Date: Saturday, April 14, 2001
Subject: PostgreSQL v7.1 Release Announcement
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group is pleased to announce
the release of PostgreSQL v7.1, now available for download from
http://www.postgresql.org and our mirror sites.
After a long and arduous development cycle, v7.1 adds several
improvements to the award winning [Linux World 1999, Linux
Journal 2000] PostgreSQL open source Object-based Relational
Database application.
As with all past releases, PostgreSQL v7.1 is the result of
collaberative and cooperative efforts of a worldwide network of
independent developers and companies committed to advancing
PostgreSQL as the best open source database solution. The Global
Development Group wants to thank the hundreds of individual
contributors who have added, tested, and improved PostgreSQL
throughout the development lifecycle of this release.
Key New Features and Capabilities of Version 7.1 Include:
Write-ahead Log (WAL) increases data integrity and processing speed.
To maintain database consistency in case of an operating
system crash, previous releases of PostgreSQL have forced all
all data modifications to disk before each transaction commit.
With WAL, only one log file must be flushed to disk, greatly
improving performance.
(Tech note: can eliminate use of -F in to disable disk flushes)
TOAST (The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique)
Past releases had compiled-in row length limit typically
between 8Kb & 32Kb. This restriction made storage of long text
fields difficult, cumbersome and slow. TOAST enables rows of
any length while maintaing the high performance PostgreSQL
users have come to expect.
SQL92 Outer Joins are now supported.
(Tech note: eliminates the UNION/NOT IN workaround)
64-bit C Language Function Manager support
The previous C function manager did not handle support
64-bit CPU's (e.g. Alpha, Sun, Itanium).
(Tech note: This change should not impact existing custom
functions developed for past versions, but performance will
be improved through rewriting to use the new call interface.)
Complex Queries that are better, stronger and faster
Many complex queries were unsupported in previous
releases. With v7.1 combinations of views, aggregates, UNION,
LIMIT, cursors, subqueries, and inherited tables are enabled.
Inherited tables are now accessed by default, and subqueries
in FROM are now supported.
Marc G. Fournier
for the PostgreSQL Global Development Group
=================
For a more complete list of New Features and Bugs Fixed, please
refer to the HISTORY segment available at:
ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/README.v7_1
Source code is available at ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/v7.1
For more information please contact:
