Breaking news: PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1, now Released

Henceforth available, this beta contains previews of all of the features which will be available in version 9.3. This means it is ready for testing by the worldwide PostgreSQL community.

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

We discovered that in 9.3, PostgreSQL has widely 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.’’ Has reported, the PostgreSQL Staff.

Now regarding the Additional features included in this release, we have:

• 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, you can see the release notes.

Note: the PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1, includes binaries and installers for Windows, Linux and Mac from the download page.