PostgreSQL releases version 8.3 [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
February 6, 2008

Version 8.3 of the PostgreSQL DBMS was announced on February 4, 2008: "Today the PostgreSQL Global Development Group releases the long-awaited version 8.3 of the most advanced open source database, which cements our place as the best performing open source database."

Version 8.3 brings many new features. First on the list is the cleaning up of data type conversions. This improvement may impact backwards compatibility issues with older applications, but will insure better data integrity in the future.

There are four new capabilities that aim to improve the consistency of response times, these include Heap Only Tuple for speeding up access to frequently updated data, asynchronous commits, spread checkpoint autotuning and a just-in-time background writing strategy. There have been numerous speed improvements including better recovery time for the write ahead log, faster small-merge joins, faster LIKE/ILIKE comparisons, improvements to searches using LIMIT, lazy XID assignment for improving read-mostly database speed and function costing for faster query planning.

Large database support improvements include synchronized scans for multiple users, level 2 cache scan protection to prevent CPU thrashing and reductions in the size of headers for variable size fields. Windows users will benefit from new Visual C++ support and some code rewrites.

Administration improvements include output of logs to database-loadable files, SSPI and GSSAPI support for Kerberos authentication, embeddable GUC settings at function creation time, parallel autovacuum workers, the pg_standby tool for configuring warm standby servers and a new ability to specify the position of NULLs at the beginning or end of results.

Development improvements include API improvements to the full text search tool, plan invalidation for clearing cached plans and automatically dropping plans when tables are updated, and updatable cursors.

Data type enhancements include full support for the ANSI SQL:2003 XML spec, support for 128 bit UUIDs, support for arrays of compound types and support for ENUM columns with a defined ordered list of alternatives. The ENUM enhancement allows applications to be migrated from the MySQL DBMS.

The PostgreSQL stored procedure language has a simplified syntax for row-returning functions and new support for scrollable cursors, which allows procedures to perform complex row manipulations.

A number of new accessory tools are being released with PostgreSQL 8.3 including a multi-threaded connection pooler, a distributed, horizontally scaled table interface, an SNMP interface, a SELinux-based security extension, a new GUI with debugging and step-through execution capabilities, a new replicated query agent, a multi-master asynchronous replication system, an integrated clustering tools project and an improved replication system.

For more information on the new features in PostgreSQL 8.3, see the release notes. The feature matrix gives a tabular view of features added versus the version number.

In order to speed the next release up, the PostgreSQL team plans to implement a new development plan for version 8.4:

In the 8.4 development cycle we would like to try a new style of development, designed to keep the patch queue to a limited size and to provide timely feedback to developers on the work they submit. To do this we will replace the traditional 'feature freeze' with a series of 'commit fests' throughout the development cycle. The idea of commit fests was discussed last October in -hackers, and it seemed to meet with general approval. Whenever a commit fest is in progress, the focus will shift from development to review, feedback and commit of patches. Each fest will continue until all patches in the queue have either been committed to the CVS repository, returned to the author for additional work, or rejected outright, and until that has happened, no new patches will be considered.

Version 8.3 represents a major step forward for PostgreSQL, if the new development style bears fruit, the next major version will come about more quickly.

CVS considered obsolete

Posted Feb 13, 2008 8:00 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

I am not a PostgreSQL hacker, but that's the very first thing I would replace (with a truly
distributed system -- not SVN).