After many years of development, PostgreSQL has
become feature-complete in many areas. This release shows a
targeted approach to adding features (e.g., authentication,
monitoring, space reuse), and adds capabilities defined in the
later SQL standards. The major areas of enhancement are:
Windowing Functions
Common Table Expressions and Recursive Queries
Default and variadic parameters for functions
Parallel Restore
Column Permissions
Per-database locale settings
Improved hash indexes
Improved join performance for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries
Easier-to-use Warm Standby
Automatic sizing of the Free Space Map
Visibility Map (greatly reduces vacuum overhead for slowly-changing tables)
Version-aware psql (backslash commands work against older servers)
Support SSL certificates for user authentication
Per-function runtime statistics
Easy editing of functions in psql
New contrib modules: pg_stat_statements, auto_explain, citext, btree_gin
The above items are explained in more detail in the sections below.
Change TRUNCATE and LOCK to
apply to child tables of the specified table(s) (Peter)
These commands now accept an ONLY option that prevents
processing child tables; this option must be used if the old
behavior is needed.
SELECT DISTINCT and
UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT
no longer always produce sorted output (Tom)
Previously, these types of queries always removed duplicate rows
by means of Sort/Unique processing (i.e., sort then remove adjacent
duplicates). Now they can be implemented by hashing, which will not
produce sorted output. If an application relied on the output being
in sorted order, the recommended fix is to add an ORDER BY
clause. As a short-term workaround, the previous behavior can be
restored by disabling enable_hashagg, but that is a very
performance-expensive fix. SELECT DISTINCT ON never uses
hashing, however, so its behavior is unchanged.
Force child tables to inherit CHECK constraints from parents
(Alex Hunsaker, Nikhil Sontakke, Tom)
Formerly it was possible to drop such a constraint from a child
table, allowing rows that violate the constraint to be visible
when scanning the parent table. This was deemed inconsistent,
as well as contrary to SQL standard.
Disallow negative LIMIT or OFFSET
values, rather than treating them as zero (Simon)
Disallow LOCK TABLE outside a transaction block
(Tom)
Such an operation is useless because the lock would be released
immediately.
Sequences now contain an additional start_value column
(Zoltan Boszormenyi)
Make numeric zero raised to a fractional power return
0, rather than throwing an error, and make
numeric zero raised to the zero power return 1,
rather than error (Bruce)
This matches the longstanding float8 behavior.
Allow unary minus of floating-point values to produce minus zero (Tom)
The changed behavior is more IEEE-standard
compliant.
Throw an error if an escape character is the last character in
a LIKE pattern (i.e., it has nothing to escape) (Tom)
Previously, such an escape character was silently ignored,
thus possibly masking application logic errors.
Remove ~=~ and ~<>~ operators
formerly used for LIKE index comparisons (Tom)
Pattern indexes now use the regular equality operator.
xpath() now passes its arguments to libxml
without any changes (Andrew)
This means that the XML argument must be a well-formed XML document.
The previous coding attempted to allow XML fragments, but it did not
work well.
Make xmlelement() format attribute values just like
content values (Peter)
Previously, attribute values were formatted according to the
normal SQL output behavior, which is sometimes at odds with
XML rules.
Rewrite memory management for libxml-using functions
(Tom)
This change should avoid some compatibility problems with use of
libxml in PL/Perl and other add-on code.
Adopt a faster algorithm for hash functions (Kenneth Marshall,
based on work of Bob Jenkins)
Many of the built-in hash functions now deliver different results on
little-endian and big-endian platforms.
In particular, estimates for full-text-search operators are
greatly improved.
Allow SELECT DISTINCT and
UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT to
use hashing (Tom)
This means that these types of queries no longer automatically
produce sorted output.
Create explicit concepts of semi-joins and anti-joins (Tom)
This work formalizes our previous ad-hoc treatment of IN
(SELECT ...) clauses, and extends it to EXISTS and
NOT EXISTS clauses. It should result in significantly
better planning of EXISTS and NOT EXISTS
queries. In general, logically equivalent IN and
EXISTS clauses should now have similar performance,
whereas previously IN often won.
