PostgreSQL

La version 8.5alpha2 est disponible depuis le 24/10/2009

* Hot Standby, allowing read-only connections during recovery, provides a built-in master-slave replication solution.
* Exclusion constraints, a generalized version of unique constraints, offer novel ways to guarantee logical data integrity.
* SQL standard conforming ORDER BY within aggregate function calls, removes the need for ugly workarounds to get ordered aggregate function input.
* Access control for large objects was added.
* Regular expression functions support case-insensitive matching and locale-dependent character classification when the server encoding is UTF8.
* PL/pgSQL is installed by default.
* The PL/pgSQL parser has been reworked to behave much more sanely.
* Various improvements were made in PL/Perl and PL/Python.

The second alpha release for PostgreSQL version 8.5, 8.5alpha2, is now available. This alpha contains several new major features added since the previous alpha. Please download, install, and test it to give us early feedback on the features being developed for the next version of PostgreSQL.

Features added in Alpha2 include:

* DEFAULT PRIVILEGES and GRANT ALL ON to give DBAs easier management of object permissions in their databases
* The DO statement so that you can run ad-hoc procedural language code on the SQL command line
* Triggers on columns
* Named parameters in function calls
* Improved HStore, making this exotic type far more useful to application developers
* Multiple administration and performance improvements

These new major features mean that we need you to participate in testing them. If you are able to help with organized alpha testing, please see the Alpha/Beta testing page

Alphas are not stable and should never be used in production; they are for testing new features only. There will be two more alphas, about every 2 months, before an 8.5 beta release. There is no guarantee that any features or APIs present in the alphas will be present, or the same, in the final release.

More detail is available in the Release Notes included with each alpha

* Alpha information page
* Download the alpha

Alpha2 is currently available in source code form only. Binary packages for some operating systems will be prepared in the coming days.

The PostgreSQL Project today released minor versions updating all active branches of the PostgreSQL object-relational database system, including versions 8.4.1, 8.3.8, 8.2.14, 8.1.18, 8.0.22, and 7.4.26. This release fixes one moderate-risk and two low-risk security issues: an authentication issue, a denial of service issue, and a privilege-escalation exploit. All users should upgrade their database installations as soon as reasonably possible.

This update release also fixes the "could not reattach shared memory" issue which has plagued many Windows PostgreSQL users, and updates time zone files for several countries. There are 23 other minor fixes, many of them affecting only version 8.4. See the release notes for full details.

As with other minor releases, users are not required to dump and reload their database in order to apply this update release; you may simply shut down PostgreSQL and update its binaries. Users skipping more than one update may need to check the release notes for extra, post-update steps.

The first alpha release for version 8.5 of PostgreSQL, 8.5alpha1, is now
available. This unstable development release includes 36 patches added
in the first commitfest this year. Download it today and try some of
the new features coming in 8.5!

This is the first ever alpha release done by the PostgreSQL project.
We've started doing alpha releases on the "release early, release often"
principle, so that our advanced users will try new features and new code
as early as possible and get back to us with adjustments and problems.
These alphas are not stable and should never be used in production; they
are for developers to try new features only. Therefore we are releasing
8.5Alpha1 in source code form only.

There will be three to four more alphas, about every 2 months, before an
8.5 beta release. There is no guarantee that any features or APIs
present in the alphas will be present, or the same, in the final
release. Included in the current alpha are:

* Deferrable Unique Constraints
* DROP COLUMN/CONSTRAINT IF EXISTS
* EXPLAIN can output in XML and JSON
* Hex-string input and output for BYTEA
* Multi-threaded pgbench
* Build improvements for code and docs

More detail is available in the Release Notes included with each alpha:
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdo...lease-8.5.html

Alpha information page:
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/alpha

Download the first alpha here:
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/8.5alpha1/

Alpha1 is currently available in source code form only. Binary packages
for some operating systems will be prepared in the coming days.