PostgreSQL v7.3beta3 Released

It has take just over a month to get to this point, but Beta3 is now ready
and available for testing. Depending on the changes generated by this
Beta, we are planning on release our first Release Candidate out within
the week, with a full release shortly after.

This Beta requires an initdb, so a dump/reload is required from previous
betas.

With this beta, we are looking to complete our list of supported platforms
that is viewable at:

http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/supported-platforms.html

If you've been able to successful compile, and run, the regression tests
on any of the platforms not listed as being supported for v7.3, please let
us know by sending a note to pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org(dot)

If you've been unable to do so, please send us in a report of the problem
you hit, and, if its just the regression tests that failed, which tests
failed, as well as a diff between your actual results and what is listed
as the expected results.

The list of changes between beta2 and beta3 is quite extensive,
encompassing over 2000 lines in a ChangeLog format. A large portion of
this is cosmetic changes (silencing compiler warnings) or documentation
changes, but some of the more prominent changes consist of:

- Function-call-style type coercions should be treated as explicit
coercions, not implicit ones.

- Perform transaction cleanup operations in a less ad-hoc, more
principled order; in particular ensure that all shared resources are
released before we release transaction locks.

- Allow 8-byte off_t to properly pg_dump

- Fix places that were using IsTransactionBlock() as an (inadequate)
check that they'd get to commit immediately on finishing.

- Fix ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN for inheritance cases.

- Make CREATE/ALTER/DROP USER/GROUP transaction-safe, or at least
pretty nearly so, by postponing write of flat password file until
transaction commit.

- Fix potential problem with btbulkdelete deleting an indexscan's
current item, if the page containing the current item is split while
the indexscan is stopped and holds no read-lock on the page.

- Rule rewriter was doing the wrong thing with conditional INSTEAD
rules whose conditions might yield NULL.

- Disallow aggregate functions in rule WHERE clauses.

- Fix within-function memory leaks in the various PLs' interfaces to
SPI_prepare

- Fix case where a function in FROM returns a scalar type, but is
referred to with whole-tuple syntax.

- Invert logic in pg_exec_query_string() so that we set a snapshot for
all utility statement types *except* a short list

- Fix rewrite code so that rules are in fact executed in order by name,
rather than being reordered according to INSTEAD attribute for
implementation convenience.

- Fix range-query estimation to not double-exclude NULLs

- adds some missing functions for float8 math operations, specifically
ceil(), floor(), and sign().

- And many many more ...

Copies of beta3 are available on all the mirror sites, as well as at the
main site under:

ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/beta

A complete copy of the ChangeLog file is also available at the same
location.

Any bugs/problems with this release, please report it to
pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org(dot)

Marc G. Fournier
Co-Ordinator
PostgreSQL Global Development Group