Improve optimization of sub-selects beneath outer joins (Tom)
Formerly, a sub-select or view could not be optimized very well if it
appeared within the nullable side of an outer join and contained
non-strict expressions (for instance, constants) in its result list.
Improve the performance of text_position() and
related functions by using Boyer-Moore-Horspool searching (David
Rowley)
This is particularly helpful for long search patterns.
Reduce I/O load of writing the statistics collection file
by writing the file only when requested (Martin Pihlak)
Improve performance for bulk inserts (Robert Haas, Simon)
Increase the default value of default_statistics_target
from 10 to 100 (Greg Sabino Mullane,
Tom)
The maximum value was also increased from 1000 to
10000.
Perform constraint_exclusion checking by default
in queries involving inheritance or UNION ALL (Tom)
A new constraint_exclusion setting,
partition, was added to specify this behavior.
Allow I/O read-ahead for bitmap index scans (Greg Stark)
The amount of read-ahead is controlled by
effective_io_concurrency. This feature is available only
if the kernel has posix_fadvise() support.
Inline simple set-returning SQL functions in
FROM clauses (Richard Rowell)
Improve performance of multi-batch hash joins by providing a special
case for join key values that are especially common in the outer
relation (Bryce Cutt, Ramon Lawrence)
Reduce volume of temporary data in multi-batch hash joins
by suppressing "physical tlist" optimization (Michael
Henderson, Ramon Lawrence)
Avoid waiting for idle-in-transaction sessions during
CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY (Simon)
Improve performance of shared cache invalidation (Tom)
Remove support for the (insecure) crypt authentication method
(Magnus)
This effectively obsoletes pre-PostgreSQL 7.2 client
libraries, as there is no longer any non-plaintext password method that
they can use.
Support regular expressions in pg_ident.conf
(Magnus)
Allow Kerberos/GSSAPI parameters
to be changed without restarting the postmaster (Magnus)
Support SSL certificate chains in server certificate
file (Andrew Gierth)
Including the full certificate chain makes the client able
to verify the certificate without having all intermediate CA
certificates present in the local store, which is often the case for
commercial CAs.
Report appropriate error message for combination of MD5
authentication and db_user_namespace enabled (Bruce)
Change all authentication options to use name=value
syntax (Magnus)
This makes incompatible changes to the ldap,
pam and ident authentication methods. All
pg_hba.conf entries with these methods need to be
rewritten using the new format.
Remove the ident sameuser option, instead making that
behavior the default if no usermap is specified (Magnus)
Allow a usermap parameter for all external authentication methods
(Magnus)
Previously a usermap was only supported for ident
authentication.
Add clientcert option to control requesting of a
client certificate (Magnus)
Previously this was controlled by the presence of a root
certificate file in the server's data directory.
Add cert authentication method to allow
user authentication via SSL certificates
(Magnus)
Previously SSL certificates could only verify that
the client had access to a certificate, not authenticate a
user.
Allow krb5, gssapi and sspi
realm and krb5 host settings to be specified in
pg_hba.conf (Magnus)
These override the settings in postgresql.conf.
Add include_realm parameter for krb5,
gssapi, and sspi methods (Magnus)
This allows identical usernames from different realms to be
authenticated as different database users using usermaps.
Parse pg_hba.conf fully when it is loaded,
so that errors are reported immediately (Magnus)
Previously, most errors in the file wouldn't be detected until clients
tried to connect, so an erroneous file could render the system
unusable. With the new behavior, if an error is detected during
reload then the bad file is rejected and the postmaster continues
to use its old copy.
Show all parsing errors in pg_hba.conf instead of
aborting after the first one (Selena Deckelmann)
Support ident authentication over Unix-domain sockets
on Solaris (Garick Hamlin)
Add pg_conf_load_time() to report when
the PostgreSQL configuration files were last loaded
(George Gensure)
Add pg_terminate_backend() to safely terminate a
backend (the SIGTERM signal works also) (Tom, Bruce)
While it's always been possible to SIGTERM a single
backend, this was previously considered unsupported; and testing
of the case found some bugs that are now fixed.
Add ability to track user-defined functions' call counts and
runtimes (Martin Pihlak)
Function statistics appear in a new system view,
pg_stat_user_functions. Tracking is controlled
by the new parameter track_functions.
Allow specification of the maximum query string size in
pg_stat_activity via new
track_activity_query_size parameter (Thomas Lee)
Increase the maximum line length sent to syslog, in
hopes of improving performance (Tom)
Add read-only configuration variables segment_size,
wal_block_size, and wal_segment_size
(Bernd Helmle)
When reporting a deadlock, report the text of all queries involved
in the deadlock to the server log (Itagaki Takahiro)
Add pg_stat_get_activity(pid) function to return
information about a specific process id (Magnus)
Allow the location of the server's statistics file to be specified
via stats_temp_directory (Magnus)
This allows the statistics file to be placed in a
RAM-resident directory to reduce I/O requirements.
On startup/shutdown, the file is copied to its traditional location
($PGDATA/global/) so it is preserved across restarts.
Add support for WITH clauses (CTEs), including WITH
RECURSIVE (Yoshiyuki Asaba, Tatsuo Ishii, Tom)
Add TABLE command (Peter)
TABLE tablename is a SQL standard short-hand for
SELECT * FROM tablename.
Allow AS to be optional when specifying a
SELECT (or RETURNING) column output
label (Hiroshi Saito)
This works so long as the column label is not any
PostgreSQL keyword; otherwise AS is still
needed.
Support set-returning functions in SELECT result lists
even for functions that return their result via a tuplestore (Tom)
In particular, this means that functions written in PL/pgSQL
and other PL languages can now be called this way.
Support set-returning functions in the output of aggregation
and grouping queries (Tom)
Allow SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE to work
on inheritance trees (Tom)
Add infrastructure for SQL/MED (Martin Pihlak,
Peter)
There are no remote or external SQL/MED capabilities
yet, but this change provides a standardized and future-proof
system for managing connection information for modules like
dblink and plproxy.
Invalidate cached plans when referenced schemas, functions, operators,
or operator classes are modified (Martin Pihlak, Tom)
This improves the system's ability to respond to on-the-fly
DDL changes.
Allow comparison of composite types and allow arrays of
anonymous composite types (Tom)
This allows constructs such as
row(1, 1.1) = any (array[row(7, 7.7), row(1, 1.0)]).
This is particularly useful in recursive queries.
Add support for Unicode string literal and identifier specifications
using code points, e.g. U&'d\0061t\+000061'
(Peter)
Reject \000 in string literals and COPY data
(Tom)
Previously, this was accepted but had the effect of terminating
the string contents.
Improve the parser's ability to report error locations (Tom)
An error location is now reported for many semantic errors,
such as mismatched datatypes, that previously could not be localized.
Improve reporting of
CREATE/DROP/RENAME DATABASE
failure when uncommitted prepared transactions are the cause
(Tom)
Make LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE into
per-database settings (Radek Strnad, Heikki)
This makes collation similar to encoding, which was always
configurable per database.
Improve checks that the database encoding, collation
(LC_COLLATE), and character classes
(LC_CTYPE) match (Heikki, Tom)
Note in particular that a new database's encoding and locale
settings can be changed only when copying from template0.
This prevents possibly copying data that doesn't match the settings.
Add ALTER DATABASE SET TABLESPACE to move a database
to a new tablespace (Guillaume Lelarge, Bernd Helmle)
Track free space in separate per-relation "fork" files (Heikki)
Free space discovered by VACUUM is now recorded in
*_fsm files, rather than in a fixed-sized shared memory
area. The max_fsm_pages and max_fsm_relations
settings have been removed, greatly simplifying administration of
free space management.
Add a visibility map to track pages that do not require
vacuuming (Heikki)
This allows VACUUM to avoid scanning all of
a table when only a portion of the table needs vacuuming.
The visibility map is stored in per-relation "fork" files.
Add vacuum_freeze_table_age parameter to control
when VACUUM should ignore the visibility map and
do a full table scan to freeze tuples (Heikki)
Track transaction snapshots more carefully (Alvaro)
This improves VACUUM's ability to reclaim space
in the presence of long-running transactions.
