In PostgreSQL 8.2, we got “RETURNING” clause in INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE queries. Unfortunately it could not be used as source of rows for anything in sql. INSERT INTO table_backup DELETE FROM TABLE WHERE … returning *; Well, it’s still not possible, but it is a one step closer, thanks to patch written and committed by Tom Lane … Continue reading “Waiting for 8.4 – sql-wrappable RETURNING”
On 28th of October Tom Lane committed his patch that changes some internals of functions, but it also adds interesting capability.
On 4th of September Tom Lane committed another great patch. This one is very large, and even after applying – it’s has some rough edges. There will be need for additional patches to make the functionality fully robust, but the fact that it got committed means that it will be available in final 8.4. What … Continue reading “Waiting for 8.4 – Common Table Expressions (WITH queries)”
On 30th of September, Heikki Linnakangas committed his patch that changes FSM: Rewrite the FSM. Instead of relying on a fixed-size shared memory segment, the free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each relation (except for hash indexes; they don’t use FSM). This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC … Continue reading “Waiting for 8.4 – new FSM (Free Space Map)”
On 23rd of September, Heikki Linnakangas committed patch that was written by Radek Strnad (actually committed patch is a stripped-down version of original). What it does? It adds ability to have (finally!) different collation order and character categories for different databases.
Takahiro Itagaki wrote, and Tom Lane committed nice patch, which I personally find really helpful: Add a duration option to pgbench, so that test length can be specified in seconds instead of by number of transactions to run. Takahiro Itagaki
Great (and admittedly long overdue) patch by Tom Lane: Make pg_dump –data-only try to order the table dumps so that foreign keys’ referenced tables are dumped before the referencing tables. This avoids failures when the data is loaded with the FK constraints already active. If no such ordering is possible because of circular or self-referential … Continue reading “Waiting for 8.4 – ordered data loading in pg_dump”
Today, Tom Lane committed patch, written by Abhijit Menon-Sen, which adds interesting feature to psql. Namely – it simplifies changing definition of functions.
On 29th of July, Tom Lane committed patch written by David E. Wheeler, which added new contrib module: citext.
During last month or so, Tom Lane commited changes in PostgreSQL, which were foundations for adding hash-based versions of popular features. I already described first such feature – DISTINCT. Now, there were 3 more commits which were related to this: