PostgreSQL 8.2 Enters Beta

The major changes in version 8.2 include:

• The addition of return values to the query language INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE actions.
• Support for multi-row VALUES lists.
• The ability to use a target table alias with UPDATE and DELETE.
• Non-blocking index creation for INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations.
• Performance optimizations for query, sorting and vacuuming operations.
• Locking concurrency improvements.
• Improvements to the administration of warm standby servers.
• The addition of the FILLFACTOR keyword for tables and indexes.
• Improvements to the monitoring and logging systems.
• Better control for creating and dropping of objects.
• The ability to modify table inheritance relationships for pre-existing tables.
• The ability to use COPY TO for processing SELECT statement output.
• Support for null values in arrays.
• Improvements to aggregate functions.
• Other user contributed improvements.

A much more detailed listing of improvements is shown in the version 8.2 release notes.

A new version of the PostgreSQL documentation is also being released with version 8.2.

Testing help has been requested, the code is available for download here.