PostgreSQL 8.4 Release Candidate 1 Now Available

PostgreSQL 8.4 Release Candidate 1 Available Now

Final release of PostgreSQL 8.4 comes much closer today with the release
of our first Release Candidate. Now, we count on all of the PostgreSQL
users and developers worldwide to test this Release Candidate to make
sure that it is stable, reliable, secure and high-performance enough to
be called an official PostgreSQL release. Please download 8.4 RC1 today
and test it with your applications.

Beta testing information page and download links:
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta

Note that no Windows MSI installer will be released for this Release
Candidate. Windows users are advised to use the One-Click installer
instead.

Several of the issues patched in this release relate to pg_migrator, the
new beta in-place upgrade tool for upgrading PostgreSQL databases.
Please test migrating a copy of your 8.3 databases to 8.4 and report
further issues with pg_migrator, especially issues related to Additional
Modules (contrib). pg_migrator will release version RC1 soon which will
be compatible with 8.4 RC1, and you can get it at:
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pg-migrator/

This Release Candidate also includes a number of changes to handling of
NULL inputs to internal functions in order to prevent denial-of-service
exploits. First, the general internal_in() function is now NONSTRICT in
order to trap NULL errors for debugging. Second, several internal
functions in our Additional Modules have been marked STRICT to lock them
down, especially several GiST index functions and pg_freespacemap.
Please check for unanticipated side-effects of this more secure policy
for internal functions against your application, especially if you use
PostgreSQL plug-ins like GIS and BLAST.

Other specific items fixed since Beta2 Include:

-- Fix FreeBSD Kerberos support
-- Fix row ordering on scrollable and WITH HOLD cursors
-- Make datetime precision in INFORMATION_SCHEMA comply with the standard
-- Normalize input for INTERVAL subtypes
-- Prevent double-escaping of XML strings, and eliminate XML crash bug
-- Fix DBlink default encoding issue
-- Reverted incompatible change to Intarray operators
-- Fix estimated row count statistic for partial vacuums
-- Add support for the SQL/MED API to DBlink
-- Fix a GIN index corruption issue
-- Improve coding of pluralization in translatable strings
-- Correct initialization of Perl library support to support Perl 5.10
-- Fix several issues with rotation of pg_standby log segments
-- Fix handling of LIKE '%_' syntax
-- Multiple minor fixes to ECPG interface

For a complete list of fixes, see our Git mirror:
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=shortlog

We rely on our community of users to ensure that PostgreSQL continues to
be the most bug-free SQL database in the industry. This means we need
your testing and bug reports as soon as possible.