Add ability to specify per-relation autovacuum and TOAST
parameters in CREATE TABLE (Alvaro, Euler Taveira de
Oliveira)
Autovacuum options used to be stored in a system table.
Previously these were interpreted as 1 BC.
(Note: years 0 and 00 are still assumed to be
the year 2000.)
Include SGT (Singapore time) in the default list of
known time zone abbreviations (Tom)
Support infinity and -infinity as
values of type date (Tom)
Make parsing of interval literals more standard-compliant
(Tom, Ron Mayer)
For example, INTERVAL '1' YEAR now does what it's
supposed to.
Allow interval fractional-seconds precision to be specified
after the second keyword, for SQL standard
compliance (Tom)
Formerly the precision had to be specified after the keyword
interval. (For backwards compatibility, this syntax is still
supported, though deprecated.) Data type definitions will now be
output using the standard format.
Support the IS0 8601 interval syntax (Ron
Mayer, Kevin Grittner)
For example, INTERVAL 'P1Y2M3DT4H5M6.7S' is now
supported.
Add IntervalStyle parameter
which controls how interval values are output (Ron Mayer)
Valid values are: postgres, postgres_verbose,
sql_standard, iso_8601. This setting also
controls the handling of negative interval input when only
some fields have positive/negative designations.
Improve consistency of handling of fractional seconds in
timestamp and interval output (Ron Mayer)
Improve the handling of casts applied to ARRAY[]
constructs, such as ARRAY[...]::integer[]
(Brendan Jurd)
Formerly PostgreSQL attempted to determine a data type
for the ARRAY[] construct without reference to the ensuing
cast. This could fail unnecessarily in many cases, in particular when
the ARRAY[] construct was empty or contained only
ambiguous entries such as NULL. Now the cast is consulted
to determine the type that the array elements must be.
Make SQL-syntax ARRAY dimensions optional
to match the SQL standard (Peter)
Add array_ndims() to return the number
of dimensions of an array (Robert Haas)
Add array_length() to return the length
of an array for a specified dimension (Jim Nasby, Robert
Haas, Peter Eisentraut)
Add aggregate function array_agg(), which
returns all aggregated values as a single array (Robert Haas,
Jeff Davis, Peter)
Add unnest(), which converts an array to
individual row values (Tom)
This is the opposite of array_agg().
Add array_fill() to create arrays initialized with
a value (Pavel Stehule)
Add generate_subscripts() to simplify generating
the range of an array's subscripts (Pavel Stehule)
Consider TOAST compression on values as short as
32 bytes (previously 256 bytes) (Greg Stark)
Require 25% minimum space savings before using TOAST
compression (previously 20% for small values and any-savings-at-all
for large values) (Greg)
Improve TOAST heuristics for rows that have a mix of large
and small toastable fields, so that we prefer to push large values out
of line and don't compress small values unnecessarily (Greg, Tom)
Implement current_query() for use by functions
that need to know the currently running query (Tomas Doran)
Add pg_get_keywords() to return a list of the
parser keywords (Dave Page)
Add pg_get_functiondef() to see a function's
definition (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
Allow the second argument of pg_get_expr() to be zero
when deparsing an expression that does not contain variables (Tom)
Modify pg_relation_size() to use regclass
(Heikki)
pg_relation_size(data_type_name) no longer works.
Add boot_val and reset_val columns to
pg_settings output (Greg Smith)
Add source file name and line number columns to
pg_settings output for variables set in a configuration
file (Magnus, Alvaro)
For security reasons, these columns are only visible to superusers.
Add support for CURRENT_CATALOG,
CURRENT_SCHEMA, SET CATALOG, SET
SCHEMA (Peter)
These provide SQL-standard syntax for existing features.
Add pg_typeof() which returns the data type
of any value (Brendan Jurd)
Make version() return information about whether
the server is a 32- or 64-bit binary (Bruce)
Fix the behavior of information schema columns
is_insertable_into and is_updatable to
be consistent (Peter)
Improve the behavior of information schema
datetime_precision columns (Peter)
These columns now show zero for date columns, and 6
(the default precision) for time, timestamp, and
interval without a declared precision, rather than showing
null as formerly.
