection
       for utilities like createuser, and as a template for new databases.
       This caused "CREATE DATABASE" to sometimes fail, because a new
       database cannot be created if anyone else is in the template
       database. With this change, the default connection database is now
       postgres, meaning it is much less likely someone will be using
       template1 during "CREATE DATABASE".
     * Create new reindexdb command-line utility by moving
       "/contrib/reindexdb" into the server (Euler Taveira de Oliveira)
     __________________________________________________________________

Data Type and Function Changes

     * Add MAX() and MIN() aggregates for array types (Koju Iijima)
     * Fix to_date() and to_timestamp() to behave reasonably when CC and
       YY fields are both used (Karel Zak)
       If the format specification contains CC and a year specification is
       YYY or longer, ignore the CC. If the year specification is YY or
       shorter, interpret CC as the previous century.
     * Add md5(bytea) (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
       md5(text) already existed.
     * Add support for "numeric ^ numeric" based on power(numeric,
       numeric)
       The function already existed, but there was no operator assigned to
       it.
     * Fix NUMERIC modulus by properly truncating the quotient during
       computation (Bruce)
       In previous releases, modulus for large values sometimes returned
       negative results due to rounding of the quotient.
     * Add a function lastval() (Dennis Björklund)
       lastval() is a simplified version of currval(). It automatically
       determines the proper sequence name based on the most recent
       nextval() or setval() call performed by the current session.
     * Add to_timestamp(DOUBLE PRECISION) (Michael Glaesemann)
       Converts Unix seconds since 1970 to a TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE.
     * Add pg_postmaster_start_time() function (Euler Taveira de Oliveira,
       Matthias Schmidt)
     * Allow the full use of time zone names in "AT TIME ZONE", not just
       the short list previously available (Magnus)
       Previously, only a predefined list of time zone names were
       supported by "AT TIME ZONE". Now any supported time zone name can
       be used, e.g.:
        SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP AT TIME ZONE 'Europe/London';

       In the above query, the time zone used is adjusted based on the
       daylight saving time rules that were in effect on the supplied
       date.
     * Add GREATEST() and LEAST() variadic functions (Pavel Stehule)
       These functions take a variable number of arguments and return the
       greatest or least value among the arguments.
     * Add pg_column_size() (Mark Kirkwood)
       This returns storage size of a column, which might be compressed.
     * Add regexp_replace() (Atsushi Ogawa)
       This allows regular expression replacement, like sed. An optional
       flag argument allows selection of global (replace all) and
       case-insensitive modes.
     * Fix interval division and multiplication (Bruce)
       Previous versions sometimes returned unjustified results, like "'4
       months'::interval / 5" returning "'1 mon -6 days'".
     * Fix roundoff behavior in timestamp, time, and interval output (Tom)
       This fixes some cases in which the seconds field would be shown as
       60 instead of incrementing the higher-order fields.
     * Add a separate day field to type interval so a one day interval can
       be distinguished from a 24 hour interval (Michael Glaesemann)
       Days that contain a daylight saving time adjustment are not 24
       hours long, but typically 23 or 25 hours. This change creates a
       conceptual distinction between intervals of "so many days" and
       intervals of "so many hours". Adding 1 day to a timestamp now gives
       the same local time on the next day even if a daylight saving time
       adjustment occurs between, whereas adding 24 hours will give a
       different local time when this happens. For example, under US DST
       rules:
        '2005-04-03 00:00:00-05' + '1 day' = '2005-04-04 00:00:00-04'
        '2005-04-03 00:00:00-05' + '24 hours' = '2005-04-04 01:00:00-04'

     * Add justify_days() and justify_hours() (Michael Glaesemann)
       These functions, respectively, adjust days to an appropriate number
       of full months and days, and adjust hours to an appropriate number
       of full days and hours.
     * Move "/contrib/dbsize" into the backend, and rename some of the
       functions (Dave Page, Andreas Pflug)
          + pg_tablespace_size()
          + pg_database_size()
          + pg_relation_size()
          + pg_total_relation_size()
          + pg_size_pretty()
       pg_total_relation_size() includes indexes and TOAST tables.
     * Add functions for read-only file access to the cluster directory
       (Dave Page, Andreas Pflug)
          + pg_stat_file()
          + pg_read_file()
          + pg_ls_dir()
     * Add pg_reload_conf() to force reloading of the configuration files
       (Dave Page, Andreas Pflug)
     * Add pg_rotate_logfile() to force rotation of the server log file
       (Dave Page, Andreas Pflug)
     * Change pg_stat_* views to include TOAST tables (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

Encoding and Locale Changes

     * Rename some encodings to be more consistent and to follow
       international standards (Bruce)
          + UNICODE is now UTF8
          + ALT is now WIN866
          + WIN is now WIN1251
          + TCVN is now WIN1258
       The original names still work.
     * Add support for WIN1252 encoding (Roland Volkmann)
     * Add support for four-byte UTF8 characters (John Hansen)
       Previously only one, two, and three-byte UTF8 characters were
       supported. This is particularly important for support for some
       Chinese character sets.
     * Allow direct conversion between EUC_JP and SJIS to improve
       performance (Atsushi Ogawa)
     * Allow the UTF8 encoding to work on Windows (Magnus)
       This is done by mapping UTF8 to the Windows-native UTF16
       implementation.
     __________________________________________________________________

General Server-Side Language Changes

     * Fix "ALTER LANGUAGE RENAME" (Sergey Yatskevich)
     * Allow function characteristics, like strictness and volatility, to
       be modified via "ALTER FUNCTION" (Neil)
     * Increase the maximum number of function arguments to 100 (Tom)
     * Allow SQL and PL/PgSQL functions to use "OUT" and "INOUT"
       parameters (Tom)
       "OUT" is an alternate way for a function to return values. Instead
       of using "RETURN", values can be returned by assigning to
       parameters declared as "OUT" or "INOUT". This is notationally
       simpler in some cases, particularly so when multiple values need to
       be returned. While returning multiple values from a function was
       possible in previous releases, this greatly simplifies the process.
       (The feature will be extended to other server-side languages in
       future releases.)
     * Move language handler functions into the pg_catalog schema
       This makes it easier to drop the public schema if desired.
     * Add SPI_getnspname() to SPI (Neil)
     __________________________________________________________________

PL/PgSQL Server-Side Language Changes

     * Overhaul the memory management of PL/PgSQL functions (Neil)
       The parsetree of each function is now stored in a separate memory
       context. This allows this memory to be easily reclaimed when it is
       no longer needed.
     * Check function syntax at "CREATE FUNCTION" time, rather than at
       runtime (Neil)
       Previously, most syntax errors were reported only when the function
       was executed.
     * Allow "OPEN" to open non-"SELECT" queries like "EXPLAIN" and "SHOW"
       (Tom)
     * No longer require functions to issue a "RETURN" statement (Tom)
       This is a byproduct of the newly added "OUT" and "INOUT"
       functionality. "RETURN" can be omitted when it is not needed to
       provide the function's return value.
     * Add support for an optional "INTO" clause to PL/PgSQL's "EXECUTE"
       statement (Pavel Stehule, Neil)
     * Make "CREATE TABLE AS" set "ROW_COUNT" (Tom)
     * Define SQLSTATE and SQLERRM to return the SQLSTATE and error
       message of the current exception (Pavel Stehule, Neil)
       These variables are only defined inside exception blocks.
     * Allow the parameters to the "RAISE" statement to be expressions
       (Pavel Stehule, Neil)
     * Add a loop "CONTINUE" statement (Pavel Stehule, Neil)
     * Allow block and loop labels (Pavel Stehule)
     __________________________________________________________________

PL/Perl Server-Side Language Changes

     * Allow large result sets to be returned efficiently (Abhijit
       Menon-Sen)
       This allows functions to use return_next() to avoid building the
       entire result set in memory.
     * Allow one-row-at-a-time retrieval of query results (Abhijit
       Menon-Sen)
       This allows functions to use spi_query() and spi_fetchrow() to
       avoid accumulating the entire result set in memory.
     * Force PL/Perl to handle strings as UTF8 if the server encoding is
       UTF8 (David Kamholz)
     * Add a validator function for PL/Perl (Andrew)
       This allows syntax errors to be reported at definition time, rather
       than execution time.
     * Allow PL/Perl to return a Perl array when the function returns an
       array type (Andrew)
       This basically maps PostgreSQL arrays to Perl arrays.
     * Allow Perl nonfatal warnings to generate "NOTICE" messages (Andrew)
     * Allow Perl's strict mode to be enabled (Andrew)
     __________________________________________________________________

psql Changes

     * Add "\set ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK" to allow statements in a transaction
       to error without affecting the rest of the transaction (Greg Sabino
       Mullane)
       This is basically implemented by wrapping every statement in a
       sub-transaction.
     * Add support for \x hex strings in psql variables (Bruce)
       Octal escapes were already supported.
     * Add support for "troff -ms" output format (Roger Leigh)
     * Allow the history file location to be controlled by HISTFILE
       (Andreas Seltenreich)
       This allows configuration of per-database history storage.
     * Prevent "\x" (expanded mode) from affecting the output of "\d
       tablename" (Neil)
     * Add "-L" option to psql to log sessions (Lorne Sunley)
       This option was added because some operating systems do not have
       simple command-line activity logging functionality.
     * Make "\d" show the tablespaces of indexes (Qingqing Zhou)
     * Allow psql help ("\h") to make a best guess on the proper help
       information (Greg Sabino Mullane)
       This allows the user to just add "\h" to the front of the syntax
       error query and get help on the supported syntax. Previously any
       additional query text beyond the command name had to be removed to
       use "\h".
     * Add "\pset numericlocale" to allow numbers to be output in a
       locale-aware format (Eugen Nedelcu)
       For example, using C locale 100000 would be output as 100,000.0
       while a European locale might output this value as 100.000,0.
     * Make startup banner show both server version number and psql's
       version number, when they are different (Bruce)
       Also, a warning will be shown if the server and psql are from
       different major releases.
     __________________________________________________________________

pg_dump Changes

     * Add "-n" / "--schema" switch to pg_restore (Richard van den Berg)
       This allows just the objects in a specified schema to be restored.
     * Allow pg_dump to dump large objects even in text mode (Tom)
       With this change, large objects are now always dumped; the former
       "-b" switch is a no-op.
     * Allow pg_dump to dump a consistent snapshot of large objects (Tom)
     * Dump comments for large objects (Tom)
     * Add "--encoding" to pg_dump (Magnus Hagander)
       This allows a database to be dumped in an encoding that is
       different from the server's encoding. This is valuable when
       transferring the dump to a machine with a different encoding.
     * Rely on pg_pltemplate for procedural languages (Tom)
       If the call handler for a procedural language is in the pg_catalog
       schema, pg_dump does not dump the handler. Instead, it dumps the
       language using just "CREATE LANGUAGE name", relying on the
       pg_pltemplate catalog to provide the language's creation parameters
       at load time.
     __________________________________________________________________

libpq Changes

     * Add a PGPASSFILE environment variable to specify the password
       file's filename (Andrew)
     * Add lo_create(), that is similar to lo_creat() but allows the OID
       of the large object to be specified (Tom)
     * Make libpq consistently return an error to the client application
       on malloc() failure (Neil)
     __________________________________________________________________

Source Code Changes

     * Fix pgxs to support building against a relocated installation
     * Add spinlock support for the Itanium processor using Intel compiler
       (Vikram Kalsi)
     * Add Kerberos 5 support for Windows (Magnus)
     * Add Chinese FAQ (laser@pgsqldb.com)
     * Rename Rendezvous to Bonjour to match OS/X feature renaming (Bruce)
     * Add support for fsync_writethrough on Darwin (Chris Campbell)
     * Streamline the passing of information within the server, the
       optimizer, and the lock system (Tom)
     * Allow pg_config to be compiled using MSVC (Andrew)
       This is required to build DBD::Pg using MSVC.
     * Remove support for Kerberos V4 (Magnus)
       Kerberos 4 had security vulnerabilities and is no longer
       maintained.
     * Code cleanups (Coverity static analysis performed by EnterpriseDB)
     * Modify "postgresql.conf" to use documentation defaults on/off
       rather than true/false (Bruce)
     * Enhance pg_config to be able to report more build-time values (Tom)
     * Allow libpq to be built thread-safe on Windows (Dave Page)
     * Allow IPv6 connections to be used on Windows (Andrew)
     * Add Server Administration documentation about I/O subsystem
       reliability (Bruce)
     * Move private declarations from "gist.h" to "gist_private.h" (Neil)
       In previous releases, "gist.h" contained both the public GiST API
       (intended for use by authors of GiST index implementations) as well
       as some private declarations used by the implementation of GiST
       itself. The latter have been moved to a separate file,
       "gist_private.h". Most GiST index implementations should be
       unaffected.
     * Overhaul GiST memory management (Neil)
       GiST methods are now always invoked in a short-lived memory
       context. Therefore, memory allocated via palloc() will be reclaimed
       automatically, so GiST index implementations do not need to
       manually release allocated memory via pfree().
     __________________________________________________________________

Contrib Changes

     * Add "/contrib/pg_buffercache" contrib module (Mark Kirkwood)
       This displays the contents of the buffer cache, for debugging and
       performance tuning purposes.
     * Remove "/contrib/array" because it is obsolete (Tom)
     * Clean up the "/contrib/lo" module (Tom)
     * Move "/contrib/findoidjoins" to "/src/tools" (Tom)
     * Remove the <<, >>, &<, and &> operators from "/contrib/cube"
       These operators were not useful.
     * Improve "/contrib/btree_gist" (Janko Richter)
     * Improve "/contrib/pgbench" (Tomoaki Sato, Tatsuo)
       There is now a facility for testing with SQL command scripts given
       by the user, instead of only a hard-wired command sequence.
     * Improve "/contrib/pgcrypto" (Marko Kreen)
          + Implementation of OpenPGP symmetric-key and public-key
            encryption
            Both RSA and Elgamal public-key algorithms are supported.
          + Stand alone build: include SHA256/384/512 hashes, Fortuna PRNG
          + OpenSSL build: support 3DES, use internal AES with OpenSSL <
            0.9.7
          + Take build parameters (OpenSSL, zlib) from "configure" result
            There is no need to edit the "Makefile" anymore.
          + Remove support for "libmhash" and "libmcrypt"
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 8.0.15

     Release date: 2008-01-07

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.14, including fixes
   for significant security issues.

   This is the last 8.0.X release for which the PostgreSQL community will
   produce binary packages for Windows. Windows users are encouraged to
   move to 8.2.X or later, since there are Windows-specific fixes in 8.2.X
   that are impractical to back-port. 8.0.X will continue to be supported
   on other platforms.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.15

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.6, see the release notes
   for 8.0.6.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     * Repair assorted bugs in the regular-expression package (Tom, Will
       Drewry)
       Suitably crafted regular-expression patterns could cause crashes,
       infinite or near-infinite looping, and/or massive memory
       consumption, all of which pose denial-of-service hazards for
       applications that accept regex search patterns from untrustworthy
       sources. (CVE-2007-4769, CVE-2007-4772, CVE-2007-6067)
     * Require non-superusers who use "/contrib/dblink" to use only
       password authentication, as a security measure (Joe)
       The fix that appeared for this in 8.0.14 was incomplete, as it
       plugged the hole for only some "dblink" functions. (CVE-2007-6601,
       CVE-2007-3278)
     * Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2007k (in particular,
       recent Argentina changes) (Tom)
     * Fix planner failure in some cases of WHERE false AND var IN (SELECT
       ...) (Tom)
     * Preserve the tablespace of indexes that are rebuilt by "ALTER TABLE
       ... ALTER COLUMN TYPE" (Tom)
     * Make archive recovery always start a new WAL timeline, rather than
       only when a recovery stop time was used (Simon)
       This avoids a corner-case risk of trying to overwrite an existing
       archived copy of the last WAL segment, and seems simpler and
       cleaner than the original definition.
     * Make "VACUUM" not use all of maintenance_work_mem when the table is
       too small for it to be useful (Alvaro)
     * Fix potential crash in translate() when using a multibyte database
       encoding (Tom)
     * Fix PL/Perl to cope when platform's Perl defines type bool as int
       rather than char (Tom)
       While this could theoretically happen anywhere, no standard build
       of Perl did things this way ... until Mac OS X 10.5.
     * Fix PL/Python to not crash on long exception messages (Alvaro)
     * Fix pg_dump to correctly handle inheritance child tables that have
       default expressions different from their parent's (Tom)
     * ecpg parser fixes (Michael)
     * Make "contrib/tablefunc"'s crosstab() handle NULL rowid as a
       category in its own right, rather than crashing (Joe)
     * Fix tsvector and tsquery output routines to escape backslashes
       correctly (Teodor, Bruce)
     * Fix crash of to_tsvector() on huge input strings (Teodor)
     * 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 8.0.14

     Release date: 2007-09-17

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.14

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.6, see the release notes
   for 8.0.6.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 excessive logging of SSL error messages (Tom)
     * Fix logging so that log messages are never interleaved when using
       the syslogger process (Andrew)
     * Fix crash when log_min_error_statement logging runs out of memory
       (Tom)
     * Fix incorrect handling of some foreign-key corner cases (Tom)
     * Prevent "CLUSTER" from failing due to attempting to process
       temporary tables of other sessions (Alvaro)
     * Update the time zone database rules, particularly New Zealand's
       upcoming changes (Tom)
     * Windows socket improvements (Magnus)
     * Suppress timezone name (%Z) in log timestamps on Windows because of
       possible encoding mismatches (Tom)
     * Require non-superusers who use "/contrib/dblink" to use only
       password authentication, as a security measure (Joe)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 8.0.13

     Release date: 2007-04-23

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.12, including a
   security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.13

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.6, see the release notes
   for 8.0.6.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     * "/contrib/tsearch2" crash fixes (Teodor)
     * Fix potential-data-corruption bug in how "VACUUM FULL" handles
       "UPDATE" chains (Tom, Pavan Deolasee)
     * Fix PANIC during enlargement of a hash index (bug introduced in
       8.0.10) (Tom)
     * Fix POSIX-style timezone specs to follow new USA DST rules (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 8.0.12

     Release date: 2007-02-07

   This release contains one fix from 8.0.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.12

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.6, see the release notes
   for 8.0.6.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Remove overly-restrictive check for type length in constraints and
       functional indexes(Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 8.0.11

     Release date: 2007-02-05

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.10, including a
   security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.11

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.6, see the release notes
   for 8.0.6.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Remove security vulnerabilities that allowed connected users to
       read backend memory (Tom)
       The vulnerabilities involve suppressing the normal check that a SQL
       function returns the data type it's declared to, and changing the
       data type of a table column (CVE-2007-0555, CVE-2007-0556). These
       errors 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)
     * Fix for rare Assert() crash triggered by UNION (Tom)
     * Tighten security of multi-byte character processing for UTF8
       sequences over three bytes long (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 8.0.10

     Release date: 2007-01-08

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.9.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.10

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.6, see the release notes
   for 8.0.6.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Improve handling of getaddrinfo() on AIX (Tom)
       This fixes a problem with starting the statistics collector, among
       other things.
     * Fix "failed to re-find parent key" errors in "VACUUM" (Tom)
     * Fix race condition for truncation of a large relation across a
       gigabyte boundary by "VACUUM" (Tom)
     * Fix bugs affecting multi-gigabyte hash indexes (Tom)
     * Fix possible deadlock in Windows signal handling (Teodor)
     * Fix error when constructing an ARRAY[] made up of multiple empty
       elements (Tom)
     * Fix ecpg memory leak during connection (Michael)
     * 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.
     * Update timezone database
       This affects Australian and Canadian daylight-savings rules in
       particular.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.0.9

     Release date: 2006-10-16

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.8.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.9

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.6, see the release notes
   for 8.0.6.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fix crash when referencing NEW row values in rule WHERE expressions
       (Tom)
     * Fix core dump when an untyped literal is taken as ANYARRAY
     * Fix mishandling of AFTER triggers when query contains a SQL
       function returning multiple rows (Tom)
     * Fix "ALTER TABLE ... TYPE" to recheck NOT NULL for USING clause
       (Tom)
     * Fix string_to_array() to handle overlapping matches for the
       separator string
       For example, string_to_array('123xx456xxx789', 'xx').
     * Fix corner cases in pattern matching for psql's \d commands
     * Fix index-corrupting bugs in /contrib/ltree (Teodor)
     * Numerous robustness fixes in ecpg (Joachim Wieland)
     * Fix backslash escaping in /contrib/dbmirror
     * Fix instability of statistics collection on Win32 (Tom, Andrew)
     * Fixes for AIX and Intel compilers (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.0.8

     Release date: 2006-05-23

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.7, including patches
   for extremely serious security issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.8

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.6, see the release notes
   for 8.0.6.

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 and standard_conforming_strings
       This fixes libpq-using applications for the security issues
       described in CVE-2006-2313 and CVE-2006-2314, and also
       future-proofs them against the planned changeover to SQL-standard
       string literal syntax. 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 bug that sometimes caused OR'd index scans to miss rows they
       should have returned
     * Fix WAL replay for case where a btree index has been truncated
     * Fix SIMILAR TO for patterns involving | (Tom)
     * Fix "SELECT INTO" and "CREATE TABLE AS" to create tables in the
       default tablespace, not the base directory (Kris Jurka)
     * Fix server to use custom DH SSL parameters correctly (Michael Fuhr)
     * Fix for Bonjour on Intel Macs (Ashley Clark)
     * Fix various minor memory leaks
     * Fix problem with password prompting on some Win32 systems (Robert
       Kinberg)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.0.7

     Release date: 2006-02-14

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.6.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.7

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.6, see the release notes
   for 8.0.6.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 8.0.4, 7.4.9, and 7.3.11 releases.
     * Fix race condition that could lead to "file already exists" errors
       during pg_clog and pg_subtrans file creation (Tom)
     * Fix cases that could lead to crashes if a cache-invalidation
       message arrives at just the wrong time (Tom)
     * Properly check DOMAIN constraints for UNKNOWN parameters in
       prepared statements (Neil)
     * Ensure "ALTER COLUMN TYPE" will process FOREIGN KEY, UNIQUE, and
       PRIMARY KEY constraints in the proper order (Nakano Yoshihisa)
     * Fixes to allow restoring dumps that have cross-schema references to
       custom operators or operator classes (Tom)
     * Allow pg_restore to continue properly after a "COPY" failure;
       formerly it tried to treat the remaining "COPY" data as SQL
       commands (Stephen Frost)
     * Fix pg_ctl unregister crash when the data directory is not
       specified (Magnus)
     * Fix ecpg crash on AMD64 and PPC (Neil)
     * Recover properly if error occurs during argument passing in
       PL/python (Neil)
     * Fix PL/perl's handling of locales on Win32 to match the backend
       (Andrew)
     * Fix crash when log_min_messages is set to DEBUG3 or above in
       "postgresql.conf" on Win32 (Bruce)
     * Fix pgxs -L library path specification for Win32, Cygwin, OS X, AIX
       (Bruce)
     * Check that SID is enabled while checking for Win32 admin privileges
       (Magnus)
     * Properly reject out-of-range date inputs (Kris Jurka)
     * Portability fix for testing presence of finite and isinf during
       configure (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.0.6

     Release date: 2006-01-09

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.5.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.6

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.3, see the release notes
   for 8.0.3. Also, you might need to "REINDEX" indexes on textual columns
   after updating, if you are affected by the locale or plperl issues
   described below.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fix Windows code so that postmaster will continue rather than exit
       if there is no more room in ShmemBackendArray (Magnus)
       The previous behavior could lead to a denial-of-service situation
       if too many connection requests arrive close together. This applies
       *only* to the Windows port.
     * Fix bug introduced in 8.0 that could allow ReadBuffer to return an
       already-used page as new, potentially causing loss of
       recently-committed data (Tom)
     * Fix for protocol-level Describe messages issued outside a
       transaction or in a failed transaction (Tom)
     * 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.
     * Allow more flexible relocation of installation directories (Tom)
       Previous releases supported relocation only if all installation
       directory paths were the same except for the last component.
     * Fix longstanding bug in strpos() and regular expression handling in
       certain rarely used Asian multi-byte character sets (Tatsuo)
     * Various fixes for functions returning RECORDs (Tom)
     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.0.5

     Release date: 2005-12-12

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.4.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.5

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.3, see the release notes
   for 8.0.3.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     * Fix bgwriter problems after recovering from errors (Tom)
       The background writer was found to leak buffer pins after write
       errors. While not fatal in itself, this might lead to mysterious
       blockages of later VACUUM commands.
     * Prevent failure if client sends Bind protocol message when current
       transaction is already aborted
     * "/contrib/ltree" fixes (Teodor)
     * AIX and HPUX compile fixes (Tom)
     * Retry file reads and writes after Windows NO_SYSTEM_RESOURCES error
       (Qingqing Zhou)
     * Fix intermittent failure when log_line_prefix includes %i
     * Fix psql performance issue with long scripts on Windows (Merlin
       Moncure)
     * Fix missing updates of "pg_group" flat file
     * Fix longstanding planning error for outer joins
       This bug sometimes caused a bogus error "RIGHT JOIN is only
       supported with merge-joinable join conditions".
     * Postpone timezone initialization until after "postmaster.pid" is
       created
       This avoids confusing startup scripts that expect the pid file to
       appear quickly.
     * Prevent core dump in pg_autovacuum when a table has been dropped
     * Fix problems with whole-row references (foo.*) to subquery results
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.0.4

     Release date: 2005-10-04

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.3.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.4

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.0.3, see the release notes
   for 8.0.3.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     * Force a checkpoint before committing "CREATE DATABASE"
       This should fix recent reports of "index is not a btree" failures
       when a crash occurs shortly after "CREATE DATABASE".
     * Fix the sense of the test for read-only transaction in "COPY"
       The code formerly prohibited "COPY TO", where it should prohibit
       "COPY FROM".
     * Handle consecutive embedded newlines in "COPY" CSV-mode input
     * Fix date_trunc(week) for dates near year end
     * Fix planning problem with outer-join ON clauses that reference only
       the inner-side relation
     * Further fixes for x FULL JOIN y ON true corner cases
     * Fix overenthusiastic optimization of x IN (SELECT DISTINCT ...) and
       related cases
     * Fix mis-planning of queries with small LIMIT values due to poorly
       thought out "fuzzy" cost comparison
     * Make array_in and array_recv more paranoid about validating their
       OID parameter
     * Fix missing rows in queries like UPDATE a=... WHERE a... with GiST
       index on column a
     * Improve robustness of datetime parsing
     * Improve checking for partially-written WAL pages
     * Improve robustness of signal handling when SSL is enabled
     * Improve MIPS and M68K spinlock code
     * Don't try to open more than max_files_per_process files during
       postmaster startup
     * Various memory leakage fixes
     * Various portability improvements
     * Update timezone data files
     * Improve handling of DLL load failures on Windows
     * Improve random-number generation on Windows
     * Make psql -f filename return a nonzero exit code when opening the
       file fails
     * Change pg_dump to handle inherited check constraints more reliably
     * Fix password prompting in pg_restore on Windows
     * Fix PL/PgSQL to handle var := var correctly when the variable is of
       pass-by-reference type
     * Fix PL/Perl %_SHARED so it's actually shared
     * Fix "contrib/pg_autovacuum" to allow sleep intervals over 2000 sec
     * Update "contrib/tsearch2" to use current Snowball code
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.0.3

     Release date: 2005-05-09

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.2, including several
   security-related issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.3

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.X. However, it is
   one possible way of handling two significant security problems that
   have been found in the initial contents of 8.0.X system catalogs. A
   dump/initdb/reload sequence using 8.0.3's initdb will automatically
   correct these problems.

   The larger 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.)

   The lesser problem is that the "contrib/tsearch2" module creates
   several functions that are improperly declared to return internal when
   they do not accept internal arguments. This breaks type safety for all
   functions using internal arguments.

   It is strongly recommended that all installations repair these errors,
   either by initdb or by following the manual repair procedure given
   below. The errors at least allow 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 same manual repair
   procedures shown in the 7.4.8 release notes.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Change encoding function signature to prevent misuse
     * Change "contrib/tsearch2" to avoid unsafe use of INTERNAL function
       results
     * Guard against incorrect second parameter to record_out
     * 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 "REINDEX"ed 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.
     * Fix pg_dump to dump trigger names containing % correctly (Neil)
     * Still more 64-bit fixes for "contrib/intagg"
     * Prevent incorrect optimization of functions returning RECORD
     * Prevent crash on COALESCE(NULL,NULL)
     * Fix Borland makefile for libpq
     * Fix "contrib/btree_gist" for timetz type (Teodor)
     * Make "pg_ctl" check the PID found in "postmaster.pid" to see if it
       is still a live process
     * Fix "pg_dump"/"pg_restore" problems caused by addition of dump
       timestamps
     * Fix interaction between materializing holdable cursors and firing
       deferred triggers during transaction commit
     * Fix memory leak in SQL functions returning pass-by-reference data
       types
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.0.2

     Release date: 2005-04-07

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.1.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.2

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.*. This release
   updates the major version number of the PostgreSQL libraries, so it
   might be necessary to re-link some user applications if they cannot
   find the properly-numbered shared library.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Increment the major version number of all interface libraries
       (Bruce)
       This should have been done in 8.0.0. It is required so 7.4.X
       versions of PostgreSQL client applications, like psql, can be used
       on the same machine as 8.0.X applications. This might require
       re-linking user applications that use these libraries.
     * Add Windows-only wal_sync_method setting of "fsync_writethrough"
       (Magnus, Bruce)
       This setting causes PostgreSQL to write through any disk-drive
       write cache when writing to WAL. This behavior was formerly called
       "fsync", but was renamed because it acts quite differently from
       "fsync" on other platforms.
     * Enable the wal_sync_method setting of "open_datasync" on Windows,
       and make it the default for that platform (Magnus, Bruce)
       Because the default is no longer "fsync_writethrough", data loss is
       possible during a power failure if the disk drive has write caching
       enabled. To turn off the write cache on Windows, from the Device
       Manager, choose the drive properties, then Policies.
     * New cache management algorithm 2Q replaces ARC (Tom)
       This was done to avoid a pending US patent on ARC. The 2Q code
       might be a few percentage points slower than ARC for some work
       loads. A better cache management algorithm will appear in 8.1.
     * Planner adjustments to improve behavior on freshly-created tables
       (Tom)
     * Allow plpgsql to assign to an element of an array that is initially
       NULL (Tom)
       Formerly the array would remain NULL, but now it becomes a
       single-element array. The main SQL engine was changed to handle
       "UPDATE" of a null array value this way in 8.0, but the similar
       case in plpgsql was overlooked.
     * Convert \r\n and \r to \n in plpython function bodies (Michael
       Fuhr)
       This prevents syntax errors when plpython code is written on a
       Windows or Mac client.
     * Allow SPI cursors to handle utility commands that return rows, such
       as "EXPLAIN" (Tom)
     * Fix "CLUSTER" failure after "ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS" (Tom)
     * Reduce memory usage of "ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN" (Neil)
     * Fix "ALTER LANGUAGE RENAME" (Tom)
     * Document the Windows-only register and unregister options of pg_ctl
       (Magnus)
     * Ensure operations done during backend shutdown are counted by
       statistics collector
       This is expected to resolve reports of pg_autovacuum not vacuuming
       the system catalogs often enough -- it was not being told about
       catalog deletions caused by temporary table removal during backend
       exit.
     * Change the Windows default for configuration parameter
       log_destination to "eventlog" (Magnus)
       By default, a server running on Windows will now send log output to
       the Windows event logger rather than standard error.
     * Make Kerberos authentication work on Windows (Magnus)
     * Allow "ALTER DATABASE RENAME" by superusers who aren't flagged as
       having CREATEDB privilege (Tom)
     * Modify WAL log entries for "CREATE" and "DROP DATABASE" to not
       specify absolute paths (Tom)
       This allows point-in-time recovery on a different machine with
       possibly different database location. Note that "CREATE TABLESPACE"
       still poses a hazard in such situations.
     * Fix crash from a backend exiting with an open transaction that
       created a table and opened a cursor on it (Tom)
     * Fix array_map() so it can call PL functions (Tom)
     * Several "contrib/tsearch2" and "contrib/btree_gist" fixes (Teodor)
     * Fix crash of some "contrib/pgcrypto" functions on some platforms
       (Marko Kreen)
     * Fix "contrib/intagg" for 64-bit platforms (Tom)
     * Fix ecpg bugs in parsing of "CREATE" statement (Michael)
     * Work around gcc bug on powerpc and amd64 causing problems in ecpg
       (Christof Petig)
     * Do not use locale-aware versions of upper(), lower(), and initcap()
       when the locale is C (Bruce)
       This allows these functions to work on platforms that generate
       errors for non-7-bit data when the locale is C.
     * Fix quote_ident() to quote names that match keywords (Tom)
     * Fix to_date() to behave reasonably when CC and YY fields are both
       used (Karel)
     * Prevent to_char(interval) from failing when given a zero-month
       interval (Tom)
     * Fix wrong week returned by date_trunc('week') (Bruce)
       date_trunc('week') returned the wrong year for the first few days
       of January in some years.
     * Use the correct default mask length for class D addresses in INET
       data types (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 8.0.1

     Release date: 2005-01-31

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.0.0, including several
   security-related issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0.1

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.0.0.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     * Make "ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN" enforce domain constraints in all
       cases
     * 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.
     * Improve planning of grouped aggregate queries
     * "ROLLBACK TO savepoint" closes cursors created since the savepoint
     * Fix inadequate backend stack size on Windows
     * Avoid SHGetSpecialFolderPath() on Windows (Magnus)
     * Fix some problems in running pg_autovacuum as a Windows service
       (Dave Page)
     * Multiple minor bug fixes in pg_dump/pg_restore
     * Fix ecpg segfault with named structs used in typedefs (Michael)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 8.0

     Release date: 2005-01-19
     __________________________________________________________________

Overview

   Major changes in this release:

   Microsoft Windows Native Server
          This is the first PostgreSQL release to run natively on
          Microsoft Windows® as a server. It can run as a Windows service.
          This release supports NT-based Windows releases like Windows
          2000 SP4, Windows XP, and Windows 2003. Older releases like
          Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME are not supported because
          these operating systems do not have the infrastructure to
          support PostgreSQL. A separate installer project has been
          created to ease installation on Windows -- see
          http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/win32/.

          Although tested throughout our release cycle, the Windows port
          does not have the benefit of years of use in production
          environments that PostgreSQL has on Unix platforms. Therefore it
          should be treated with the same level of caution as you would a
          new product.

          Previous releases required the Unix emulation toolkit Cygwin in
          order to run the server on Windows operating systems. PostgreSQL
          has supported native clients on Windows for many years.

   Savepoints
          Savepoints allow specific parts of a transaction to be aborted
          without affecting the remainder of the transaction. Prior
          releases had no such capability; there was no way to recover
          from a statement failure within a transaction except by aborting
          the whole transaction. This feature is valuable for application
          writers who require error recovery within a complex transaction.

   Point-In-Time Recovery
          In previous releases there was no way to recover from disk drive
          failure except to restore from a previous backup or use a
          standby replication server. Point-in-time recovery allows
          continuous backup of the server. You can recover either to the
          point of failure or to some transaction in the past.

   Tablespaces
          Tablespaces allow administrators to select different file
          systems for storage of individual tables, indexes, and
          databases. This improves performance and control over disk space
          usage. Prior releases used initlocation and manual symlink
          management for such tasks.

   Improved Buffer Management, CHECKPOINT, VACUUM
          This release has a more intelligent buffer replacement strategy,
          which will make better use of available shared buffers and
          improve performance. The performance impact of vacuum and
          checkpoints is also lessened.

   Change Column Types
          A column's data type can now be changed with "ALTER TABLE".

   New Perl Server-Side Language
          A new version of the plperl server-side language now supports a
          persistent shared storage area, triggers, returning records and
          arrays of records, and SPI calls to access the database.

   Comma-separated-value (CSV) support in COPY
          "COPY" can now read and write comma-separated-value files. It
          has the flexibility to interpret nonstandard quoting and
          separation characters too.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 8.0

   A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate
   data from any previous release.

   Observe the following incompatibilities:

     * In "READ COMMITTED" serialization mode, volatile functions now see
       the results of concurrent transactions committed up to the
       beginning of each statement within the function, rather than up to
       the beginning of the interactive command that called the function.
     * Functions declared "STABLE" or "IMMUTABLE" always use the snapshot
       of the calling query, and therefore do not see the effects of
       actions taken after the calling query starts, whether in their own
       transaction or other transactions. Such a function must be
       read-only, too, meaning that it cannot use any SQL commands other
       than "SELECT".
     * Nondeferred "AFTER" triggers are now fired immediately after
       completion of the triggering query, rather than upon finishing the
       current interactive command. This makes a difference when the
       triggering query occurred within a function: the trigger is invoked
       before the function proceeds to its next operation.
     * Server configuration parameters virtual_host and tcpip_socket have
       been replaced with a more general parameter listen_addresses. Also,
       the server now listens on localhost by default, which eliminates
       the need for the -i postmaster switch in many scenarios.
     * Server configuration parameters SortMem and VacuumMem have been
       renamed to work_mem and maintenance_work_mem to better reflect
       their use. The original names are still supported in "SET" and
       "SHOW".
     * Server configuration parameters log_pid, log_timestamp, and
       log_source_port have been replaced with a more general parameter
       log_line_prefix.
     * Server configuration parameter syslog has been replaced with a more
       logical log_destination variable to control the log output
       destination.
     * Server configuration parameter log_statement has been changed so it
       can selectively log just database modification or data definition
       statements. Server configuration parameter log_duration now prints
       only when log_statement prints the query.
     * Server configuration parameter max_expr_depth parameter has been
       replaced with max_stack_depth which measures the physical stack
       size rather than the expression nesting depth. This helps prevent
       session termination due to stack overflow caused by recursive
       functions.
     * The length() function no longer counts trailing spaces in CHAR(n)
       values.
     * Casting an integer to BIT(N) selects the rightmost N bits of the
       integer, not the leftmost N bits as before.
     * Updating an element or slice of a NULL array value now produces a
       nonnull array result, namely an array containing just the
       assigned-to positions.
     * Syntax checking of array input values has been tightened up
       considerably. Junk that was previously allowed in odd places with
       odd results now causes an error. Empty-string element values must
       now be written as "", rather than writing nothing. Also changed
       behavior with respect to whitespace surrounding array elements:
       trailing whitespace is now ignored, for symmetry with leading
       whitespace (which has always been ignored).
     * Overflow in integer arithmetic operations is now detected and
       reported as an error.
     * The arithmetic operators associated with the single-byte "char"
       data type have been removed.
     * The extract() function (also called date_part) now returns the
       proper year for BC dates. It previously returned one less than the
       correct year. The function now also returns the proper values for
       millennium and century.
     * CIDR values now must have their nonmasked bits be zero. For
       example, we no longer allow 204.248.199.1/31 as a CIDR value. Such
       values should never have been accepted by PostgreSQL and will now
       be rejected.
     * "EXECUTE" now returns a completion tag that matches the executed
       statement.
     * psql's "\copy" command now reads or writes to the query's
       stdin/stdout, rather than psql's stdin/stdout. The previous
       behavior can be accessed via new "pstdin"/"pstdout" parameters.
     * The JDBC client interface has been removed from the core
       distribution, and is now hosted at http://jdbc.postgresql.org.
     * The Tcl client interface has also been removed. There are several
       Tcl interfaces now hosted at http://gborg.postgresql.org.
     * The server now uses its own time zone database, rather than the one
       supplied by the operating system. This will provide consistent
       behavior across all platforms. In most cases, there should be
       little noticeable difference in time zone behavior, except that the
       time zone names used by "SET"/"SHOW" TimeZone might be different
       from what your platform provides.
     * Configure's threading option no longer requires users to run tests
       or edit configuration files; threading options are now detected
       automatically.
     * Now that tablespaces have been implemented, initlocation has been
       removed.
     * The API for user-defined GiST indexes has been changed. The Union
       and PickSplit methods are now passed a pointer to a special
       GistEntryVector structure, rather than a bytea.
     __________________________________________________________________

Deprecated Features

   Some aspects of PostgreSQL's behavior have been determined to be
   suboptimal. For the sake of backward compatibility these have not been
   removed in 8.0, but they are considered deprecated and will be removed
   in the next major release.

     * The 8.1 release will remove the to_char() function for intervals.
     * The server now warns of empty strings passed to oid/float4/float8
       data types, but continues to interpret them as zeroes as before. In
       the next major release, empty strings will be considered invalid
       input for these data types.
     * By default, tables in PostgreSQL 8.0 and earlier are created with
       OIDs. In the next release, this will *not* be the case: to create a
       table that contains OIDs, the "WITH OIDS" clause must be specified
       or the default_with_oids configuration parameter must be set. Users
       are encouraged to explicitly specify "WITH OIDS" if their tables
       require OIDs for compatibility with future releases of PostgreSQL.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

   Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between release
   8.0 and the previous major release.
     __________________________________________________________________

Performance Improvements

     * Support cross-data-type index usage (Tom)
       Before this change, many queries would not use an index if the data
       types did not match exactly. This improvement makes index usage
       more intuitive and consistent.
     * New buffer replacement strategy that improves caching (Jan)
       Prior releases used a least-recently-used (LRU) cache to keep
       recently referenced pages in memory. The LRU algorithm did not
       consider the number of times a specific cache entry was accessed,
       so large table scans could force out useful cache pages. The new
       cache algorithm uses four separate lists to track most recently
       used and most frequently used cache pages and dynamically optimize
       their replacement based on the work load. This should lead to much
       more efficient use of the shared buffer cache. Administrators who
       have tested shared buffer sizes in the past should retest with this
       new cache replacement policy.
     * Add subprocess to write dirty buffers periodically to reduce
       checkpoint writes (Jan)
       In previous releases, the checkpoint process, which runs every few
       minutes, would write all dirty buffers to the operating system's
       buffer cache then flush all dirty operating system buffers to disk.
       This resulted in a periodic spike in disk usage that often hurt
       performance. The new code uses a background writer to trickle disk
       writes at a steady pace so checkpoints have far fewer dirty pages
       to write to disk. Also, the new code does not issue a global sync()
       call, but instead fsync()s just the files written since the last
       checkpoint. This should improve performance and minimize
       degradation during checkpoints.
     * Add ability to prolong vacuum to reduce performance impact (Jan)
       On busy systems, "VACUUM" performs many I/O requests which can hurt
       performance for other users. This release allows you to slow down
       "VACUUM" to reduce its impact on other users, though this increases
       the total duration of "VACUUM".
     * Improve B-tree index performance for duplicate keys (Dmitry Tkach,
       Tom)
       This improves the way indexes are scanned when many duplicate
       values exist in the index.
     * Use dynamically-generated table size estimates while planning (Tom)
       Formerly the planner estimated table sizes using the values seen by
       the last "VACUUM" or "ANALYZE", both as to physical table size
       (number of pages) and number of rows. Now, the current physical
       table size is obtained from the kernel, and the number of rows is
       estimated by multiplying the table size by the row density (rows
       per page) seen by the last "VACUUM" or "ANALYZE". This should
       produce more reliable estimates in cases where the table size has
       changed significantly since the last housekeeping command.
     * Improved index usage with OR clauses (Tom)
       This allows the optimizer to use indexes in statements with many OR
       clauses that would not have been indexed in the past. It can also
       use multi-column indexes where the first column is specified and
       the second column is part of an OR clause.
     * Improve matching of partial index clauses (Tom)
       The server is now smarter about using partial indexes in queries
       involving complex "WHERE" clauses.
     * Improve performance of the GEQO optimizer (Tom)
       The GEQO optimizer is used to plan queries involving many tables
       (by default, twelve or more). This release speeds up the way
       queries are analyzed to decrease time spent in optimization.
     * Miscellaneous optimizer improvements
       There is not room here to list all the minor improvements made, but
       numerous special cases work better than in prior releases.
     * Improve lookup speed for C functions (Tom)
       This release uses a hash table to lookup information for
       dynamically loaded C functions. This improves their speed so they
       perform nearly as quickly as functions that are built into the
       server executable.
     * Add type-specific "ANALYZE" statistics capability (Mark
       Cave-Ayland)
       This feature allows more flexibility in generating statistics for
       nonstandard data types.
     * "ANALYZE" now collects statistics for expression indexes (Tom)
       Expression indexes (also called functional indexes) allow users to
       index not just columns but the results of expressions and function
       calls. With this release, the optimizer can gather and use
       statistics about the contents of expression indexes. This will
       greatly improve the quality of planning for queries in which an
       expression index is relevant.
     * New two-stage sampling method for "ANALYZE" (Manfred Koizar)
       This gives better statistics when the density of valid rows is very
       different in different regions of a table.
     * Speed up "TRUNCATE" (Tom)
       This buys back some of the performance loss observed in 7.4, while
       still keeping "TRUNCATE" transaction-safe.
     __________________________________________________________________

Server Changes

     * Add WAL file archiving and point-in-time recovery (Simon Riggs)
     * Add tablespaces so admins can control disk layout (Gavin)
     * Add a built-in log rotation program (Andreas Pflug)
       It is now possible to log server messages conveniently without
       relying on either syslog or an external log rotation program.
     * Add new read-only server configuration parameters to show server
       compile-time settings: block_size, integer_datetimes,
       max_function_args, max_identifier_length, max_index_keys (Joe)
     * Make quoting of sameuser, samegroup, and all remove special meaning
       of these terms in "pg_hba.conf" (Andrew)
     * Use clearer IPv6 name ::1/128 for localhost in default
       "pg_hba.conf" (Andrew)
     * Use CIDR format in "pg_hba.conf" examples (Andrew)
     * Rename server configuration parameters SortMem and VacuumMem to
       work_mem and maintenance_work_mem (Old names still supported) (Tom)
       This change was made to clarify that bulk operations such as index
       and foreign key creation use maintenance_work_mem, while work_mem
       is for workspaces used during query execution.
     * Allow logging of session disconnections using server configuration
       log_disconnections (Andrew)
     * Add new server configuration parameter log_line_prefix to allow
       control of information emitted in each log line (Andrew)
       Available information includes user name, database name, remote IP
       address, and session start time.
     * Remove server configuration parameters log_pid, log_timestamp,
       log_source_port; functionality superseded by log_line_prefix
       (Andrew)
     * Replace the virtual_host and tcpip_socket parameters with a unified
       listen_addresses parameter (Andrew, Tom)
       virtual_host could only specify a single IP address to listen on.
       listen_addresses allows multiple addresses to be specified.
     * Listen on localhost by default, which eliminates the need for the
       "-i" postmaster switch in many scenarios (Andrew)
       Listening on localhost (127.0.0.1) opens no new security holes but
       allows configurations like Windows and JDBC, which do not support
       local sockets, to work without special adjustments.
     * Remove syslog server configuration parameter, and add more logical
       log_destination variable to control log output location (Magnus)
     * Change server configuration parameter log_statement to take values
       all, mod, ddl, or none to select which queries are logged (Bruce)
       This allows administrators to log only data definition changes or
       only data modification statements.
     * Some logging-related configuration parameters could formerly be
       adjusted by ordinary users, but only in the "more verbose"
       direction. They are now treated more strictly: only superusers can
       set them. However, a superuser can use "ALTER USER" to provide
       per-user settings of these values for non-superusers. Also, it is
       now possible for superusers to set values of superuser-only
       configuration parameters via PGOPTIONS.
     * Allow configuration files to be placed outside the data directory
       (mlw)
       By default, configuration files are kept in the cluster's top
       directory. With this addition, configuration files can be placed
       outside the data directory, easing administration.
     * Plan prepared queries only when first executed so constants can be
       used for statistics (Oliver Jowett)
       Prepared statements plan queries once and execute them many times.
       While prepared queries avoid the overhead of re-planning on each
       use, the quality of the plan suffers from not knowing the exact
       parameters to be used in the query. In this release, planning of
       unnamed prepared statements is delayed until the first execution,
       and the actual parameter values of that execution are used as
       optimization hints. This allows use of out-of-line parameter
       passing without incurring a performance penalty.
     * Allow "DECLARE CURSOR" to take parameters (Oliver Jowett)
       It is now useful to issue "DECLARE CURSOR" in a Parse message with
       parameters. The parameter values sent at Bind time will be
       substituted into the execution of the cursor's query.
     * Fix hash joins and aggregates of inet and cidr data types (Tom)
       Release 7.4 handled hashing of mixed inet and cidr values
       incorrectly. (This bug did not exist in prior releases because they
       wouldn't try to hash either data type.)
     * Make log_duration print only when log_statement prints the query
       (Ed L.)
     __________________________________________________________________

Query Changes

     * Add savepoints (nested transactions) (Alvaro)
     * Unsupported isolation levels are now accepted and promoted to the
       nearest supported level (Peter)
       The SQL specification states that if a database doesn't support a
       specific isolation level, it should use the next more restrictive
       level. This change complies with that recommendation.
     * Allow "BEGIN WORK" to specify transaction isolation levels like
       "START TRANSACTION" does (Bruce)
     * Fix table permission checking for cases in which rules generate a
       query type different from the originally submitted query (Tom)
     * Implement dollar quoting to simplify single-quote usage (Andrew,
       Tom, David Fetter)
       In previous releases, because single quotes had to be used to quote
       a function's body, the use of single quotes inside the function
       text required use of two single quotes or other error-prone
       notations. With this release we add the ability to use "dollar
       quoting" to quote a block of text. The ability to use different
       quoting delimiters at different nesting levels greatly simplifies
       the task of quoting correctly, especially in complex functions.
       Dollar quoting can be used anywhere quoted text is needed.
     * Make CASE val WHEN compval1 THEN ... evaluate val only once (Tom)
       "CASE" no longer evaluates the tested expression multiple times.
       This has benefits when the expression is complex or is volatile.
     * Test "HAVING" before computing target list of an aggregate query
       (Tom)
       Fixes improper failure of cases such as SELECT SUM(win)/SUM(lose)
       ... GROUP BY ... HAVING SUM(lose) > 0. This should work but
       formerly could fail with divide-by-zero.
     * Replace max_expr_depth parameter with max_stack_depth parameter,
       measured in kilobytes of stack size (Tom)
       This gives us a fairly bulletproof defense against crashing due to
       runaway recursive functions. Instead of measuring the depth of
       expression nesting, we now directly measure the size of the
       execution stack.
     * Allow arbitrary row expressions (Tom)
       This release allows SQL expressions to contain arbitrary composite
       types, that is, row values. It also allows functions to more easily
       take rows as arguments and return row values.
     * Allow "LIKE"/"ILIKE" to be used as the operator in row and
       subselect comparisons (Fabien Coelho)
     * Avoid locale-specific case conversion of basic ASCII letters in
       identifiers and keywords (Tom)
       This solves the "Turkish problem" with mangling of words containing
       I and i. Folding of characters outside the 7-bit-ASCII set is still
       locale-aware.
     * Improve syntax error reporting (Fabien, Tom)
       Syntax error reports are more useful than before.
     * Change "EXECUTE" to return a completion tag matching the executed
       statement (Kris Jurka)
       Previous releases return an "EXECUTE" tag for any "EXECUTE" call.
       In this release, the tag returned will reflect the command
       executed.
     * Avoid emitting "NATURAL CROSS JOIN" in rule listings (Tom)
       Such a clause makes no logical sense, but in some cases the rule
       decompiler formerly produced this syntax.
     __________________________________________________________________

Object Manipulation Changes

     * Add "COMMENT ON" for casts, conversions, languages, operator
       classes, and large objects (Christopher)
     * Add new server configuration parameter default_with_oids to control
       whether tables are created with OIDs by default (Neil)
       This allows administrators to control whether "CREATE TABLE"
       commands create tables with or without OID columns by default.
       (Note: the current factory default setting for default_with_oids is
       TRUE, but the default will become FALSE in future releases.)
     * Add "WITH" / "WITHOUT OIDS" clause to "CREATE TABLE AS" (Neil)
     * Allow "ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN" to drop an OID column ("ALTER TABLE
       SET WITHOUT OIDS" still works) (Tom)
     * Allow composite types as table columns (Tom)
     * Allow "ALTER ... ADD COLUMN" with defaults and "NOT NULL"
       constraints; works per SQL spec (Rod)
       It is now possible for "ADD COLUMN" to create a column that is not
       initially filled with NULLs, but with a specified default value.
     * Add "ALTER COLUMN TYPE" to change column's type (Rod)
       It is now possible to alter a column's data type without dropping
       and re-adding the column.
     * Allow multiple "ALTER" actions in a single "ALTER TABLE" command
       (Rod)
       This is particularly useful for "ALTER" commands that rewrite the
       table (which include "ALTER COLUMN TYPE" and "ADD COLUMN" with a
       default). By grouping "ALTER" commands together, the table need be
       rewritten only once.
     * Allow "ALTER TABLE" to add SERIAL columns (Tom)
       This falls out from the new capability of specifying defaults for
       new columns.
     * Allow changing the owners of aggregates, conversions, databases,
       functions, operators, operator classes, schemas, types, and
       tablespaces (Christopher, Euler Taveira de Oliveira)
       Previously this required modifying the system tables directly.
     * Allow temporary object creation to be limited to "SECURITY DEFINER"
       functions (Sean Chittenden)
     * Add "ALTER TABLE ... SET WITHOUT CLUSTER" (Christopher)
       Prior to this release, there was no way to clear an auto-cluster
       specification except to modify the system tables.
     * Constraint/Index/SERIAL names are now "table_column_type" with
       numbers appended to guarantee uniqueness within the schema (Tom)
       The SQL specification states that such names should be unique
       within a schema.
     * Add pg_get_serial_sequence() to return a SERIAL column's sequence
       name (Christopher)
       This allows automated scripts to reliably find the SERIAL sequence
       name.
     * Warn when primary/foreign key data type mismatch requires costly
       lookup
     * New "ALTER INDEX" command to allow moving of indexes between
       tablespaces (Gavin)
     * Make "ALTER TABLE OWNER" change dependent sequence ownership too
       (Alvaro)
     __________________________________________________________________

Utility Command Changes

     * Allow "CREATE SCHEMA" to create triggers, indexes, and sequences
       (Neil)
     * Add "ALSO" keyword to "CREATE RULE" (Fabien Coelho)
       This allows "ALSO" to be added to rule creation to contrast it with
       "INSTEAD" rules.
     * Add "NOWAIT" option to "LOCK" (Tatsuo)
       This allows the "LOCK" command to fail if it would have to wait for
       the requested lock.
     * Allow "COPY" to read and write comma-separated-value (CSV) files
       (Andrew, Bruce)
     * Generate error if the "COPY" delimiter and NULL string conflict
       (Bruce)
     * "GRANT"/"REVOKE" behavior follows the SQL spec more closely
     * Avoid locking conflict between "CREATE INDEX" and "CHECKPOINT"
       (Tom)
       In 7.3 and 7.4, a long-running B-tree index build could block
       concurrent "CHECKPOINT"s from completing, thereby causing WAL bloat
       because the WAL log could not be recycled.
     * Database-wide "ANALYZE" does not hold locks across tables (Tom)
       This reduces the potential for deadlocks against other backends
       that want exclusive locks on tables. To get the benefit of this
       change, do not execute database-wide "ANALYZE" inside a transaction
       block ("BEGIN" block); it must be able to commit and start a new
       transaction for each table.
     * "REINDEX" does not exclusively lock the index's parent table
       anymore
       The index itself is still exclusively locked, but readers of the
       table can continue if they are not using the particular index being
       rebuilt.
     * Erase MD5 user passwords when a user is renamed (Bruce)
       PostgreSQL uses the user name as salt when encrypting passwords via
       MD5. When a user's name is changed, the salt will no longer match
       the stored MD5 password, so the stored password becomes useless. In
       this release a notice is generated and the password is cleared. A
       new password must then be assigned if the user is to be able to log
       in with a password.
     * New pg_ctl "kill" option for Windows (Andrew)
       Windows does not have a kill command to send signals to backends so
       this capability was added to pg_ctl.
     * Information schema improvements
     * Add "--pwfile" option to initdb so the initial password can be set
       by GUI tools (Magnus)
     * Detect locale/encoding mismatch in initdb (Peter)
     * Add "register" command to pg_ctl to register Windows operating
       system service (Dave Page)
     __________________________________________________________________

Data Type and Function Changes

     * More complete support for composite types (row types) (Tom)
       Composite values can be used in many places where only scalar
       values worked before.
     * Reject nonrectangular array values as erroneous (Joe)
       Formerly, array_in would silently build a surprising result.
     * Overflow in integer arithmetic operations is now detected (Tom)
     * The arithmetic operators associated with the single-byte "char"
       data type have been removed.
       Formerly, the parser would select these operators in many
       situations where an "unable to select an operator" error would be
       more appropriate, such as null * null. If you actually want to do
       arithmetic on a "char" column, you can cast it to integer
       explicitly.
     * Syntax checking of array input values considerably tightened up
       (Joe)
       Junk that was previously allowed in odd places with odd results now
       causes an ERROR, for example, non-whitespace after the closing
       right brace.
     * Empty-string array element values must now be written as "", rather
       than writing nothing (Joe)
       Formerly, both ways of writing an empty-string element value were
       allowed, but now a quoted empty string is required. The case where
       nothing at all appears will probably be considered to be a NULL
       element value in some future release.
     * Array element trailing whitespace is now ignored (Joe)
       Formerly leading whitespace was ignored, but trailing whitespace
       between an element value and the delimiter or right brace was
       significant. Now trailing whitespace is also ignored.
     * Emit array values with explicit array bounds when lower bound is
       not one (Joe)
     * Accept YYYY-monthname-DD as a date string (Tom)
     * Make netmask and hostmask functions return maximum-length mask
       length (Tom)
     * Change factorial function to return numeric (Gavin)
       Returning numeric allows the factorial function to work for a wider
       range of input values.
     * to_char/to_date() date conversion improvements (Kurt Roeckx, Fabien
       Coelho)
     * Make length() disregard trailing spaces in CHAR(n) (Gavin)
       This change was made to improve consistency: trailing spaces are
       semantically insignificant in CHAR(n) data, so they should not be
       counted by length().
     * Warn about empty string being passed to OID/float4/float8 data
       types (Neil)
       8.1 will throw an error instead.
     * Allow leading or trailing whitespace in
       int2/int4/int8/float4/float8 input routines (Neil)
     * Better support for IEEE Infinity and NaN values in float4/float8
       (Neil)
       These should now work on all platforms that support IEEE-compliant
       floating point arithmetic.
     * Add "week" option to date_trunc() (Robert Creager)
     * Fix to_char for 1 BC (previously it returned 1 AD) (Bruce)
     * Fix date_part(year) for BC dates (previously it returned one less
       than the correct year) (Bruce)
     * Fix date_part() to return the proper millennium and century (Fabien
       Coelho)
       In previous versions, the century and millennium results had a
       wrong number and started in the wrong year, as compared to standard
       reckoning of such things.
     * Add ceiling() as an alias for ceil(), and power() as an alias for
       pow() for standards compliance (Neil)
     * Change ln(), log(), power(), and sqrt() to emit the correct
       SQLSTATE error codes for certain error conditions, as specified by
       SQL:2003 (Neil)
     * Add width_bucket() function as defined by SQL:2003 (Neil)
     * Add generate_series() functions to simplify working with numeric
       sets (Joe)
     * Fix upper/lower/initcap() functions to work with multibyte
       encodings (Tom)
     * Add boolean and bitwise integer "AND"/"OR" aggregates (Fabien
       Coelho)
     * New session information functions to return network addresses for
       client and server (Sean Chittenden)
     * Add function to determine the area of a closed path (Sean
       Chittenden)
     * Add function to send cancel request to other backends (Magnus)
     * Add interval plus datetime operators (Tom)
       The reverse ordering, datetime plus interval, was already
       supported, but both are required by the SQL standard.
     * Casting an integer to BIT(N) selects the rightmost N bits of the
       integer (Tom)
       In prior releases, the leftmost N bits were selected, but this was
       deemed unhelpful, not to mention inconsistent with casting from bit
       to int.
     * Require CIDR values to have all nonmasked bits be zero (Kevin
       Brintnall)
     __________________________________________________________________

Server-Side Language Changes

     * In READ COMMITTED serialization mode, volatile functions now see
       the results of concurrent transactions committed up to the
       beginning of each statement within the function, rather than up to
       the beginning of the interactive command that called the function.
     * Functions declared STABLE or IMMUTABLE always use the snapshot of
       the calling query, and therefore do not see the effects of actions
       taken after the calling query starts, whether in their own
       transaction or other transactions. Such a function must be
       read-only, too, meaning that it cannot use any SQL commands other
       than "SELECT". There is a considerable performance gain from
       declaring a function STABLE or IMMUTABLE rather than VOLATILE.
     * Nondeferred "AFTER" triggers are now fired immediately after
       completion of the triggering query, rather than upon finishing the
       current interactive command. This makes a difference when the
       triggering query occurred within a function: the trigger is invoked
       before the function proceeds to its next operation. For example, if
       a function inserts a new row into a table, any nondeferred foreign
       key checks occur before proceeding with the function.
     * Allow function parameters to be declared with names (Dennis
       Björklund)
       This allows better documentation of functions. Whether the names
       actually do anything depends on the specific function language
       being used.
     * Allow PL/pgSQL parameter names to be referenced in the function
       (Dennis Björklund)
       This basically creates an automatic alias for each named parameter.
     * Do minimal syntax checking of PL/pgSQL functions at creation time
       (Tom)
       This allows us to catch simple syntax errors sooner.
     * More support for composite types (row and record variables) in
       PL/pgSQL
       For example, it now works to pass a rowtype variable to another
       function as a single variable.
     * Default values for PL/pgSQL variables can now reference previously
       declared variables
     * Improve parsing of PL/pgSQL FOR loops (Tom)
       Parsing is now driven by presence of ".." rather than data type of
       "FOR" variable. This makes no difference for correct functions, but
       should result in more understandable error messages when a mistake
       is made.
     * Major overhaul of PL/Perl server-side language (Command Prompt,
       Andrew Dunstan)
     * In PL/Tcl, SPI commands are now run in subtransactions. If an error
       occurs, the subtransaction is cleaned up and the error is reported
       as an ordinary Tcl error, which can be trapped with catch.
       Formerly, it was not possible to catch such errors.
     * Accept "ELSEIF" in PL/pgSQL (Neil)
       Previously PL/pgSQL only allowed "ELSIF", but many people are
       accustomed to spelling this keyword "ELSEIF".
     __________________________________________________________________

