PostgreSQL 7.4 Press Kit

Contents:

Original Release

Detailed Feature List

Full Text of Quotes

International Contact List

Links to More Information

September ##, 2003

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) is pleased to announce the availability of version 7.4 of the PostgreSQL Object Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS). This major release is the work of our world wide network of hundreds of developers and contributors over the last 9 months. It provides commercial-grade enterprise database functionality and performance with the flexibility and low total cost of ownership widely associated with Open Source software.

"If you tried PostgreSQL before, and went with a commercial database like Oracle or DB2 instead, it's time to re-evaluate," says Rod Taylor of Inquent Technologies. "PostgreSQL's expanding enterprise feature set and performance improvements over the last two years make PostgreSQL competitive with even the highest-end database systems. And you can't beat the cost."

Version 7.4 includes a host of new features which make PostgreSQL a more powerful and scalable database for large enterprises. These include AMD Opteron(tm) optimization, improved index maintenance tools, and enhanced support of full text indexing which adds ranked result sets. Combined with the recent contribution of the eRServer(c) replication solution by PostgreSQL Inc., these advances fulfill PostgreSQL's potential to run high-availability, large-scale data centers.

Hash aggregation in memory, query planner improvement for subqueries, a new wire protocol, and expanded functional and expressional indexes were also added by the PGDG. These features will improve query and procedure performance for all size databases, in some cases by as much as 400%. The new version maintains PostgreSQL's status as one of the fastest SQL databases in the world.

Lamar Owen, Director of Information Technology for the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, commented on the new features, "The improved performance of PostgreSQL 7.4 for very large, data-warehouse tables will allow me to provide efficient access to a huge library of astronomical photography and spectrography, correlated with geological and meteorological observations, over the Internet. The improved indexing capabilities for custom and composite types will allow unprecedented ease in analyzing this data, which tends to be difficult to shoehorn into traditional index paradigms."

Facilitating the desire of database developers to migrate their projects to PostgreSQL, 7.4 is more accessible and standardized than any previous version. First, the PGDG has "raised the bar" on ANSI SQL standard compliance by completely overhauling messaging internals and enhancing metadata reporting, creating a complete SQL standard error-reporting and information schema framework. Second, the online documentation has been extensively reorganized and expanded to give new PostgreSQL users an easier start. Third, to make things even easier for users accustomed to a graphical environment, two of the most popular GUI administration tools for PostgreSQL, pgAdmin and phgPgAdmin, are releasing dramatically revised new versions to accompany PostgreSQL 7.4.

"We have used PostgreSQL successfully for over two years in a mission-critical capacity to support our registry systems," said Ram Mohan, Chief Technology Officer for Afilias Limited, the company responsible for running the backend database containing all .info and .org Internet domain names worldwide. "This upgrade of PostgreSQL improves the scalability and capacity of PostgreSQL and will help to ensure continued advancements to future releases."

About PostgreSQL:

With more than 16 years of development by hundreds of the world's most generous and brilliant minds from the open source community,PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database. With its long time support of an enterprise level feature set including transactions, stored procedures, triggers, and subqueries, PostgreSQL is being used by many of today's most demanding businesses and government agencies.

Corporations such as BASF, Red Hat, Afilias Limited, Cisco, Chrysler, OpenMFG and 3Com, organizations like WGCR Radio, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, and Open Source projects including Bricolage, OpenACS and GForge rely on PostgreSQL's rock solid performance record and open development process. PostgreSQL is available under a BSD License for both commercial and non-commercial use.

To find out more about PostgreSQL or to download it, please visit:

The PostgreSQL Home Page

Full Feature List

New Enterprise Features in 7.4

Among the large enterprise features which have been added, expanded, or improved in version 7.4 are:

REPLICATION: PostgreSQL Inc. has contributed their eRServer Java-based replication solution to the PostgreSQL community. eRServer provides a highly scalable, battle-tested replication option significantly more powerful than previously available Open Source solutions. For more information, see PostgreSQL Inc.'s release.

PERFORMANCE: Several major performance enhancements have been added in version 7.4, enabling PostgreSQL to match or exceed the speed of other enterprise database systems. These include:

• Hash aggregation in memory to make data warehousing and OLAP queries up to 20 times faster;
  
• Improvements in subquery handling by the planner resulting in up to 400% speed increases in some complex queries;
  
• New script to set more reasonable postgresql.conf defaults for shared buffers, yielding better "out of the box" performance.
  
• New wire protocol (version 3) increases the speed of data transfers;
  
• Enhanced implementation of functional indexes allows better indexing on custom data types and composite fields.

HIGH AVAILABILITY: Expansion of PostgreSQL's Free Space Map disk management feature to support continuous index maintenance is the last "piece of the puzzle" in providing 24/7/365 uptime for PostgreSQL databases. The many hardware solutions vendors who include PostgreSQL as the embedded database in their applications may now eliminate the need for any data locking or downtime in their applications.

