PostgreSQL v7.4 Released

After almost 12 months of intense development, and testing, we are proud
to announce the availability of PostgreSQL v7.4.

An overview of the major changes in v7.4 include:

IN/NOT IN subqueries are now much more efficient
Improved GROUP BY processing by using hash buckets
New multikey hash join capability
Queries using the explicit JOIN syntax are now better optimized
Faster and more powerful regular expression code
Function-inlining for simple SQL functions
Full support for IPv6 connections and IPv6 address data types
Major improvements in SSL performance and reliability
Make free space map efficiently reuse empty index pages, and other
SQL-standard information schema
Cursors conform more closely to the SQL standard
Cursors can exist outside transactions
New client-to-server protocol
libpq and ECPG applications are now fully thread-safe
New version of full-text indexing
New autovacuum tool
Array handling has been improved and moved into the server core

For a full listing of what has changed between v7.3 and v7.4, please see
the HISTORY file available at:

http://developer.postgresql.org/~momjian/HISTORY.html

For a look at the Official Press Release that our Advocacy team *slaved*
over for the many weeks preceeding the release, it is available at:

http://www.postgresql.org/presskit/en/presskit74.html

For this release, we have two primary methods of downloading, in two
different formats ...

For those using BitTorrent (http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/) we have
setup a BitTorrent server at:

http://bt.postgresql.org

For those using FTP, please see our listing of mirror sites for a location
near you:

http://www.postgresql.org/mirrors-www.html

And, due to popular demand over the years, we've finally given in and are
offering both .gz and .bz versions, both through FTP and BitTorrent.

Any questions/problems with release, please report them, as always, to
pgsql-bugs(at)postgresql(dot)org(dot)

Marc G. Fournier
Coordinator
PostgreSQL Global Development Group