		ANNOUNCEMENT PQL-0.8
		====================
		by Bjoern Lemke, 1995
		
PQL is a relational, transaction oriented database tool, that
is free available in source.
PQL stands for "plain query language" and is a kind of SQL (rather a subset)
Nearly all features of SQL are supported, like joins, subqueries and grouping.
The join operation has been optimized using a iterative "search and join"
algorithm which runs over all joined base tables.

In addition to the PQL-Interpreter, a relational database engine interface
is shipped within the package. The shipped engine is based on the lower level
GDBM interface, a freely available database library.
For the command line editing of the interpreter, the GNU readline library is 
another requirement for building PQL. 
Furthermore, PQL requires the standard Unix tools lex/yacc.
(AT&T lex or flex are supported at the moment)

PQL has reached an early phase of release 0.8. There are still many things to 
to, a lot of bugs must be eliminated and some useful features should be added.
But, since the first public version of 0.7prebeta, many, many things
have been changed, added and improved:

	- lots of bugs have been fixed
  	- the condition evaluation should work correctly now
          (or-conditons have not been evaluated correctly)
        - transactions can be aborted explicitly now
        - some fundamental type casts are supported now (long -> float)
        - all available tables can be listed using the 'list'-command
        - sorting and the distinct operator is implemented now
	- a PQL test script has been added to the package	 
	- interactive/stdin mode is detected automatically
	- some missing predicate features have been added
	- count operator has been improved and extended

The complete PQL package is free available at 
	
	info2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de:/pub/unix/database/pql-0.8.tar.gz

Please flame bugs and advices regarding PQL to Bjoern Lemke, lemke@lf.net
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