Release Notes: Major Changes in 8.2

I'd like to include a section on Major changes in this release at the
top of the release notes, as has been done for at least the last 6 major
releases. The notes below are one stab at that, for **discussion**. I've
tried to arrange specific changes into groups...

Major changes in this release:

Improved scalability and performance on multi-processor systems (Tom,
Alvaro, Itagaki, Qingqing, Heikki)

A variety of changes improves the performance of both sequential scans
and index scans, as well as enhancing multi-processor scalability. The
advanced query optimizer has also been further enhanced, allowing
indexes and partitioning to be useful in more cases.

Improved utility and large query performance (Tom, Simon, Alon, Andreas)

Large sorts will have typical performance increases of 100-300%,
improving complex queries and creating new indexes. Loading times have
also been reduced. Large queries, data loads, upgrades and restores will
be considerably improved.

Improved monitoring and performance tuning (Tom, Bruce, Greg, Larry)

Overhead of statistics collection has been considerably reduced and new
statistics and system information is available. Better query logging
improves diagnostics and especially performance tuning. Server now
includes DTrace support. Indexes can now also be created CONCURRENTLY,
allowing application tuning without effecting server availability.

Zero administration overhead now possible (Alvaro)

With autovacuum enabled, all required vacuuming will now take place
without administrator intervention enabling wider distribution of
embedded databases.

Improved defaults and configuration (Peter, Andrew)

Installation defaults are now improved for many tunable memory
parameters and these can now be specified in kB, MB and GB.

Warm Standby Servers for High Availability (Simon, Tom)

Warm Standby servers can now be more easily configured and are
appropriate in a wider range of circumstances than previously.

Improved scalability and performance of text search: GIN and Tsearch2
(Teodor, Oleg)

New GIN indexes allow much larger text search indexes than were
previously possible. TSearch2 has been enhanced and performance has also
been greatly improved.

Enhanced DML Functionality (Jonah, Joe, Tom, Susanne, Atsushi)

INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE RETURNING and INSERT .. VALUES (), VALUES (),
VALUES () allow more efficient application designs. Enhancements to
UPDATE and DELETE allow additional constructs for clarity and ease of
use.

SQL:2003 Analytical functions (Sergey, Tom, Neil)

All statistical aggregate functions defined by SQL:2003 are now
supported and user-defined aggregates now can take multiple columns as
inputs.

--
Simon Riggs
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com