Postgres95 version 1.0

Tue Sep 5 15:57:18 PDT 1995

We are pleased to announce the release of Postgres95, version 1.0. We wish to acknowlege all the beta testers for helping us find bugs from the previous releases. Below are the changes in version 1.0.

Copyright changes

• The copyright of Postgres 1.0 has been loosened to be freely modifiable and distributable for any purpose. Please read the COPYRIGHT file. Thanks to Professor Michael Stonebraker for making this possible.

Incompatible Changes

• date formats have to be MM-DD-YYYY (or DD-MM-YYYY if you're using EUROPEAN STYLE). This follows SQL-92 specs.
• "delimiters" is now a keyword

Enhancements

• SQL 'LIKE' syntax has been added
• copy command now takes an optional USING DELIMITER specification. delimiters can be any single-character string.
• IRIX 5.3 port has been added. Thanks to Paul Walmsley (ccshag@everest.cclabs.missouri.edu) and others.
• updated pg_dump to work with new libpq
• \d has been added to psql. It dumps out meta information about tables. Thanks to Keith Parks (emkxp01@mtcc.demon.co.uk)
• regexp performance for architectures that use POSIX regex has been improved due to caching of precompiled patterns. Thanks to Alistair Crooks (agc@uts.amdahl.com)
• a new version of libpq++. Thanks to William Wanders (wwanders@sci.kun.nl)

Bug fixes

• arbitrary userids can be specified in the createuser script
• \c to connect to other databases in psql now works.
• bad pg_proc entry for float4inc() is fixed
• users with usecreatedb field set can now create databases without having to be usesuper
• remove access control entries when the entry no longer has any permissions
• fixed non-portable datetimes implementation
• added kerberos flags to the src/backend/Makefile
• libpq now works with kerberos
• typographic errors in the user manual have been corrected.
btrees with multiple index never worked, now we tell you they don't work when you try to use them

New utilities:

• mkldexport added to the distribution. mkldexport is only needed for the AIX port.

About Postgres95

Postgres95 is a derivative of the last official release of Postgres (version 4.2). The code has been ANSI-fied and trimmed by 25%. We made many internal changes that improve performance and code maintainability. Postgres95 runs about 30-50% faster on the Wisconsin Benchmark compared to v4.2. Apart from bug fixes, these are the major enhancements:

• The query language POSTQUEL has been replaced with SQL (implemented in the server). We do not support subqueries at the moment. (However, subqueries can be imitated with user defined SQL functions.) Aggregates have been re-implemented. We also added support for GROUP BY. The libpq interface is still available for C programs.
• In addition to the monitor program, we provide a new program (psql) which supports GNU readline.
• We added a new front-end library, libpgtcl, that supports Tcl-based clients. A sample shell, pgtclsh, provides four new Tcl commands to interface tcl programs with the Postgres95 backend.
• The large object interface has been overhauled. We kept Inversion large objects as the only mechanism for storing large objects. (This is not to be confused with the Inversion file system which has been removed.)
• The instance-level rule system has been removed. Rules are still available as rewrite rules.
• A short tutorial introducing regular SQL features as well as those of ours is distributed with the source code.
• gmake (instead of BSD make) is used for the build. Also, Postgres95 can be compiled with an unpatched gcc (data alignment of doubles has been fixed).

Postgres95 is free and the complete source is available. Please read the COPYRIGHT.

Platforms

Postgres95 has been compiled and tested on Alpha (OSF 2.1, 3.0), DECStation (Ultrix 4.4), SPARC (SunOS 4.1.3), SPARC (Solaris 2.4), and HP 9000/700 (HP-UX 9.0), Intel X86 (Linux and NetBSD), and IBM RS6000 (AIX)

In addition, ports are provided for Intel X86 (Linux, 1.2 kernel running ELF), BSD44_derived OS's (NetBSD, FreeBSD, BSD/OS), IBM RS6000 (AIX 3.2.5), and SGI MIPS (IRIX 5.3).

Some ports are contributed efforts and have not been tested at Berkeley by the authors due to unavailability of platforms.

Support

The POSTGRES project has officially ended in 1994 and the POSTGRES group no longer exists at Berkeley. Hence, there is no official support for Postgres95. (However, the authors will be available for questions during beta-testing.)

To join the postgres95@postgres.berkeley.edu mailing list, send a message with "ADD" in the subject line to postgres95-request@postgres.berkeley.edu

This is an unmoderated mailing list for the discussion of postgres95 related issues. Jolly and Andrew monitor the list closely but since postgres95 development is a volunteer effort, we cannot guarantee timely responses to bug reports and questions.

If support, robustness, performance, or documentation is critical, you should consider a commercial product such as Illustra (which is a commercial version of Postgres).

Contact

Postgres95-1.0 is available for ftp.

If you have additional questions about postgres95, please send mail to Jolly Chen ( jolly@CS.Berkeley.edu) or Andrew Yu ( andrew@CS.Berkeley.edu), not to the entire postgres95 mailing list.