psql Changes

     * Improve psql information display about database objects
       (Christopher)
     * Allow psql to display group membership in "\du" and "\dg" (Markus
       Bertheau)
     * Prevent psql "\dn" from showing temporary schemas (Bruce)
     * Allow psql to handle tilde user expansion for file names (Zach
       Irmen)
     * Allow psql to display fancy prompts, including color, via readline
       (Reece Hart, Chet Ramey)
     * Make psql "\copy" match "COPY" command syntax fully (Tom)
     * Show the location of syntax errors (Fabien Coelho, Tom)
     * Add "CLUSTER" information to psql "\d" display (Bruce)
     * Change psql "\copy stdin/stdout" to read from command input/output
       (Bruce)
     * Add "pstdin"/"pstdout" to read from psql's stdin/stdout (Mark Feit)
     * Add global psql configuration file, "psqlrc.sample" (Bruce)
       This allows a central file where global psql startup commands can
       be stored.
     * Have psql "\d+" indicate if the table has an OID column (Neil)
     * On Windows, use binary mode in psql when reading files so control-Z
       is not seen as end-of-file
     * Have "\dn+" show permissions and description for schemas (Dennis
       Björklund)
     * Improve tab completion support (Stefan Kaltenbrunn, Greg Sabino
       Mullane)
     * Allow boolean settings to be set using upper or lower case (Michael
       Paesold)
     __________________________________________________________________

pg_dump Changes

     * Use dependency information to improve the reliability of pg_dump
       (Tom)
       This should solve the longstanding problems with related objects
       sometimes being dumped in the wrong order.
     * Have pg_dump output objects in alphabetical order if possible (Tom)
       This should make it easier to identify changes between dump files.
     * Allow pg_restore to ignore some SQL errors (Fabien Coelho)
       This makes pg_restore's behavior similar to the results of feeding
       a pg_dump output script to psql. In most cases, ignoring errors and
       plowing ahead is the most useful thing to do. Also added was a
       pg_restore option to give the old behavior of exiting on an error.
     * pg_restore "-l" display now includes objects' schema names
     * New begin/end markers in pg_dump text output (Bruce)
     * Add start/stop times for pg_dump/pg_dumpall in verbose mode (Bruce)
     * Allow most pg_dump options in pg_dumpall (Christopher)
     * Have pg_dump use "ALTER OWNER" rather than "SET SESSION
       AUTHORIZATION" by default (Christopher)
     __________________________________________________________________

libpq Changes

     * Make libpq's "SIGPIPE" handling thread-safe (Bruce)
     * Add PQmbdsplen() which returns the display length of a character
       (Tatsuo)
     * Add thread locking to SSL and Kerberos connections (Manfred Spraul)
     * Allow PQoidValue(), PQcmdTuples(), and PQoidStatus() to work on
       "EXECUTE" commands (Neil)
     * Add PQserverVersion() to provide more convenient access to the
       server version number (Greg Sabino Mullane)
     * Add PQprepare/PQsendPrepared() functions to support preparing
       statements without necessarily specifying the data types of their
       parameters (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
     * Many ECPG improvements, including "SET DESCRIPTOR" (Michael)
     __________________________________________________________________

Source Code Changes

     * Allow the database server to run natively on Windows (Claudio,
       Magnus, Andrew)
     * Shell script commands converted to C versions for Windows support
       (Andrew)
     * Create an extension makefile framework (Fabien Coelho, Peter)
       This simplifies the task of building extensions outside the
       original source tree.
     * Support relocatable installations (Bruce)
       Directory paths for installed files (such as the "/share"
       directory) are now computed relative to the actual location of the
       executables, so that an installation tree can be moved to another
       place without reconfiguring and rebuilding.
     * Use "--with-docdir" to choose installation location of
       documentation; also allow "--infodir" (Peter)
     * Add "--without-docdir" to prevent installation of documentation
       (Peter)
     * Upgrade to DocBook V4.2 SGML (Peter)
     * New PostgreSQL CVS tag (Marc)
       This was done to make it easier for organizations to manage their
       own copies of the PostgreSQL CVS repository. File version stamps
       from the master repository will not get munged by checking into or
       out of a copied repository.
     * Clarify locking code (Manfred Koizar)
     * Buffer manager cleanup (Neil)
     * Decouple platform tests from CPU spinlock code (Bruce, Tom)
     * Add inlined test-and-set code on PA-RISC for gcc (ViSolve, Tom)
     * Improve i386 spinlock code (Manfred Spraul)
     * Clean up spinlock assembly code to avoid warnings from newer gcc
       releases (Tom)
     * Remove JDBC from source tree; now a separate project
     * Remove the libpgtcl client interface; now a separate project
     * More accurately estimate memory and file descriptor usage (Tom)
     * Improvements to the Mac OS X startup scripts (Ray A.)
     * New fsync() test program (Bruce)
     * Major documentation improvements (Neil, Peter)
     * Remove pg_encoding; not needed anymore
     * Remove pg_id; not needed anymore
     * Remove initlocation; not needed anymore
     * Auto-detect thread flags (no more manual testing) (Bruce)
     * Use Olson's public domain timezone library (Magnus)
     * With threading enabled, use thread flags on Unixware for backend
       executables too (Bruce)
       Unixware cannot mix threaded and nonthreaded object files in the
       same executable, so everything must be compiled as threaded.
     * psql now uses a flex-generated lexical analyzer to process command
       strings
     * Reimplement the linked list data structure used throughout the
       backend (Neil)
       This improves performance by allowing list append and length
       operations to be more efficient.
     * Allow dynamically loaded modules to create their own server
       configuration parameters (Thomas Hallgren)
     * New Brazilian version of FAQ (Euler Taveira de Oliveira)
     * Add French FAQ (Guillaume Lelarge)
     * New pgevent for Windows logging
     * Make libpq and ECPG build as proper shared libraries on OS X (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

Contrib Changes

     * Overhaul of "contrib/dblink" (Joe)
     * "contrib/dbmirror" improvements (Steven Singer)
     * New "contrib/xml2" (John Gray, Torchbox)
     * Updated "contrib/mysql"
     * New version of "contrib/btree_gist" (Teodor)
     * New "contrib/trgm", trigram matching for PostgreSQL (Teodor)
     * Many "contrib/tsearch2" improvements (Teodor)
     * Add double metaphone to "contrib/fuzzystrmatch" (Andrew)
     * Allow "contrib/pg_autovacuum" to run as a Windows service (Dave
       Page)
     * Add functions to "contrib/dbsize" (Andreas Pflug)
     * Removed "contrib/pg_logger": obsoleted by integrated logging
       subprocess
     * Removed "contrib/rserv": obsoleted by various separate projects
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.19

     Release date: 2008-01-07

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.18, including fixes
   for significant security issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.19

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.11, see the release notes
   for 7.4.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     * Repair assorted bugs in the regular-expression package (Tom, Will
       Drewry)
       Suitably crafted regular-expression patterns could cause crashes,
       infinite or near-infinite looping, and/or massive memory
       consumption, all of which pose denial-of-service hazards for
       applications that accept regex search patterns from untrustworthy
       sources. (CVE-2007-4769, CVE-2007-4772, CVE-2007-6067)
     * Require non-superusers who use "/contrib/dblink" to use only
       password authentication, as a security measure (Joe)
       The fix that appeared for this in 7.4.18 was incomplete, as it
       plugged the hole for only some "dblink" functions. (CVE-2007-6601,
       CVE-2007-3278)
     * Fix planner failure in some cases of WHERE false AND var IN (SELECT
       ...) (Tom)
     * Fix potential crash in translate() when using a multibyte database
       encoding (Tom)
     * Fix PL/Python to not crash on long exception messages (Alvaro)
     * ecpg parser fixes (Michael)
     * Make "contrib/tablefunc"'s crosstab() handle NULL rowid as a
       category in its own right, rather than crashing (Joe)
     * Fix tsvector and tsquery output routines to escape backslashes
       correctly (Teodor, Bruce)
     * Fix crash of to_tsvector() on huge input strings (Teodor)
     * 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.18

     Release date: 2007-09-17

   This release contains fixes from 7.4.17.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.18

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.11, see the release notes
   for 7.4.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 excessive logging of SSL error messages (Tom)
     * Fix crash when log_min_error_statement logging runs out of memory
       (Tom)
     * Prevent "CLUSTER" from failing due to attempting to process
       temporary tables of other sessions (Alvaro)
     * Require non-superusers who use "/contrib/dblink" to use only
       password authentication, as a security measure (Joe)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.17

     Release date: 2007-04-23

   This release contains fixes from 7.4.16, including a security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.17

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.11, see the release notes
   for 7.4.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     * "/contrib/tsearch2" crash fixes (Teodor)
     * Fix potential-data-corruption bug in how "VACUUM FULL" handles
       "UPDATE" chains (Tom, Pavan Deolasee)
     * Fix PANIC during enlargement of a hash index (bug introduced in
       7.4.15) (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.16

     Release date: 2007-02-05

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.15, including a
   security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.16

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.11, see the release notes
   for 7.4.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Remove security vulnerability that allowed connected users to read
       backend memory (Tom)
       The vulnerability involves suppressing the normal check that a SQL
       function returns the data type it's declared to, or 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)
     * Fix for rare Assert() crash triggered by UNION (Tom)
     * Tighten security of multi-byte character processing for UTF8
       sequences over three bytes long (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.15

     Release date: 2007-01-08

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.14.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.15

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.11, see the release notes
   for 7.4.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Improve handling of getaddrinfo() on AIX (Tom)
       This fixes a problem with starting the statistics collector, among
       other things.
     * Fix "failed to re-find parent key" errors in "VACUUM" (Tom)
     * Fix bugs affecting multi-gigabyte hash indexes (Tom)
     * Fix error when constructing an ARRAY[] made up of multiple empty
       elements (Tom)
     * 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.14

     Release date: 2006-10-16

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.14

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.11, see the release notes
   for 7.4.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fix core dump when an untyped literal is taken as ANYARRAY
     * Fix string_to_array() to handle overlapping matches for the
       separator string
       For example, string_to_array('123xx456xxx789', 'xx').
     * Fix corner cases in pattern matching for psql's \d commands
     * Fix index-corrupting bugs in /contrib/ltree (Teodor)
     * Fix backslash escaping in /contrib/dbmirror
     * Adjust regression tests for recent changes in US DST laws
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.13

     Release date: 2006-05-23

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.12, including patches
   for extremely serious security issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.13

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.11, see the release notes
   for 7.4.11.

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 and standard_conforming_strings
       This fixes libpq-using applications for the security issues
       described in CVE-2006-2313 and CVE-2006-2314, and also
       future-proofs them against the planned changeover to SQL-standard
       string literal syntax. 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 bug that sometimes caused OR'd index scans to miss rows they
       should have returned
     * Fix WAL replay for case where a btree index has been truncated
     * Fix SIMILAR TO for patterns involving | (Tom)
     * Fix server to use custom DH SSL parameters correctly (Michael Fuhr)
     * Fix for Bonjour on Intel Macs (Ashley Clark)
     * Fix various minor memory leaks
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.12

     Release date: 2006-02-14

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.12

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.11, see the release notes
   for 7.4.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 7.4.9 and 7.3.11 releases.
     * Fix race condition that could lead to "file already exists" errors
       during pg_clog file creation (Tom)
     * Properly check DOMAIN constraints for UNKNOWN parameters in
       prepared statements (Neil)
     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.11

     Release date: 2006-01-09

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.10.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.11

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.8, see the release notes
   for 7.4.8. Also, you might need to "REINDEX" indexes on textual columns
   after updating, if you are affected by the locale or plperl issues
   described below.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fix for protocol-level Describe messages issued outside a
       transaction or in a failed transaction (Tom)
     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.4.10

     Release date: 2005-12-12

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.9.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.10

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.8, see the release notes
   for 7.4.8.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     * Prevent failure if client sends Bind protocol message when current
       transaction is already aborted
     * "/contrib/ltree" fixes (Teodor)
     * AIX and HPUX compile fixes (Tom)
     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.4.9

     Release date: 2005-10-04

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.8.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.9

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, if you
   are upgrading from a version earlier than 7.4.8, see the release notes
   for 7.4.8.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 the sense of the test for read-only transaction in "COPY"
       The code formerly prohibited "COPY TO", where it should prohibit
       "COPY FROM".
     * Fix planning problem with outer-join ON clauses that reference only
       the inner-side relation
     * Further fixes for x FULL JOIN y ON true corner cases
     * Make array_in and array_recv more paranoid about validating their
       OID parameter
     * Fix missing rows in queries like UPDATE a=... WHERE a... with GiST
       index on column a
     * Improve robustness of datetime parsing
     * Improve checking for partially-written WAL pages
     * Improve robustness of signal handling when SSL is enabled
     * Don't try to open more than max_files_per_process files during
       postmaster startup
     * Various memory leakage fixes
     * Various portability improvements
     * Fix PL/PgSQL to handle var := var correctly when the variable is of
       pass-by-reference type
     * Update "contrib/tsearch2" to use current Snowball code
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.4.8

     Release date: 2005-05-09

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.7, including several
   security-related issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.8

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, it is
   one possible way of handling two significant security problems that
   have been found in the initial contents of 7.4.X system catalogs. A
   dump/initdb/reload sequence using 7.4.8's initdb will automatically
   correct these problems.

