Frankfurt, Germany (PRWEB) November 8, 2005

(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.

These features will continue the adoption trend established by the previous release. Version 8.0 has been downloaded one million times in its first seven months, which compares with about 300,000 over a similar period for the prior release.

“The project is clearly accelerating in the minds of database users,” said Lance Obermeyer, Director of Products at Pervasive Software, one of PostgreSQL’s corporate sponsors. “Given the growing interest in open source infrastructure software, we’re expecting PostgreSQL to pick up even more steam.”

New Advanced Database Features

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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.

Performance Enhancements

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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. This also helps simplify database management by greatly reducing the need for multi-column indexes.

Table Partitioning: the query planner is now able to avoid scanning whole sections of a large table using a technique known as Constraint Exclusion. Similar to the Table Partitioning found in other database management systems, this feature improves both performance and data management for multi-gigabyte tables.

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. Shared locks will improve insert and update performance on many high-volume OLTP applications.

“PostgreSQL 8.1 offers a huge performance increase pretty much across the board, [on our] dual processor Opteron production servers,” said Merlin Moncure, Database Administrator for Reliable Computer Solutions. “More specifically, I’m seeing around 20% reduction in run times for simple queries and an additional 20% reduction in CPU load, for a staggering 20-40% improvement in server load characteristics.”

There are more than 120 other enhancements, some of which are detailed on our 8.1 presskit:

http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/presskit81.html.en

About PostgreSQL

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PostgreSQL is the collective work of hundreds of developers, building on twenty years of development which started at the University of California at Berkeley. With its long-time support of an enterprise level feature set including transactions, functions, triggers, and subqueries, PostgreSQL is being used by many of today’s most demanding businesses and government agencies. PostgreSQL is distributed under a BSD license, which allows use and distribution without fees for both commercial and non-commercial applications.

Contact:

Bruce Momjian                        

610-359-1001                        

Josh Berkus

415-752-2500

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