8.3release
8.3 Release Draft
8.3 Release Draft
NY, NY, ## November 2007: 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 tremendously improve using PostgreSQL for application designers, database administrators, and users. This release includes more than 280 patches by dozens of PostgreSQL contributors.
Quote 1: "PG is great," big corporate endorser.
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
- Load distributed checkpoints, which decrease checkpoint activity at peak load times
- Automated self-tuning of the background writer
These changes also significantly accelerate transaction processing throughput, between 5% and 30%, 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 administer your servers.
Of course, this wouldn't be a proper PostgreSQL release if it did not provide a horde of new features for application developers, among them being:
- ANSI-standard SQL/XML support, including XML export
- Text search: our advanced full text search tool, TSearch2, has been merged into the core distribution and its syntax normalized for easier use and extension to cover new languages and dictionaries.
- 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 exited 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 distribution features, several new accessory projects 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, Skytools and Bucardo, a graphical debugger for stored procedures, and a scalable connection pooler. 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.
Download PostgreSQL from our download page.
About PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL is the collective work of hundreds of developers, building on twenty-one 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.
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