OPTERON SUPPORT: PostgreSQL is now optimized on the AMD Opteron, thanks to the work of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, adding to the family of proven 64-bit platforms which includes HP/Compaq, Alpha, Sun UltraSPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, and RS6000*. 64-bit platforms are an emerging class of high-performance computing, with greater power and scalability needed for enterprise systems.

FULL TEXT INDEXING: PostgreSQL's TSearch module now includes a ranked preference system, making TSearch equal to or better than many full text indexing solutions offered by other RDBMSs.

Adopting PostgreSQL Easier Than Ever

The following enhancements aid in the testing, prototyping, and porting efforts of database professionals considering a switch to PostgreSQL:

REORGANIZED AND EXPANDED DOCUMENTATION: Completely reorganized and expanded online documentation, making it easier for first-time PostgreSQL database developers to get their databases built, tuned, and running.

SQL-STANDARD ERROR FRAMEWORK: Completely redesigned error logging and reporting, providing developers with an SQL99 compliant mechanism for debugging and troubleshooting, and giving users real time suggestions on how to avoid error conditions in their applications.

SQL-STANDARD INFORMATION SCHEMA: 7.4 includes an SQL99 compliant Information Schema (or "metadata"). This provides application developers with database, type, object, and configuration information in a way which eases the migration of interfaces and middleware between database systems, and even the replication of data between commercial databases and PostgreSQL.

NEW GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE (GUI) VERSIONS: PGAdmin and PHPPgAdmin, two of the three most popular GUIs for PostgreSQL will have new, extensively rewritten versions for PostgreSQL 7.4, making it more comfortable than ever for database administrators to switch.

QUERY REWRITING: Includes a new option for explicit join rewriting by the query planner, easing the transition of existing applications and queries running on Sybase and MS SQL Server, which handle queries this way by default.

Other Major Features

ADVANCED SQL FEATURES: PostgreSQL continues to expand its support for the SQL 92 and SQL 99 standards, maintaining its place as the industry leader in standards compliance by including many SQL features not found in other databases. New in 7.4 are statement-level triggers, enhanced data type domains, and read-only transactions, as well as improved support for SQL 92 schema introduced in version 7.3.

MORE DATABASE PROGRAMMING OPTIONS: Extending database server programming beyond the SQL standard, 7.4 adds multibyte regular expressions for text searching in Asian and Middle Eastern languages, polymorphic functions for more rapid development of custom data types and aggregates, and enhanced array data type handling for scientific databases. PostgreSQL is already the acknowledged leader in database customizability, and these new features widen the lead over other major RDBMSes.

NEW NETWORK SUPPORT: Now supports IPv6 Standard for TCP/IP networking, and Apple Computer's Rendezvous zero-configuration networking protocol.

Complete List

See here for a complete change list for 7.4.

Full Text of Quotes From PostgreSQL Users:

"If you tried PostgreSQL before, and went with a commercial database like Oracle or DB2 instead, it's time to re-evaluate. PostgreSQL's expanding enterprise feature set and performance improvements over the last two years make PostgreSQL competitive with even the highest-end database systems. And you can't beat the cost."
Rod Taylor, Inquent Technologies: http://www.inquent.com Contact: Celal Ulgen 416-645-4600 press@inquent.com

"The improved performance of PostgreSQL 7.4 for very large, data-warehouse tables will allow me to provide efficient access to a huge library of astronomical photography and spectrography, correlated with geological and meteorological observations, over the Internet. The improved indexing capabilities for custom and composite types will allow unprecedented ease in analyzing this data, which tends to be difficult to shoehorn into traditional index paradigms. The additional contribution of a proven-robust replication solution will allow me to easily provide hot failover and backup mechanisms for this data, some of which currently resides on priceless photographic plates, some of which are over 100 years old. PostgreSQL's proven performance, robustness, and programmability make the decision to use PostgreSQL for this application an easy one to make."
Lamar Owen, Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute: http://www.pari.edu Contact: Lamar Owen 828-862-5554 lowen@pari.edu

"We have used PostgreSQL successfully for over two years in a mission-critical capacity to support our registry systems. This upgrade of PostgreSQL improves the scalability and capacity of PostgreSQL and will help to ensure continued advancements to future releases. For real-time operations, the planner/optimizer enhancements adds more intelligence and allows more efficient operation of the database. In addition, the expanded trigger capabilities sets up the basis for even further gains in future versions of PostgreSQL."
Ram Mohan, CTO, Afilias Limited : http://www.afilias.info/about_afilias/backgrounder Contact: Heather Carle 215-706-5777 hcarle@afilias.info

International Contact List

Links to More Information