Convert remaining builtin set-returning functions to use
OUT parameters (Jaime Casanova)
This makes it possible to call these functions without specifying
a column list: pg_show_all_settings(),
pg_lock_status(), pg_prepared_xact(),
pg_prepared_statement(), pg_cursor()
Make pg_*_is_visible() and
has_*_privilege() functions return NULL
for invalid OIDs, rather than reporting an error (Tom)
Extend has_*_privilege() functions to allow inquiring
about the OR of multiple privileges in one call (Stephen
Frost, Tom)
Add has_column_privilege() and
has_any_column_privilege() functions (Stephen
Frost, Tom)
Support EXECUTE USING for easier insertion of data
values into a dynamic query string (Pavel Stehule)
Allow looping over the results of a cursor using a FOR
loop (Pavel Stehule)
Support RETURN QUERY EXECUTE (Pavel
Stehule)
Improve the RAISE command (Pavel Stehule)
Support DETAIL and HINT fields
Support specification of the SQLSTATE error code
Support an exception name parameter
Allow RAISE without parameters in an exception
block to re-throw the current error
Allow specification of SQLSTATE codes
in EXCEPTION lists (Pavel Stehule)
This is useful for handling custom SQLSTATE codes.
Support the CASE statement (Pavel Stehule)
Make RETURN QUERY set the special FOUND and
GET DIAGNOSTICSROW_COUNT variables
(Pavel Stehule)
Make FETCH and MOVE set the
GET DIAGNOSTICSROW_COUNT variable
(Andrew Gierth)
Make EXIT without a label always exit the innermost
loop (Tom)
Formerly, if there were a BEGIN block more closely nested
than any loop, it would exit that block instead. The new behavior
matches Oracle(TM) and is also what was previously stated by our own
documentation.
Make processing of string literals and nested block comments
match the main SQL parser's processing (Tom)
In particular, the format string in RAISE now works
the same as any other string literal, including being subject
to standard_conforming_strings. This change also
fixes other cases in which valid commands would fail when
standard_conforming_strings is on.
Avoid memory leakage when the same function is called at varying
exception-block nesting depths (Tom)
Remove verbose startup banner; now just suggest help
(Joshua Drake)
Make help show common backslash commands (Greg
Sabino Mullane)
Add \pset format wrapped mode to wrap output to the
screen width, or file/pipe output too if \pset columns
is set (Bryce Nesbitt)
Allow all supported spellings of boolean values in \pset,
rather than just on and off (Bruce)
Formerly, any string other than "off" was silently taken
to mean true. psql will now complain
about unrecognized spellings (but still take them as true).
Use the pager for wide output (Bruce)
Require a space between a one-letter backslash command and its first
argument (Bernd Helmle)
This removes a historical source of ambiguity.
Improve tab completion support for schema-qualified and
quoted identifiers (Greg Sabino Mullane)
Add optional on/off argument for
\timing (David Fetter)
Display access control rights on multiple lines (Brendan
Jurd, Andreas Scherbaum)
Make \l show database access privileges (Andrew Gilligan)
Make \l+ show database sizes, if permissions
allow (Andrew Gilligan)
Add the \ef command to edit function definitions
(Abhijit Menon-Sen)
Make \d* commands that do not have a pattern argument
show system objects only if the S modifier is specified
(Greg Sabino Mullane, Bruce)
The former behavior was inconsistent across different variants
of \d, and in most cases it provided no easy way to see
just user objects.
Improve \d* commands to work with older
PostgreSQL server versions (back to 7.4),
not only the current server version
(Guillaume Lelarge)
Make \d show foreign-key constraints that reference
the selected table (Kenneth D'Souza)
Make \d on a sequence show its column values
(Euler Taveira de Oliveira)
Add column storage type and other relation options to the
\d+ display (Gregory Stark, Euler Taveira de
Oliveira)
Show relation size in \dt+ output (Dickson S.
Guedes)
Show the possible values of enum types in \dT+
(David Fetter)
Allow \dC to accept a wildcard pattern, which matches
either datatype involved in the cast (Tom)
Add a function type column to \df's output, and add
options to list only selected types of functions (David Fetter)
Make \df not hide functions that take or return
type cstring (Tom)
Previously, such functions were hidden because most of them are
datatype I/O functions, which were deemed uninteresting. The new
policy about hiding system functions by default makes this wart
unnecessary.