   The larger 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.)

   The lesser problem is that the "contrib/tsearch2" module creates
   several functions that are misdeclared to return internal when they do
   not accept internal arguments. This breaks type safety for all
   functions using internal arguments.

   It is strongly recommended that all installations repair these errors,
   either by initdb or by following the manual repair procedures given
   below. The errors at least allow 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 procedures
   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;

   Next, if you have installed "contrib/tsearch2", do:
BEGIN;
UPDATE pg_proc SET proargtypes[0] = 'internal'::regtype
WHERE oid IN (
   'dex_init(text)'::regprocedure,
   'snb_en_init(text)'::regprocedure,
   'snb_ru_init(text)'::regprocedure,
   'spell_init(text)'::regprocedure,
   'syn_init(text)'::regprocedure
);
-- The command should report having updated 5 rows;
-- if not, rollback and investigate instead of committing!
COMMIT;

   If this command fails with a message like "function "dex_init(text)"
   does not exist", then either "tsearch2" is not installed in this
   database, or you already did the update.

   The above procedures 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 errors. 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 procedures.
   Finally, do:
-- re-freeze template0:
VACUUM FREEZE;
-- and protect it against future alterations:
UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = false WHERE datname = 'template0';
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Change encoding function signature to prevent misuse
     * Change "contrib/tsearch2" to avoid unsafe use of INTERNAL function
       results
     * 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 "REINDEX"ed 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.
     * Ensure operations done during backend shutdown are counted by
       statistics collector
       This is expected to resolve reports of pg_autovacuum not vacuuming
       the system catalogs often enough -- it was not being told about
       catalog deletions caused by temporary table removal during backend
       exit.
     * Additional buffer overrun checks in plpgsql (Neil)
     * Fix pg_dump to dump trigger names containing % correctly (Neil)
     * Fix "contrib/pgcrypto" for newer OpenSSL builds (Marko Kreen)
     * Still more 64-bit fixes for "contrib/intagg"
     * Prevent incorrect optimization of functions returning RECORD
     * Prevent to_char(interval) from dumping core for month-related
       formats
     * Prevent crash on COALESCE(NULL,NULL)
     * Fix array_map to call PL functions correctly
     * Fix permission checking in "ALTER DATABASE RENAME"
     * Fix "ALTER LANGUAGE RENAME"
     * Make RemoveFromWaitQueue clean up after itself
       This fixes a lock management error that would only be visible if a
       transaction was kicked out of a wait for a lock (typically by query
       cancel) and then the holder of the lock released it within a very
       narrow window.
     * Fix problem with untyped parameter appearing in "INSERT ... SELECT"
     * Fix "CLUSTER" failure after "ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS"
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.4.7

     Release date: 2005-01-31

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.6, including several
   security-related issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.7

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     * Make age(timestamptz) do calculation in local timezone not GMT
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.4.6

     Release date: 2004-10-22

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.5.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.6

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     * Prevent forced backend shutdown from re-emitting prior command
       result
       In rare cases, a client might think that its last command had
       succeeded when it really had been aborted by forced database
       shutdown.
     * Repair bug in pg_stat_get_backend_idset
       This could lead to misbehavior in some of the system-statistics
       views.
     * Fix small memory leak in postmaster
     * Fix "expected both swapped tables to have TOAST tables" bug
       This could arise in cases such as CLUSTER after ALTER TABLE DROP
       COLUMN.
     * Prevent pg_ctl restart from adding -D multiple times
     * Fix problem with NULL values in GiST indexes
     * :: is no longer interpreted as a variable in an ECPG prepare
       statement
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.4.5

     Release date: 2004-08-18

   This release contains one serious bug fix over 7.4.4.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.5

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Repair possible crash during concurrent B-tree index insertions
       This patch fixes a rare case in which concurrent insertions into a
       B-tree index could result in a server panic. No permanent damage
       would result, but it's still worth a re-release. The bug does not
       exist in pre-7.4 releases.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.4.4

     Release date: 2004-08-16

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.3.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.4

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     * Check HAVING restriction before evaluating result list of an
       aggregate plan
     * Avoid crash when session's current user ID is deleted
     * Fix hashed crosstab for zero-rows case (Joe)
     * Force cache update after renaming a column in a foreign key
     * Pretty-print UNION queries correctly
     * Make psql handle \r\n newlines properly in COPY IN
     * pg_dump handled ACLs with grant options incorrectly
     * Fix thread support for OS X and Solaris
     * Updated JDBC driver (build 215) with various fixes
     * ECPG fixes
     * Translation updates (various contributors)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.4.3

     Release date: 2004-06-14

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.3

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fix temporary memory leak when using non-hashed aggregates (Tom)
     * ECPG fixes, including some for Informix compatibility (Michael)
     * Fixes for compiling with thread-safety, particularly Solaris
       (Bruce)
     * Fix error in COPY IN termination when using the old network
       protocol (ljb)
     * Several important fixes in pg_autovacuum, including fixes for large
       tables, unsigned oids, stability, temp tables, and debug mode
       (Matthew T. O'Connor)
     * Fix problem with reading tar-format dumps on NetBSD and BSD/OS
       (Bruce)
     * Several JDBC fixes
     * Fix ALTER SEQUENCE RESTART where last_value equals the restart
       value (Tom)
     * Repair failure to recalculate nested sub-selects (Tom)
     * Fix problems with non-constant expressions in LIMIT/OFFSET
     * Support FULL JOIN with no join clause, such as X FULL JOIN Y ON
       TRUE (Tom)
     * Fix another zero-column table bug (Tom)
     * Improve handling of non-qualified identifiers in GROUP BY clauses
       in sub-selects (Tom)
       Select-list aliases within the sub-select will now take precedence
       over names from outer query levels.
     * Do not generate "NATURAL CROSS JOIN" when decompiling rules (Tom)
     * Add checks for invalid field length in binary COPY (Tom)
       This fixes a difficult-to-exploit security hole.
     * Avoid locking conflict between "ANALYZE" and "LISTEN"/"NOTIFY"
     * Numerous translation updates (various contributors)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.4.2

     Release date: 2004-03-08

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.1.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.2

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, it
   might be advisable as the easiest method of incorporating fixes for two
   errors that have been found in the initial contents of 7.4.X system
   catalogs. A dump/initdb/reload sequence using 7.4.2's initdb will
   automatically correct these problems.

   The more severe of the two errors is that data type anyarray has the
   wrong alignment label; this is a problem because the pg_statistic
   system catalog uses anyarray columns. The mislabeling can cause planner
   misestimations and even crashes when planning queries that involve
   WHERE clauses on double-aligned columns (such as float8 and timestamp).
   It is strongly recommended that all installations repair this error,
   either by initdb or by following the manual repair procedure given
   below.

   The lesser error is that the system view pg_settings ought to be marked
   as having public update access, to allow UPDATE pg_settings to be used
   as a substitute for "SET". This can also be fixed either by initdb or
   manually, but it is not necessary to fix unless you want to use UPDATE
   pg_settings.

   If you wish not to do an initdb, the following procedure will work for
   fixing pg_statistic. As the database superuser, do:
-- clear out old data in pg_statistic:
DELETE FROM pg_statistic;
VACUUM pg_statistic;
-- this should update 1 row:
UPDATE pg_type SET typalign = 'd' WHERE oid = 2277;
-- this should update 6 rows:
UPDATE pg_attribute SET attalign = 'd' WHERE atttypid = 2277;
--
-- At this point you MUST start a fresh backend to avoid a crash!
--
-- repopulate pg_statistic:
ANALYZE;

   This can be done in a live database, but beware that all backends
   running in the altered database must be restarted before it is safe to
   repopulate pg_statistic.

   To repair the pg_settings error, simply do:
GRANT SELECT, UPDATE ON pg_settings TO PUBLIC;

   The above procedures 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 errors. 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 procedures.
   Finally, do:
-- re-freeze template0:
VACUUM FREEZE;
-- and protect it against future alterations:
UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = false WHERE datname = 'template0';
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

   Release 7.4.2 incorporates all the fixes included in release 7.3.6,
   plus the following fixes:

     * Fix pg_statistics alignment bug that could crash optimizer
       See above for details about this problem.
     * Allow non-super users to update pg_settings
     * Fix several optimizer bugs, most of which led to "variable not
       found in subplan target lists" errors
     * Avoid out-of-memory failure during startup of large multiple index
       scan
     * Fix multibyte problem that could lead to "out of memory" error
       during "COPY IN"
     * Fix problems with "SELECT INTO" / "CREATE TABLE AS" from tables
       without OIDs
     * Fix problems with "alter_table" regression test during parallel
       testing
     * Fix problems with hitting open file limit, especially on OS X (Tom)
     * Partial fix for Turkish-locale issues
       initdb will succeed now in Turkish locale, but there are still some
       inconveniences associated with the i/I problem.
     * Make pg_dump set client encoding on restore
     * Other minor pg_dump fixes
     * Allow ecpg to again use C keywords as column names (Michael)
     * Added ecpg WHENEVER NOT_FOUND to SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE
       (Michael)
     * Fix ecpg crash for queries calling set-returning functions
       (Michael)
     * Various other ecpg fixes (Michael)
     * Fixes for Borland compiler
     * Thread build improvements (Bruce)
     * Various other build fixes
     * Various JDBC fixes
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.4.1

     Release date: 2003-12-22

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4.1

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.4.

   If you want to install the fixes in the information schema you need to
   reload it into the database. This is either accomplished by
   initializing a new cluster by running "initdb", or by running the
   following sequence of SQL commands in each database (ideally including
   template1) as a superuser in psql, after installing the new release:
DROP SCHEMA information_schema CASCADE;
\i /usr/local/pgsql/share/information_schema.sql

   Substitute your installation path in the second command.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * Fixed bug in "CREATE SCHEMA" parsing in ECPG (Michael)
     * Fix compile error when "--enable-thread-safety" and "--with-perl"
       are used together (Peter)
     * Fix for subqueries that used hash joins (Tom)
       Certain subqueries that used hash joins would crash because of
       improperly shared structures.
     * Fix free space map compaction bug (Tom)
       This fixes a bug where compaction of the free space map could lead
       to a database server shutdown.
     * Fix for Borland compiler build of libpq (Bruce)
     * Fix netmask() and hostmask() to return the maximum-length masklen
       (Tom)
       Fix these functions to return values consistent with pre-7.4
       releases.
     * Several "contrib/pg_autovacuum" fixes
       Fixes include improper variable initialization, missing vacuum
       after "TRUNCATE", and duration computation overflow for long
       vacuums.
     * Allow compile of "contrib/cube" under Cygwin (Jason Tishler)
     * Fix Solaris use of password file when no passwords are defined
       (Tom)
       Fix crash on Solaris caused by use of any type of password
       authentication when no passwords were defined.
     * JDBC fix for thread problems, other fixes
     * Fix for bytea index lookups (Joe)
     * Fix information schema for bit data types (Peter)
     * Force zero_damaged_pages to be on during recovery from WAL
     * Prevent some obscure cases of "variable not in subplan target
       lists"
     * Make PQescapeBytea and byteaout consistent with each other (Joe)
     * Escape bytea output for bytes > 0x7e(Joe)
       If different client encodings are used for bytea output and input,
       it is possible for bytea values to be corrupted by the differing
       encodings. This fix escapes all bytes that might be affected.
     * Added missing SPI_finish() calls to dblink's
       get_tuple_of_interest() (Joe)
     * New Czech FAQ
     * Fix information schema view constraint_column_usage for foreign
       keys (Peter)
     * ECPG fixes (Michael)
     * Fix bug with multiple IN subqueries and joins in the subqueries
       (Tom)
     * Allow COUNT('x') to work (Tom)
     * Install ECPG include files for Informix compatibility into separate
       directory (Peter)
       Some names of ECPG include files for Informix compatibility
       conflicted with operating system include files. By installing them
       in their own directory, name conflicts have been reduced.
     * Fix SSL memory leak (Neil)
       This release fixes a bug in 7.4 where SSL didn't free all memory it
       allocated.
     * Prevent "pg_service.conf" from using service name as default dbname
       (Bruce)
     * Fix local ident authentication on FreeBSD (Tom)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 7.4

     Release date: 2003-11-17
     __________________________________________________________________

Overview

   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.

   Improved 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.

   New multikey hash join capability
          In previous releases, hash joins could only occur on single
          keys. This release allows multicolumn hash joins.

   Queries using the explicit 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.

   Faster and more powerful regular expression code
          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.

   Function-inlining for simple SQL functions
          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.

   Full support for IPv6 connections and IPv6 address data types
          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.

   Major improvements in SSL performance and reliability
          Several people very familiar with the SSL API have overhauled
          our SSL code to improve SSL key negotiation and error recovery.

   Make free space map efficiently reuse empty index pages, and other free
          space management improvements
          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.

   SQL-standard information schema
          The information schema provides a standardized and stable way to
          access information about the schema objects defined in a
          database.

   Cursors conform more closely to the SQL standard
          The commands "FETCH" and "MOVE" have been overhauled to conform
          more closely to the SQL standard.

   Cursors can exist outside transactions
          These cursors are also called holdable cursors.

   New client-to-server protocol
          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.

   libpq and ECPG applications are now fully thread-safe
          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.

   New version of full-text indexing
          A new full-text indexing suite is available in
          "contrib/tsearch2".

   New autovacuum tool
          The new autovacuum tool in "contrib/autovacuum" monitors the
          database statistics tables for "INSERT"/"UPDATE"/"DELETE"
          activity and automatically vacuums tables when needed.

   Array handling has been improved and moved into the server core
          Many array limitations have been removed, and arrays behave more
          like fully-supported data types.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.4

   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(n)
       to varchar(n) or text. This is what most people always expected to
       happen anyway.
     * The data type float(p) now measures "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 ($) is no longer allowed in operator names. It can
       instead be a non-first character in identifiers. This was done to
       improve compatibility with other database systems, and to avoid
       syntax problems when parameter placeholders ($n) are written
       adjacent to operators.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

   Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between release
   7.4 and the previous major release.
     __________________________________________________________________

Server Operation Changes

     * 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 Mac OS X (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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Performance Improvements

     * 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 (subquery) performance (Tom)
     * 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Server Configuration Changes

     * 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 Mac OS X Rendezvous server support (Chris Campbell)
       This allows Mac OS X 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Query Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Object Manipulation Changes

     * 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 subtable, also SQL:2003
       feature INCLUDING DEFAULTS (Rod)
     * Add WITH GRANT OPTION clause to "GRANT" (Peter)
       This enabled "GRANT" to give other users the ability to grant
       privileges on a object.
     __________________________________________________________________

Utility Command Changes

     * 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
       n for "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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Data Type and Function Changes

     * 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 expr op ANY/SOME/ALL (array_expr) (Joe)
       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(p) measure the precision "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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Server-Side Language Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

psql Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

pg_dump Changes

     * 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

libpq Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

JDBC Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Miscellaneous Interface Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Source Code Changes

     * 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 Darwin 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Contrib Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.21

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.21

   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 the release notes
   for 7.3.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.20

     Release date: 2007-09-17

   This release contains fixes from 7.3.19.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.20

   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 the release notes
   for 7.3.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.19

     Release date: 2007-04-23

   This release contains fixes from 7.3.18, including a security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 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 the release notes
   for 7.3.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.18

     Release date: 2007-02-05

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.17, including a
   security fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.18

   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 the release notes
   for 7.3.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.17

     Release date: 2007-01-08

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.16.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.17

   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 the release notes
   for 7.3.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.16

     Release date: 2006-10-16

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.15.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 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 the release notes
   for 7.3.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.15

     Release date: 2006-05-23

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.14, including patches
   for extremely serious security issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 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 the release notes
   for 7.3.13.

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.14

     Release date: 2006-02-14

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.14

   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 the release notes
   for 7.3.13.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.13

     Release date: 2006-01-09

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.12.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 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 7.3.10, see the release notes
   for 7.3.10. Also, you might need to "REINDEX" indexes on textual
   columns after updating, if you are affected by the locale or plperl
   issues described below.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.12

     Release date: 2005-12-12

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.11.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 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 the release notes
   for 7.3.10.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.11

     Release date: 2005-10-04

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.10.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 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 the release notes
   for 7.3.10.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                               Release 7.3.10

     Release date: 2005-05-09

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.9, including several
   security-related issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.10

   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';
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 "REINDEX"ed 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.3.9

     Release date: 2005-01-31

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.8, including several
   security-related issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.9

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.3.8

     Release date: 2004-10-22

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.7.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.8

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.3.7

     Release date: 2004-08-16

   This release contains one critical fix over 7.3.6, and some minor
   items.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.7

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.3.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.3.6

     Release date: 2004-03-02

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.3.5.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.6

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.3.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.3.5

     Release date: 2003-12-03

   This has a variety of fixes from 7.3.4.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.5

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.3.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.3.4

     Release date: 2003-07-24

   This has a variety of fixes from 7.3.3.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.4

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.3.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.3.3

     Release date: 2003-05-22

   This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.3.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.3

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running version 7.3.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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 "NULL"s 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.3.2

     Release date: 2003-02-04

   This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.3.1.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.2

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running version 7.3.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.3.1

     Release date: 2002-12-18

   This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.3.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3.1

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 7.3

     Release date: 2002-11-27
     __________________________________________________________________

Overview

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.3

   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:
   http://developer.postgresql.org/~momjian/upgrade_tips_7.3.

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

Server Operation

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Performance

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Privileges

     * 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 Configuration

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Queries

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Object Manipulation

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Utility Commands

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Data Types and Functions

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Internationalization

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

Server-side Languages

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

psql

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

libpq

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

JDBC

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Miscellaneous Interfaces

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Source Code

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Contrib

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.2.8

     Release date: 2005-05-09

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.2.7, including one
   security-related issue.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.2.8

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.2.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.2.7

     Release date: 2005-01-31

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.2.6, including several
   security-related issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.2.7

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.2.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.2.6

     Release date: 2004-10-22

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.2.5.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.2.6

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.2.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.2.5

     Release date: 2004-08-16

   This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.2.4.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.2.5

   A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.2.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.2.4

     Release date: 2003-01-30

   This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.2.3, including
   fixes to prevent possible data loss.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.2.4

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running version 7.2.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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()
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.2.3

     Release date: 2002-10-01

   This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.2.2, including
   fixes to prevent possible data loss.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.2.3

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running version 7.2.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.2.2

     Release date: 2002-08-23

   This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.2.1.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.2.2

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running version 7.2.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.2.1

     Release date: 2002-03-21

   This release contains a variety of fixes for version 7.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.2.1

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running version 7.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 7.2

     Release date: 2002-02-04
     __________________________________________________________________

Overview

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.2

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

Server Operation

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Performance

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Privileges

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Client Authentication

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Server Configuration

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Queries

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Schema Manipulation

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Utility Commands

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Data Types and Functions

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Internationalization

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

PL/pgSQL

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

PL/Perl

     * New untrusted PL/Perl (Alex Pilosov)
     * PL/Perl is now built on some platforms even if libperl is not
       shared (Peter E)
     __________________________________________________________________

PL/Tcl

     * Now reports errorInfo (Vsevolod Lobko)
     * Add spi_lastoid function (bob@redivi.com)
     __________________________________________________________________

PL/Python

     * ...is new (Andrew Bosma)
     __________________________________________________________________

psql

     * \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)
     __________________________________________________________________

libpq

     * New function PQescapeString() to escape quotes in command strings
       (Florian Weimer)
     * New function PQescapeBytea() escapes binary strings for use as SQL
       string literals
     __________________________________________________________________

JDBC

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

ODBC

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

ECPG

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Misc. Interfaces

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Build and Install

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Source Code

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

Contrib

     * 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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.1.3

     Release date: 2001-08-15
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.1.3

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.1.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.1.2

     Release date: 2001-05-11

   This has one fix from 7.1.1.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.1.2

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.1.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

Fix PL/pgSQL SELECTs when returning no rows
Fix for psql backslash core dump
Referential integrity privilege fix
Optimizer fixes
pg_dump cleanups
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.1.1

     Release date: 2001-05-05

   This has a variety of fixes from 7.1.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.1.1

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.1.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 7.1

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.1

   A dump/restore using pg_dump is required for those wishing to migrate
   data from any previous release.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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 Darwin/MacOS X 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.0.3

     Release date: 2000-11-11

   This has a variety of fixes from 7.0.2.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.0.3

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.0.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.0.2

     Release date: 2000-06-05

   This is a repackaging of 7.0.1 with added documentation.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.0.2

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

Added documentation to tarball.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 7.0.1

     Release date: 2000-06-01

   This is a cleanup release for 7.0.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.0.1

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 7.0.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 7.0

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 7.0

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 6.5.3

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 6.5.3

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 6.5.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

Updated version of pgaccess 0.98
NT-specific patch
Fix dumping rules on inherited tables
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 6.5.2

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 6.5.2

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 6.5.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 6.5.1

     Release date: 1999-07-15

   This is basically a cleanup release for 6.5. We have fixed a variety of
   problems reported by 6.5 users.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 6.5.1

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 6.5.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 6.5

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 6.5

   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.*
     __________________________________________________________________

Multiversion Concurrency Control

   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: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 6.4.2

     Release date: 1998-12-20

   The 6.4.1 release was improperly packaged. This also has one additional
   bug fix.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 6.4.2

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 6.4.*.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

Fix for datetime constant problem on some platforms(Thomas)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 6.4.1

     Release date: 1998-12-18

   This is basically a cleanup release for 6.4. We have fixed a variety of
   problems reported by 6.4 users.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 6.4.1

   A dump/restore is *not* required for those running 6.4.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 6.4

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 6.4

   A dump/restore using pg_dump or pg_dumpall is required for those
   wishing to migrate data from any previous release of PostgreSQL.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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 indentifiers
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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 6.3.2

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 6.3.1

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 6.3

     Release date: 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.

     Note: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 6.3

   A dump/restore using pg_dump or pg_dumpall is required for those
   wishing to migrate data from any previous release of PostgreSQL.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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 an 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(Thom
as)
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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 6.2.1

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration from version 6.2 to version 6.2.1

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 6.2

     Release date: 1997-10-02

   A dump/restore is required for those wishing to migrate data from
   previous releases of PostgreSQL.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration from version 6.1 to version 6.2

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration from version 1.x to version 6.2

   Those migrating from earlier 1.* releases should first upgrade to 1.09
   because the COPY output format was improved from the 1.02 release.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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 "<^"(Thom
as)
Add routines for text trimming on both ends, substring, and string position(Thom
as)
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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 6.1.1

     Release date: 1997-07-22
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration from version 6.1 to version 6.1.1

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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)
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 6.1

     Release date: 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).
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration to Version 6.1

   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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 6.0

     Release date: 1997-01-29

   A dump/restore is required for those wishing to migrate data from
   previous releases of PostgreSQL.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration from version 1.09 to version 6.0

   This migration requires a complete dump of the 1.09 database and a
   restore of the database in 6.0.
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration from pre-1.09 to version 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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(Bru
ce)
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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 1.09

     Release date: 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 1.02

     Release date: 1996-08-01
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration from version 1.02 to version 1.02.1

   Here is a new migration file for 1.02.1. It includes the 'copy' change
   and a script to convert old ASCII files.

     Note: 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:
    1. Start up a new 1.02.1 postmaster
    2. 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

Dump/Reload Procedure

   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 = texticregexn
e);
create operator ~* (leftarg = varchar, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregexe
q);
create operator !~* (leftarg = varchar, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregex
ne);
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                Release 1.01

     Release date: 1996-02-23
     __________________________________________________________________

Migration from version 1.0 to version 1.01

   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:
    1. Set the definition of NAMEDATALEN in "src/Makefile.global" to 16
       and OIDNAMELEN to 20.
    2. Decide whether you want to use Host based authentication.
         a. 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.
         b. 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.
    3. Compile and install 1.01, but DO NOT do the "initdb" step.
    4. Before doing anything else, terminate your 1.0 postmaster, and
       backup your existing $PGDATA directory.
    5. Set your PGDATA environment variable to your 1.0 databases, but set
       up path up so that 1.01 binaries are being used.
    6. Modify the file "$PGDATA/PG_VERSION" from 5.0 to 5.1
    7. Start up a new 1.01 postmaster
    8. 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 = char2icregexn
e);
create operator ~* (leftarg = char4, rightarg = text, procedure = char4icregexeq
);
create operator !~* (leftarg = char4, rightarg = text, procedure = char4icregexn
e);
create operator ~* (leftarg = char8, rightarg = text, procedure = char8icregexeq
);
create operator !~* (leftarg = char8, rightarg = text, procedure = char8icregexn
e);
create operator ~* (leftarg = char16, rightarg = text, procedure = char16icregex
eq);
create operator !~* (leftarg = char16, rightarg = text, procedure = char16icrege
xne);
create operator ~* (leftarg = text, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregexeq);
create operator !~* (leftarg = text, rightarg = text, procedure = texticregexne)
;
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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
     __________________________________________________________________

                                 Release 1.0

     Release date: 1995-09-05
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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
     __________________________________________________________________

                           Postgres95 Release 0.03

     Release date: 1995-07-21
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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.
     __________________________________________________________________

                           Postgres95 Release 0.02

     Release date: 1995-05-25
     __________________________________________________________________

Changes

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 a 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
     __________________________________________________________________

                           Postgres95 Release 0.01

     Release date: 1995-05-01

   Initial release.
