Cool new stuff in PostgreSQL 8.1?

csn

Hey Sxooter - what new stuff in PostgreSQL 8.1 are you looking forward to?

Moving pg_autovacuum into main sounds pretty significant. I guess I can remove my cron vacuums?

The replacing of users and groups with roles sounds pretty significant too - wonder if I'll have to worry about that.

The csv header option is a nice small touch.

Looks like there's some new IN/INOUT functionality for plpgsql that may replace RETURN.

Other than that, it appears there are also quite a few performance improvements.

Sxooter

Hehe. I've been so busy and had my head down so much lately, I haven't even beta tested it. I feel dirty.

Did the pg_autovacuum make it? I thought it was being put off for still another version.

I am quite happy to hear that max(field) and min(field) have been optimized to bypass sequential scans. I am looking forward to finally upgrading the internal servers where I work to 8.0.4 actually, since they have so many of the features I really want, like save points and $$ quoting. $$ quoting is the bomb, if you've ever pulled your hair out wondering if you needed 8 or 10 ' marks around each argument in some part of a script before.

csn

Yeah, it shows up in the release notes:

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. [/quote]
The MAX/MIN is another gotcha checked off - some people used that as an advantage of mysql over postgresql.

Yeah, $-quoting is great - so nice not to have to escape all the quotes. I also like being able to declare the variable names in the function parameter list, rather than having to do 'var alias for $1;' (and sometimes having to renumber all of them when I add/remove a variable.

Sxooter

Yeah, that quoting thing chased a LOT of newbies away from writing their own user defined functions. Hopefully we'll see a flood of folks writing UDFs in their favorite languages.