First of all – I base information in this post on Linux, so if you are using another operating system – it's quite likely that it will not help you.
Second – if you're using Linux, you have probably some package manager – dpkg, rpm, pacman, poldek, whatever. Right? So, it should be easy to install Pg using this package manager?
Well, yes and no. Yes – of course all (known to me) Linux distributions include PostgreSQL, but I do not use their prepackaged version.
Why, and how do I install?
On 12th of February Tom Lane committed patch by Hitoshi Harada:
Log Message: ----------- Extend the set of frame options supported for window functions. This patch allows the frame to start from CURRENT ROW (in either RANGE or ROWS mode), and it also adds support for ROWS n PRECEDING and ROWS n FOLLOWING start and end points. (RANGE value PRECEDING/FOLLOWING isn't there yet --- the grammar works, but that's all.) Hitoshi Harada, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
Continue reading Waiting for 9.0 – extended frames for window functions
On 1st of Februyary, Takahiro Itagaki committed a patch by Pavel Stehule which adds string_agg aggregate:
Log Message: ----------- Add string_agg aggregate functions. The one argument version concatenates the input values into a string. The two argument version also does the same thing, but inserts delimiters between elements. Original patch by Pavel Stehule, reviewed by David E. Wheeler and me.
I tend to write about new features in new versions of PostgreSQL, but this patch actually fixes one of the things that annoy me a lot, so here it goes:
On 26th of January, Simon Riggs committed:
Log Message: ----------- Fix longstanding gripe that we check for 0000000001.history at start of archive recovery, even when we know it is never present.
If you've ever tried to roll your own restore_command script ( like pg_standby ) then you know that to the algorithm that's presented in docs You always had to add special case for file “0000000001.history" – which was never there, but somehow PostgreSQL always asked for it – despite the fact that it could never arrive.
Now, thanks to this small patch we will no longer need to add this “if" in any script. It's small, and it's not a new feature, but I am SO happy to see it.
On 19th of January Tom Lane committed really brilliant patch:
Log Message: ----------- Add pg_table_size() and pg_indexes_size() to provide more user-friendly wrappers around the pg_relation_size() function. Bernd Helmle, reviewed by Greg Smith
The BIG feature. The feature that made PostgreSQL leap from 8.4 to 9.0. Patch was written by Fujii Masao, and committed by Heikki Linnakangas on 15th of January 2010:
Log Message: ----------- Introduce Streaming Replication. This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and streams WAL from disk to the client. Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer. Bump catalog version because of two new functions, pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for monitoring the progress of replication. Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me