Working Toward PostgreSQL 9.0 Beta3

We are gradually creeping toward the release of PostgreSQL 9.0, but there's still a ways to go. We're continuing to get several bug reports per week about problems in 9.0 beta 2 - many thanks to all those who have tested and reported bugs. Here are some of the issues we've resolved in CVS since beta2:

- Fix a problem that could cause checkpoints to happen too infrequently when using streaming replication, with certain combinations of settings (Fujii Masao).
- Fix quoting problems in EXPLAIN (FORMAT YAML) output (Dean Rasheed).
- Fix a problem that could cause a "cache lookup failed for type %d" error when using PL/python (Tom Lane).
- Change pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location() to return NULL instead of 0/0 when they do not apply (Heikki Linnakangas).
- Rename restartpoint_command to archive_cleanup_command, to clarify what it's for (Itagaki Takahiro).
- Allow replication connections to use a "replication" entry in .pgpass (Fujii Masao).
- Fix the newly added vacuumdb -Z option (Josh Berkus).
- Have pg_upgrade create its output files in a less surprising location (Bruce Momjian).
- Fix ALTER LARGE OBJECT and GRANT ... ON LARGE OBJECT to not break when an OID too large to be represented by a signed integer is used (Robert Haas).
- Avoid entering a tight loop when streaming replication hits a corrupt WAL record (Heikki Linnakangas).
- New contrib module for use as an archive_cleanup_command (Simon Riggs).
- Adjust GUC categories to match the docs (Itagaki Takahiro).
- Deprecate the use of => as an operator name, and remove or rename the new => operators in 9.0, so we can eventually use this for the purpose the SQL standards committee has in mind (Robert Haas).
- Revert apparently-useless code to add symbol table entries for PL/perl functions (Andrew Dunstan).
- Avoid calling malloc(0) in pg_upgrade (Bruce Momjian).
- Don't allow WAL to be streamed to the standby until it has been fsync'd on the master - otherwise, a master crash can effectively corrupt the standby database (Fujii Masao).
- Fix pg_upgrade problems on Win32 (Bruce Momjian).
- Various documentation improvements.

If you haven't yet beta-tested PostgreSQL 9.0, there's no time like the present! Ideally, load up your production data, run your production application against it, and let us know whether anything breaks. Or, pull the plug a few times and see if anything goes wrong; or try to break Streaming Replication or Hot Standby. This is shaping up to be a great release - but it's not done yet.