PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1 Released

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, enabling pushing data to other databases
* 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 greatly reduced its requirement for SysV shared
memory, changing to mmap().  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.  We also request that users spend extra time
testing the improvements to Foreign Key locks.

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

Additional features included in this release are:

* Fast failover to replicas for high availability
* 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
* COPY FREEZE for reduced IO bulk loading
* User-defined background workers for automating database tasks
* Recursive view declaration
* lock_timeout directive

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 the new features are available
on the 9.3 Features Wiki Page
(http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9.3).

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.


--
Dave Page
PostgreSQL Core Team
http://www.postgresql.org/