The PostgreSQL developers' community recently published the first Beta version of the new 9.0 release. Over 200 new functions and improvements feature in this new version.

With this new release, PostgreSQL now amongst other features claims an inbuilt replication solution as well as the ability to access and read standby nodes, continuously being updated by Log Shipping (Hot Standby). Streaming replication allows the sending of transaction logs directly to one or more standby nodes, which considerably reduces the amount of time lost compared with the more common, file-based log shipping. Combining these two features makes for an extremely efficient solution for high availability or loadbalanced systems.

The all new PostgreSQL version also offers the following innovations:

• Memory based LISTEN/NOTIFY: this replaces the previous table based implementation and is much faster.
• Exclusion Constraints: broadens constraints to be able to deal with the complex datatypes of overlapping constraints.


• Procedural code such as PL/pgSQL, PL/Perl and PL/Python can now be done inline per DO command.
This means there is no longer need to define a function with CREATE FUNCTION.
• Triggers on columns


• Triggers can now be tied to conditions


• Named argument lists for procedures


• Parameters can now be flexibly linked to rolls/databases

As always, anyone interested is invited to share their test results with the developers. Information on the procedure for testing and filing of error messages can be found in the Wiki.

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