Sixth Draft - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

The following draft considers everyone's comments.  I think the paragraph
about history (moved to the end) needs more stuff.

Thanks,
--J

August 24, 2004 - The PostgreSQL Global Development group today announced
the availability of the 8.0 version of the PostgreSQL Object-Relational
Database Management System, the most advanced open source database in the
world today.  With this new release, professional users have an
world-class, scalable, open source database solution that does not
sacrifice many of the conveniences provided by commercial products.

PostgreSQL 8.0 contains many new features that make the database a strong
contender against the likes of Oracle and DB2.  Many companies, who view
PostgreSQL as a strategic part of their overall I.T. plan, have sponsored
development of the new features, which include:

Native Windows Support:  PostgreSQL now works natively with Windows
systems and does not need an emulation layer.  This provides dramatically
improved performance over previous versions, and offers a compelling
alternative to Microsoft SQL Server for independent software vendors,
corporate users, and individual Windows developers.

Savepoints:  Savepoints allow specific parts of a database 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 provides the ability to recover data to the
point of failure or to any time in the past.

Tablespaces:  This feature, also 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, disk
input/output subsystems have been improved to use shared buffers more
effectively, yielding significant increases in speed and performance.

There are also several new external components which complement the core
PostgreSQL database engine:

- Slony-I is a a "master-slave" replication system with cascading and
failover capabilities funded by Internet domain registry Afilias.
- PostgreSQL added to its roster of stored procedure languages with
PL/PerlNG and PL/PHP which were sponsored by consultancy Command Prompt,
Inc. as well as PL/Java and the .Net provider Npgsql.

Version 8 is the collective work of hundreds of developers, building on
almost twenty years of development dating back to the University of
California at Berkeley.

PostgreSQL is licensed under a BSD-style license, which due to its lack of
licensing fees allows corporate and individual users more flexibility than
the competition.  The PostgreSQL database can be downloaded freely at
http://www.postgresql.org.