August 24, 2004 - The PostgreSQL Global Development group today announced
the availability of the landmark 8.0 version of the PostgreSQL ORDBMS.
PostgreSQL, created in 1986 by UC Berkeley, is the most advanced open
source database in existence today. Version 8 is the collective work of
over 200 developers.
PostgreSQL 8.0 contains many new features that make the database a viable
contender in the enterprise against the likes of Oracle and DB2. The full
list can be found at the PostgreSQL website, but some of the major
features include:
Native Windows Support: PostgreSQL now works natively with Windows
operating systems and does not need an emulation layer. This provides a
big speed boost under Windows and makes PostgreSQL a viable replacement
for Microsoft SQL Server.
Savepoints: Savepoints allow specific parts of a transaction to be
aborted without affecting the whole transaction. This feature, funded by
Fujitsu, is valuable for application developers who require error recovery
within complex transactions.
Point In Time Recovery: PITR expands the PostgreSQL enterprise feature set
by providing the ability to recover data to the point of failure or to any
transaction in the past.
Tablespaces: This feature, funded by Fujitsu, allows the database
administrator to choose which filesystems are used for schemas, tables,
and indexes. This allows the administrator to place whole databases on
separate disks to improve performance.
Improved Memory and I/O usage: With this release of PostgreSQL, the
memory and disk I/O subsystems have been improved to use shared buffers
more effectively. With this improvement comes an increase in speed and
performance.
Along with the new features come some new addins:
- Slony-I is a replication system funded by dot-org domain registry Afilias.
- PostgreSQL has gained a number of stored procedure languages, namely
PL/PerlNG and PL/PHP which were sponsored by consultancy Command Prompt,
Inc. as well as
PL/Java and the .Net provider Npgsql.
- There are many more features available for anyone who wants to use them.
The PostgreSQL database can be downloaded freely at
http://www.postgresql.org.
