Fifth Draft - Press Release - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

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. PostgreSQL is the most advanced open source
database in the world today.  The database is icensed under a BSD-style
license, which allows for cost-effective implementation in any project due
to its lack of license fees. Version 8 is the collective work of hundreds
of developers.

PostgreSQL 8.0 contains many new features that make the database a strong
contender against the likes of Oracle and DB2.  Many companies have
already recognized the potential of PostgreSQL and 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 a increased
performance over previous Windows versions and makes PostgreSQL a strong
upgrade from Microsoft SQL Server.

Savepoints:  Savepoints, also known as nested transactions, 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 provides the ability to recover data to the
point of failure or to any time 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.
- Pgxs provides coding infrastructure to make it easier to deploy
extension modules.  Numerous extensions and applications are available at
GBorg.postgresql.org and PGFoundry.org

The PostgreSQL database can be downloaded freely at
http://www.postgresql.org.