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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.

  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

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