Since I believe we will only support the two latest versions of PG (at least historically this has been the case), I used "if version() like ''%7.2%'' then old syntax" and otherwise assumed the new (PG 7.3) syntax.
Ola's patch was applied to version 1.25 but not 1.24.2.2, which is the 4.6.3 revision. See CVS.
This means that OpenACS 4.6.3 isn't fully PG 7.3 compliant. Maybe I should be upgrading to 5.0.4 to avoid other, similar problems with PG 7.3?