Beta 1 Release Draft - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

All,

So, I've taken another tack on this.  I realized that the important
thing about the beta was not to provide narrative marketing information
about the beta features, but rather to get our users to test the new
features.  This means, among other things, listing as many of them as
possible, rather than highlighting a few "big" ones.  We'll do that for
the final release.

So, here's a draft based on that idea.  Please provide feedback,
improvements, and corrections as soon as you can; we may need to send
this out as early as Thursday.

============================

PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1 Released
=============================

The first beta release of PostgreSQL 9.3, the latest version of the
world's best open source database, is now available.  This beta contains
previews of all of the features which will be available in version 9.3,
and is ready for testing by the worldwide PostgreSQL community.  Please
download, test, and report what you find.

Major Features
--------------

The major features available for testing in this beta include:

* Writeable Foreign Tables
* pgsql_fdw driver for federation of PostgreSQL databases
* Automatically updatable VIEWs
* MATERIALIZED VIEW declaration
* LATERAL JOINs
* Additional JSON constructor and extractor functions
* Indexed regular expression search
* Disk page checksums to detect filesystem failures

In 9.3, PostgreSQL has switched from using SysV shared memory to using
Posix shared memory and mmap for memory management.  This allows easier
installation and configuration of PostgreSQL, but means that we need our
users to rigorously test and ensure that no memory management issues
have been introduced by the change.

Additional Features
-------------------

Additional features included in this release are:

* Streaming-only remastering of replicas
* Performance and locking improvements for Foreign Key locks
* Parallel pg_dump for faster backups
* Directories for configuration files
* pg_isready database connection checker
* 64-bit Large Object API
* COPY FREEZE for reduced IO bulk loading
* User-defined background workers for automating database tasks
* Recursive view declaration

For a full listing of the features in version 9.3 Beta, please see the
[release
notes](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release-9-3.html).
Additional descriptions and notes on some of -the new features are
available on the [9.3 Features Wiki
Page](http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.3_Features).

Test 9.3 Beta 1 Now
-------------------

We depend on our community to help test the next version in order to
guarantee that it is high-performance and bug-free.  Please download
PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1 and try it with your workloads and applications as
soon as you can, and give feedback to the PostgreSQL developers.
Features and APIs in Beta 1 will not change substantially before final
release, so it is now safe to start building applications against the
new features. [More information on how to test and report
issues](http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta)

Get the PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1, including binaries and installers for
Windows, Linux and Mac from [our download
page](http://www.postgresql.org/download).

Full documentation of the new version [is available
online](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static), and also installs
with PostgreSQL.





--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com