PostgreSQL 9.2 Beta 1 Available for Testing

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces the beta release of PostgreSQL 9.2, which will include major increases in performance and both vertical and horizontal scalability. The PostgreSQL Project asks all users to download and begin testing 9.2 Beta as soon as possible.

Major performance and scalability advances in this version include:

• Index-only scans, allowing users to avoid inefficient scans of base tables
• Enhanced read-only workload scaling to 64 cores and over 300,000 queries per second
• Improvements to data write speeds, including group commit
• Reductions in CPU power consumption
• Cascading replication, supporting geographically distributed standby databases

PostgreSQL 9.2 will also offer many new features for application developers, including:

• JSON data support, enabling hybrid document-relational databases
• Range types, supporting new types of calendar, time-series and analytic applications
• Multiple improvements to ALTER and other statements, easing runtime database updates

For a full listing of the features in version 9.2 Beta, please see the release notes.

We depend on our community to help test the next version in order to guarantee that it is high-performance and bug-free. Please download PostgreSQL 9.2 Beta and try it with your workloads and applications as soon as you can, and give feedback to the PostgreSQL developers. More information on how to test and report issues

Get PostgreSQL 9.2 beta, including binaries and installers for Windows, Linux and Mac from our download page.

Full documentation of the new version is available online, and also installs with PostgreSQL.