Add a --no-tablespaces option to
pg_dump/pg_dumpall/pg_restore
so that dumps can be restored to clusters that have non-matching
tablespace layouts (Gavin Roy)
Remove -d and -D options from
pg_dump and pg_dumpall (Tom)
These options were too frequently confused with the option to
select a database name in other PostgreSQL
client applications. The functionality is still available,
but you must now spell out the long option name
--inserts or --column-inserts.
Remove -i/--ignore-version option from
pg_dump and pg_dumpall (Tom)
Use of this option does not throw an error, but it has no
effect. This option was removed because the version checks
are necessary for safety.
Disable statement_timeout during dump and restore
(Joshua Drake)
Allow the OID to be specified when importing a large
object, via new function lo_import_with_oid() (Tatsuo)
Add "events" support (Andrew Chernow, Merlin Moncure)
This adds the ability to register callbacks to manage private
data associated with PGconn and PGresult
objects.
Improve error handling to allow the return of multiple
error messages as multi-line error reports (Magnus)
Make PQexecParams() and related functions return
PGRES_EMPTY_QUERY for an empty query (Tom)
They previously returned PGRES_COMMAND_OK.
Document how to avoid the overhead of WSACleanup()
on Windows (Andrew Chernow)
Do not rely on Kerberos tickets to determine the default database
username (Magnus)
Previously, a Kerberos-capable build of libpq would use the
principal name from any available Kerberos ticket as default
database username, even if the connection wasn't using Kerberos
authentication. This was deemed inconsistent and confusing.
The default username is now determined the same way with or
without Kerberos. Note however that the database username must still
match the ticket when Kerberos authentication is used.
Fix certificate validation for SSL connections
(Magnus)
libpq now supports verifying both the certificate
and the name of the server when making SSL
connections. If a root certificate is not available to use for
verification, SSL connections will fail. The
sslmode parameter is used to enable certificate
verification and set the level of checking.
The default is still not to do any verification, allowing connections
to SSL-enabled servers without requiring a root certificate on the
client.
Support wildcard server certificates (Magnus)
If a certificate CN starts with *, it will
be treated as a wildcard when matching the hostname, allowing the
use of the same certificate for multiple servers.
Allow the file locations for client certificates to be specified
(Mark Woodward, Alvaro, Magnus)
Add a PQinitOpenSSL function to allow greater control
over OpenSSL/libcrypto initialization (Andrew Chernow)
Make libpq unregister its OpenSSL
callbacks when no database connections remain open
(Bruce, Magnus, Russell Smith)
This is required for applications that unload the libpq library,
otherwise invalid OpenSSL callbacks will remain.
This has effectively been required for several years, but now there
is no infrastructure claiming to support other parser tools.
Add pg_config--htmldir option
(Peter)
Pass float4 by value inside the server (Zoltan
Boszormenyi)
Add configure option
--disable-float4-byval to use the old behavior.
External C functions that use old-style (version 0) call convention
and pass or return float4 values will be broken by this
change, so you may need the configure option if you
have such functions and don't want to update them.
Pass float8, int8, and related datatypes
by value inside the server on 64-bit platforms (Zoltan Boszormenyi)
Add configure option
--disable-float8-byval to use the old behavior.
As above, this change might break old-style external C functions.
This adds support for daylight saving time (DST)
calculations beyond the year 2038.
Deprecate use of platform's time_t data type (Tom)
Some platforms have migrated to 64-bit time_t, some have
not, and Windows can't make up its mind what it's doing. Define
pg_time_t to have the same meaning as time_t,
but always be 64 bits (unless the platform has no 64-bit integer type),
and use that type in all module APIs and on-disk data formats.
