PostgreSQL 8.3 released with SQL/XML support

NEW YORK, USA: The PostgreSQL global development group has 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.

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 "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.

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

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.