PostgreSQL v7.2b2 Released

Good evening ...

Back on October 25th, 2001, the PostgreSQL Global Development
Group quietly released Beta1 of PostgreSQL v7.2, in order to get the first
round of packaging and testing of our upcoming release in motion.

Today, almost two weeks later and with few major bugs reported, we
are please to announce our second Beta for broader testing.

v7.2 of PostgreSQL includes over 6 months of development since we
released v7.1 back in April, 2001, and, as with all our releases, contains
more improvements, enhancements and bug fixes then one would put into an
email.

Major highlights for this release include:

VACUUM - VACUUM no longer locks tables, 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 much 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 - Error messages can now be displayed in
several languages.

With a complete list of changes listed in the HISTORY file.

As well, as with all of our major releases, v7.2 will require a
complete dump and restore when upgrading from previous versions.

v7.2b2 is available at ftp://ftp.postgresql.org, as well as
through all of our official mirror sites.

Bug reports, as always, should be directed to
pgsql-bugs(at)postgresql(dot)org, and the severity of all bugs reported will
determine whether we move to the release cycle, or do another Beta, so we
encourage as many administrators as possible to test this current release.

Marc G. Fournier
Coordinator, PGDG