Fix bug in handling of the time zone database when cross-compiling
(Richard Evans)
Link backend object files in one step, rather than in stages
(Peter)
Improve gettext support to allow better translation
of plurals (Peter)
Add message translation support to the PL languages (Alvaro, Peter)
Add more DTrace probes (Robert Lor)
Enable DTrace support on Mac OS X
Leopard and other non-Solaris platforms (Robert Lor)
Simplify and standardize conversions between C strings and
text datums, by providing common functions for the purpose
(Brendan Jurd, Tom)
Clean up the include/catalog/ header files so that
frontend programs can include them without including
postgres.h
(Zdenek Kotala)
Make name char-aligned, and suppress zero-padding of
name entries in indexes (Tom)
Recover better if dynamically-loaded code executes exit()
(Tom)
Add a hook to let plug-ins monitor the executor (Itagaki
Takahiro)
Add a hook to allow the planner's statistics lookup behavior to
be overridden (Simon Riggs)
Add shmem_startup_hook() for custom shared memory
requirements (Tom)
Replace the index access method amgetmulti entry point
with amgetbitmap, and extend the API for
amgettuple to support run-time determination of
operator lossiness (Heikki, Tom, Teodor)
The API for GIN and GiST opclass consistent functions
has been extended as well.
Add support for partial-match searches in GIN indexes
(Teodor Sigaev, Oleg Bartunov)
Replace pg_class column reltriggers
with boolean relhastriggers (Simon)
Also remove unused pg_class columns
relukeys, relfkeys, and
relrefs.
Add a relistemp column to pg_class
to ease identification of temporary tables (Tom)
Move platform FAQs into the main documentation
(Peter)
Prevent parser input files from being built with any conflicts
(Peter)
Add support for the KOI8U (Ukrainian) encoding
(Peter)
Add Japanese message translations (Japan PostgreSQL Users Group)
This used to be maintained as a separate project.
Fix problem when setting LC_MESSAGES on
MSVC-built systems (Hiroshi Inoue, Hiroshi
Saito, Magnus)
Add contrib/auto_explain to automatically run
EXPLAIN on queries exceeding a specified duration
(Itagaki Takahiro, Tom)
Add contrib/btree_gin to allow GIN indexes to
handle more datatypes (Oleg, Teodor)
Add contrib/citext to provide a case-insensitive,
multibyte-aware text data type (David Wheeler)
Add contrib/pg_stat_statements for server-wide
tracking of statement execution statistics (Itagaki Takahiro)
Add duration and query mode options to contrib/pgbench
(Itagaki Takahiro)
Make contrib/pgbench use table names
pgbench_accounts, pgbench_branches,
pgbench_history, and pgbench_tellers,
rather than just accounts, branches,
history, and tellers (Tom)
This is to reduce the risk of accidentally destroying real data
by running pgbench.
Fix contrib/pgstattuple to handle tables and
indexes with over 2 billion pages (Tatsuhito Kasahara)
In contrib/fuzzystrmatch, add a version of the
Levenshtein string-distance function that allows the user to
specify the costs of insertion, deletion, and substitution
(Volkan Yazici)
Make contrib/ltree support multibyte encodings
(laser)
Enable contrib/dblink to use connection information
stored in the SQL/MED catalogs (Joe Conway)
Improve contrib/dblink's reporting of errors from
the remote server (Joe Conway)
Make contrib/dblink set client_encoding
to match the local database's encoding (Joe Conway)
This prevents encoding problems when communicating with a remote
database that uses a different encoding.
Make sure contrib/dblink uses a password supplied
by the user, and not accidentally taken from the server's
.pgpass file (Joe Conway)
This is a minor security enhancement.
Add fsm_page_contents()
to contrib/pageinspect (Heikki)
Modify get_raw_page() to support free space map
(*_fsm) files. Also update
contrib/pg_freespacemap.
Add support for multibyte encodings to contrib/pg_trgm
(Teodor)
Rewrite contrib/intagg to use new
functions array_agg() and unnest()
(Tom)
Make contrib/pg_standby recover all available WAL before
failover (Fujii Masao, Simon, Heikki)
To make this work safely, you now need to set the new
recovery_end_command option in recovery.conf
to clean up the trigger file after failover. pg_standby
will no longer remove the trigger file itself.
contrib/pg_standby's -l option is now a no-op,
because it is unsafe to use a symlink (Simon)