PostgreSQL v7.2 Final Release

For Immediate Release February 5th, 2002

After almost a full year of development since PostgreSQL v7.1 was
released, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group is proud to announce the
availability of our latest development milestone ... PostgreSQL v7.2,
another step forward for the project.

A full list of changes to v7.2 can be found in the HISTORY file,
included with the release, as well as under all ftp mirrors as:

/pub/README.v7_2

Highlights of this release are as follows:

VACUUM
Vacuuming no longer locks tables, thus allowing normal user
access during the vacuum. A new "VACUUM FULL" command does
old-style vacuum by locking the table and shrinking the on-disk
copy of the table.

Transactions
There is no longer a problem with installations that exceed
four billion transactions.

OID's
OID's are now optional. Users can now create tables without
OID's for cases where OID usage is excessive.

Optimizer
The system now computes histogram column statistics during
"ANALYZE", allowing much better optimizer choices.

Security
A new MD5 encryption option allows more secure storage and
transfer of passwords. A new Unix-domain socket authentication
option is available on Linux and BSD systems.

Statistics
Administrators can use the new table access statistics module
to get fine-grained information about table and index usage.

Internationalization
Program and library messages can now be displayed in several
languages.

.. with many many more bug fixes, enhancements and performance
related changes ...

Source for this release is available on all mirrors under:

/pub/source/v7.2

As always, any bugs with this release should be reported to
pgsql-bugs(at)postgresql(dot)org ... and, as with all point releases, this
release requires a complete dump and reload from previous releases, due to
internal structure changes ...

Marc G. Fournier
Co-ordinator
PostgreSQL Global Development Group