PostgreSQL 8.1 Beta 2 available

[Posted September 19, 2005 by cook]

From:		Josh Berkus <josh-AT-postgresql.org>
To:		pgsql-announce-AT-postgresql.org
Subject:		[ANNOUNCE] PostgreSQL 8.1 Beta 2 available, Windows version too
Date:		Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:25:30 -0700

PostgreSQL Community:

The second beta version of PostgreSQL 8.1 is now available from the mirrors.  
All users are encouraged to download, test, and submit bug reports.  The more 
testing 8.1 gets, the faster it will be final and the more stable 8.1.0 will 
be.

Beta 2 includes a Win32 version, now that the Windows ipv6 bug is fixed.  
Windows users are especially encouraged to test 8.1, and submit bugs using 
our bug report form: http://www.postgresql.org/support/submitbug

Source downloads for all other platforms are available on the FTP mirrors: 
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/v8.1beta/

Please see the release notes 
( http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/release.htm... ) 
for a listing of new features.  Testing of the new features is most critical, 
particularly testing them in combination.

Please note that Beta 2 will require an initdb from Beta 1 and all earlier 
builds.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Core Team
josh@postgresql.org

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to post comments

Fantastic

Posted Sep 25, 2005 23:17 UTC (Sun) by yem (guest, #1138) [Link]

I just compiled up a fresh 8.1b2 and loaded in a 4.5Gb database that was performing poorly on 7.3. Here's what happened when I ran the offending query (a SELECT with two AND'd conditions each of which has an index):

Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz, 2Gb RAM, tuned 7.3: 2673 secs
Single P4 2.6Ghz, 1Gb RAM, default 8.1b2: 23 secs

I suspect this feature can take the credit for this improvement:

Allow index scans to use an intermediate in-memory bitmap (Tom)
In previous releases, only a single index could be used to do lookups on a table. With this feature, if a query has WHERE tab.col1 = 4 and tab.col2 = 9, and there is no multicolumn index on col1 and col2, but there is an index on col1 and another on col2, it is possible to search both indexes and combine the results in memory, then do heap fetches for only the rows matching both the col1 and col2 restrictions.