Software Update: PostgreSQL 9.0 Beta 1

PostgreSQL is an open source relational database management system that can be run on various operating systems. The developers released the first beta version of PostgreSQL 9.0 a few days ago. Support for 64-bit on the Windows platform, Python 3 in PL/Python and conditional per-column triggers has been added. The accompanying announcement with more information looks like this:

PostgreSQL 9.0 Beta 1 Now Available

The first beta release of PostgreSQL version 9.0 is now available. Version 9.0 is the first version of PostgreSQL to include built-in real-time binary database replication with query scale-out, consisting of two features, “hot standby” and “streaming replication”. Combined with its other major features, this release will expand adoption of PostgreSQL by new users and in new types of applications.

This release is a beta version. This means that it is expected to have bugs, issues, and missing documentation. 9.0 beta is being released so that our users will find those issues and allow eliminating them before the final release. The PostgreSQL Global Development Group requests that all users download and test version 9.0 to help us produce a timely and trouble-free 9.0 release.

In version 9.0, a large number of new features will allow developers and DBAs to broaden their use of PostgreSQL, including:

• New binary replication
• 64-bit support on Windows
• Improved LISTEN/NOTIFY allows fast internal database event messaging
• Anonymous procedure blocks with the DO statement
• Conditional and SQL-compliant per-column triggers
• Support for Python 3 in PL/Python and numerous PL/Perl improvements
• Uniqueness constraints for non-scalar data (exclusion constraints)
• Improved key value data support
• Automatic join removal, optimizing for ORM-generated queries

The full list of over 200 changes is available in the release notes.

Users interested in taking advantage of these new features should download and test porting their applications to PostgreSQL 9.0 beta now. Because version 9.0 includes many new major features as well as overhauled internal code, such as changes to the syntax allowed by the PL/PgSQL language, backwards compatibility issues are expected.

Source code, as well as binary installers for many platforms, is available from the PostgreSQL Web Site.