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PostgreSQL Version 8.3 Released

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of version 8.3 of the high-performance object-relational database management system. This release includes a record number of new and improved features which will greatly enhance PostgreSQL for application designers, database administrators and users, with more than 280 patches by dozens of PostgreSQL contributors from 18 countries.

"The continued evolution of the open source PostgreSQL database gives users the option of deploying a non proprietary database, allowing them to save money, improve performance and increase productivity. PostgreSQL 8.3 is an impressive new release and we encourage customers around the world to explore it," said Rich Green, executive vice president of Software at Sun Microsystems.

Version 8.3 provides greater consistency of performance than previous versions, ensuring that every user can depend on the same high performance demonstrated in recent benchmarks for every transaction, whether in peak hours or not, seven days a week, 52 weeks per year. Major performance enhancements include:

* Heap Organized Tuples (HOT), which eliminate up to 3/4 of the maintenance overhead of frequently updated tables

* Spread checkpoints and background writer autotuning, which reduce the impact of checkpoints on response times

* Asynchronous commit option for much faster response times on some transactions

These changes also significantly accelerate transaction processing throughput, between 5 percent and 30 percent, depending on the workload.

"PostgreSQL just got smarter," said Bruce Momjian, PostgreSQL Core Team member.

PostgreSQL is the first open source database to implement Synchronized Scan, which greatly reduces I/O on large data mining databases. The Windows team has enabled Visual C++ compilation of PostgreSQL, improving stability and performance on Windows, as well as accessibility to the project to Windows contributors. New logging options have been added and the overhead of the statistics collector has been diminished in order to make it easier to monitor your servers.

Of course, this wouldn't be a proper PostgreSQL release without providing lots of new features for application developers, among them:

* ANSI-standard SQL/XML support, including XML export

* Text search: our advanced full text search tool, TSearch2, has been merged into the core distribution with better management and new dictionaries and languages

* GSSAPI and SSPI authentication support

* New data types: UUIDs, ENUMs and arrays of composite types

"We process over 18,000 queries per second on over 300GB of user data on our PostgreSQL servers, and those numbers go up every month," said Gavin Roy, CTO of social networking site MyYearbook.com. "We're very excited about HOT, shared buffer scan improvements and integrated tsearch indexing. Preliminary testing shows that 8.3 will improve our database load profile while decreasing response times. We're really looking forward to it."

In addition to the many new core features, several new optional components have matured and released 1.0 versions during the 8.3 release cycle. These include SNMP support, horizontal scalability options such as PL/Proxy, pgPool2 and Bucardo, a graphical debugger for stored procedures, and a scalable connection pooler called pgBouncer. These add to the rich set of accessories already available.

There are dozens of additional features and improvements in 8.3 which will make PostgreSQL a more powerful database platform. See the press kit for details: 8.3 Press Kit (http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/presskit83.html)

Download PostgreSQL from our download page: Downloads (http://www.postgresql.org/download)

For more information contact:

Josh Berkus

press@postgresql.org

415-752-2500

San Francisco

Bruce Momjian

press@postgresql.org

610-359-1001

Philadelphia

Darcy Buskermolen

cn@postgresql.org

250-765-2071

Vancouver

About PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL is the collective work of hundreds of developers, building on 21 years of development, which began at the University of California, Berkeley. With its long-term support of enterprise-level transactional database features and scalability, PostgreSQL is being used by many of today's most demanding businesses and government agencies. PostgreSQL is distributed under a BSD license, which allows use and distribution without fees for both commercial and non-commercial applications.Learn more at PostgreSQL.org (http://www.postgresql.org).

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