Feature freeze for version 8.2 took place on August 1st, 2006. This release adds many functionality and performance improvements that were requested by users, including:

• Query language enhancements including INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE RETURNING, multi-row VALUES lists, and optional target-table alias in UPDATE/DELETE
• Index creation without blocking concurrent INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations
• Many query optimization improvements, including support for reordering outer joins
• Improved sorting performance with lower memory usage
• More efficient locking with better concurrency
• More efficient vacuuming
• Easier administration of warm standby servers
• New FILLFACTOR support for tables and indexes
• Monitoring, logging, and performance tuning additions
• More control over creating and dropping objects
• Table inheritance relationships can be defined for and removed from pre-existing tables
• COPY TO can copy the output of an arbitrary SELECT statement
• Array improvements, including nulls in arrays
• Aggregate-function improvements, including multiple-input aggregates and SQL:2003 statistical functions
• Many /contrib improvements

Release Notes for 8.2