Postgres 7.1 and the 8k tuple / row limit

Hey all,

I've developed a full-text, news article database in Postgres with Perl and
the Pg module as my search front end. The only problem (that I discovered
AFTER I'd done all my dev work) is that Postgres has an 8K row limit. About
3% of my articles exceed this size limit.

I've tried splitting the articles into three separate rows (which are then
joined with '||' when performing a query) but this is far too slow without
cluster indexing.

Recompiling Postgres with a larger row size limit is not an option and
anyway, the decision is not mine.

However, I've read that Postgres 7.1 / 7.2 will accomodate larger row sizes
and was wondering if there was a ballpark ETA / release date for them. And
does anybody know which version will have this feature?

The reason I ask is that I might hang around waiting for these releases
rather than stick with my current plan of cutting my losses and switching to
DB2.

Cheers.

Ally

ally(at)nospam(dot)netspace(dot)net(dot)au

PS: Remove 'nospam' from e-mail address to reply.