[Fwd: Re: [CORE] Going Beta on Monday ...]

> I browsed through the CVS logs and made this list of the important
> stuff.  There's a ton of less important stuff...

Shall we consider this the start of the list then? I think there may be
a couple of things already mentioned in the release note stubs for 7.1
too.
                    - Thomas

Additional items:

AT TIME ZONE clause for date/time types
OVERLAPS operator support rewritten

WAL --- fsync reliability without the performance hit
TOAST --- 8K row limit is no longer significant
outer joins (per SQL92 syntax, not Oracle's)
subselects in FROM clause
views and subselects now allow union/intersect/except, order by, limit
views containing grouping, aggregates, DISTINCT work now
bit-string types work now
function manager overhaul: fixes portability problems, NULL-argument
handling
memory management overhaul: prevent memory leak accumulation during
queries
drop table and rename table are now rollback-able (transaction-safe)
extensive overhaul of configure/build mechanism
overhaul of parameter-setting mechanisms (postmaster flags,
postmaster.opts,etc)
more efficient large-object implementation
pg_dump can dump large objects now
pg_dump does the right thing with user-added objects in template1
support for binding postmaster's IP socket to a virtual host name
support for placing postmaster's Unix socket file elsewhere than /tmp
keep reference counts on syscache entries to avoid dropping still-used
entries
Protect against changes in LOCALE environment causing corrupted indexes
better handling of unknown-type literals (default to string type more
readily)
inet/cidr datatypes cleaned up
LIKE/ESCAPE implemented, also ILIKE (case-insensitive LIKE)
aggregate-function support redesigned: only one transition function now,cleaner handling of NULLs
STDDEV() and VARIANCE() aggregates added
SUM() and AVG() on integer datatypes use NUMERIC accumulators
Child tables are now scanned by default -- ie, if foo has children thenSELECT FROM foo means SELECT FROM foo*.  Ditto
forUPDATE and DELETE.Use SELECT FROM ONLY foo if you don't want this behavior.
 
vacuum analyze does the analyze part without holding exclusive lock