8 November 2005, Frankfurt, Germany (OpenDBCon):
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group proudly announces the
release of
PostgreSQL 8.1, further extending PostgreSQL's lead as the most
advanced
open source database management system.
Designed, built, and tested by a large and thriving community and
backed
by a growing number of corporate sponsors and support companies,
version
8.1 will expand the scope of PostgreSQL application
development.
The new release includes performance improvements and advanced
SQL
features which will support bigger data warehouses,
higher-volume
transaction processing, and more complex distributed enterprise
software.
Major new features in this release include:
Roles:
PostgreSQL now supports database roles, which simplify
the
management of large numbers of users with complex
overlapping
database rights.
IN/OUT Parameters:
PostgreSQL functions now support IN, OUT and INOUT
parameters,
which substantially improves support of complex business
logic
for J2EE and .NET applications.
Two-Phase Commit (2PC):
Long in demand for WAN applications and heterogeneous
data
centers using PostgreSQL, this feature allows
ACID-compliant
transactions across widely separated servers.
Some Performance Enhancements found in thie relese include:
Improved Multiprocessor (SMP) Performance:
The buffer manager for 8.1 has been enhanced to scale
almost
linearly with the number of processors, leading to
significant
performance gains on 8-way, 16-way, dual-core, and
multi-core
CPU servers.
Bitmap Scan:
indexes will be dynamically converted to bitmaps in
memory when
appropriate, giving up to twenty times faster index
performance
on complex queries against very large tables.
Table Partitioning:
the query planner is now able to avoid scanning whole
sections
of a large table using a technique known as
Constraint
Exclusion.
Shared Row Locking:
PostgreSQL's "better than row-level locking" now
supports even
higher levels of concurrency through the addition of
shared row
locks for foreign keys.
For a more complete listing of changes in this release, please see
the
Release Notes visible at:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/release.html
PostgreSQL 8.1.0 can be downloaded from the following
locations:
FTP Mirrors
- http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/latest/
Bittorrent
- http://www.postgresql.org/download/bittorrent
Windows Installer
- http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/v8.1.0/win32
Other Binaries, including Linux, Mac OSx and Solaris
- http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/v8.1.0/
Sourceforge
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgsql
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