Release 8.4

DateStyle no longer controls interval output formatting; instead there is a new variable IntervalStyle (Ron Mayer)

Improve consistency of handling of fractional seconds in timestamp and interval output (Ron Mayer)

This may result in displaying a different number of fractional digits than before, or rounding instead of truncating.

Make to_char() 's localized month/day names depend on LC_TIME , not LC_MESSAGES (Euler Taveira de Oliveira)

Cause to_date() and to_timestamp() to more consistently report errors for invalid input (Brendan Jurd)

Previous versions would often ignore or silently misread input that did not match the format string. Such cases will now result in an error.

Fix to_timestamp() to not require upper/lower case matching for meridian ( AM / PM ) and era ( BC / AD ) format designations (Brendan Jurd)

For example, input value ad now matches the format string AD .

Convert many postgresql.conf settings to enumerated values so that pg_settings can display the valid values (Magnus)

Add cursor_tuple_fraction parameter to control the fraction of a cursor's rows that the planner assumes will be fetched (Robert Hell)

Allow underscores in the names of custom variable classes in postgresql.conf (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)

Provide an option to pg_start_backup() to force its implied checkpoint to finish as quickly as possible (Tom)

The default behavior avoids excess I/O consumption, but that is pointless if no concurrent query activity is going on.

Make pg_stop_backup() wait for modified WAL files to be archived (Simon)

This guarantees that the backup is valid at the time pg_stop_backup() completes.

When archiving is enabled, rotate the last WAL segment at shutdown so that all transactions can be archived immediately (Guillaume Smet, Heikki)

Delay "smart" shutdown while a continuous archiving base backup is in progress (Laurenz Albe)

Cancel a continuous archiving base backup if "fast" shutdown is requested (Laurenz Albe)

Allow recovery.conf boolean variables to take the same range of string values as postgresql.conf boolean variables (Bruce)

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.

Support statement-level ON TRUNCATE triggers (Simon)

Add RESTART / CONTINUE IDENTITY options for TRUNCATE TABLE (Zoltan Boszormenyi)

The start value of a sequence can be changed by ALTER SEQUENCE START WITH .

Allow TRUNCATE tab1, tab1 to succeed (Bruce)

Add a separate TRUNCATE permission (Robert Haas)

Make EXPLAIN VERBOSE show the output columns of each plan node (Tom)

Previously EXPLAIN VERBOSE output an internal representation of the query plan. (That behavior is now available via debug_print_plan .)

Make EXPLAIN identify subplans and initplans with individual labels (Tom)

Make EXPLAIN honor debug_print_plan (Tom)

Allow EXPLAIN on CREATE TABLE AS (Peter)

Allow sub-selects in LIMIT and OFFSET (Tom)

Add SQL -standard syntax for LIMIT / OFFSET capabilities (Peter)

To wit, OFFSET num {ROW|ROWS} FETCH {FIRST|NEXT} [num] {ROW|ROWS} ONLY .

Add ALTER TYPE RENAME (Petr Jelinek)

Add ALTER SEQUENCE ... RESTART (with no parameter) to reset a sequence to its initial value (Zoltan Boszormenyi)

Modify the ALTER TABLE syntax to allow all reasonable combinations for tables, indexes, sequences, and views (Tom)

This change allows the following new syntaxes:

• ALTER SEQUENCE OWNER TO

• ALTER VIEW ALTER COLUMN SET/DROP DEFAULT

• ALTER VIEW OWNER TO

• ALTER VIEW SET SCHEMA

There is no actual new functionality here, but formerly you had to say ALTER TABLE to do these things, which was confusing.

Add support for the syntax ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET DATA TYPE (Peter)

This is SQL -standard syntax for functionality that was already supported.

Make ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS rewrite the table to physically remove OID values (Tom)

Also, add ALTER TABLE SET WITH OIDS to rewrite the table to add OID s.

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)

Dramatically improve the speed of building and accessing hash indexes (Tom Raney, Shreya Bhargava)

This allows hash indexes to be sometimes faster than btree indexes. However, hash indexes are still not crash-safe.

Make hash indexes store only the hash code, not the full value of the indexed column (Xiao Meng)

This greatly reduces the size of hash indexes for long indexed values, improving performance.

Implement fast update option for GIN indexes (Teodor, Oleg)

This option greatly improves update speed at a small penalty in search speed.

xxx_pattern_ops indexes can now be used for simple equality comparisons, not only for LIKE (Tom)

Remove the requirement to use @@@ when doing GIN weighted lookups on full text indexes (Tom, Teodor)

The normal @@ text search operator can be used instead.

Add an optimizer selectivity function for @@ text search operations (Jan Urbanski)

Allow prefix matching in full text searches (Teodor Sigaev, Oleg Bartunov)

Support multi-column GIN indexes (Teodor Sigaev)

Improve support for Nepali language and Devanagari alphabet (Teodor)

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.

Add --freeze option to vacuumdb (Bruce)

Reject year 0 BC and years 000 and 0000 (Tom)

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 variadic functions (functions with a variable number of arguments) (Pavel Stehule)

Only trailing arguments can be optional, and they all must be of the same data type.

Support default values for function arguments (Pavel Stehule)

Add CREATE FUNCTION ... RETURNS TABLE clause (Pavel Stehule)

Allow SQL -language functions to return the output of an INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE RETURNING clause (Tom)

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 DIAGNOSTICS ROW_COUNT variables (Pavel Stehule)

Make FETCH and MOVE set the GET DIAGNOSTICS ROW_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)

Add pg_dump / pg_dumpall option --lock-wait-timeout (David Gould)

This allows dumps to fail if unable to acquire a shared lock within the specified amount of time.

Reorder pg_dump --data-only output to dump tables referenced by foreign keys before the referencing tables (Tom)

This allows data loads when foreign keys are already present. If circular references make a safe ordering impossible, a NOTICE is issued.

Allow pg_dump , pg_dumpall , and pg_restore to use a specified role (Benedek László)

Allow pg_restore to use multiple concurrent connections to do the restore (Andrew)

The number of concurrent connections is controlled by the option --jobs . This is supported only for custom-format archives.

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.

Add localization support for messages (Euler Taveira de Oliveira)

ecpg parser is now automatically generated from the server parser (Michael)

Previously the ecpg parser was hand-maintained.

Add support for single-use plans with out-of-line parameters (Tom)

Add new SPI_OK_REWRITTEN return code for SPI_execute() (Heikki)

This is used when a command is rewritten to another type of command.

Remove unnecessary inclusions from executor/spi.h (Tom)

SPI-using modules might need to add some #include lines if they were depending on spi.h to include things for them.