PostgreSQL 9.4 Beta 2 Released

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has made available the second beta release of PostgreSQL 9.4. This beta contains previews of all of the features which will be available in version 9.4, plus corrections for many of the issues discovered by users who tested 9.4 Beta 1. Please download, test, and report what you find.

Among the changes made since 9.4 Beta 1 are:

• Fix handling of two-phase commit and prepared statements for logical decoding
• Multiple fixes for bugs in pg_recvlogical
• Change slot handling logic for replication slots
• Add support for BSD and e2fsprogs UUID libraries.
• Multiple jsonb bug fixes
• Remove use_json_as_text options from json functions
• Make json_build_* functions STABLE instead of IMMUTABLE
• Prevent ALTER SYSTEM from changing the data directory
• Prevent autovacuum-related crash
• Many documentation improvements and changes

Beta 2 includes changes to pg_control and to the system catalogs. As such, users who have been testing Beta 1 will need to upgrade in order to test Beta 2. We suggest using pg_upgrade for this upgrade in order to test that as well.

For a full listing of the features in version 9.4 Beta, please see the release notes. Additional descriptions and notes on the new features are available on the 9.4 Features Wiki Page.

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 9.4 Beta 2 and try it with your workloads and applications as soon as you can, and give feedback to the PostgreSQL developers. Features and APIs in Beta 2 will not change substantially before final release, so it is now safe to start building applications against the new features. More information on how to test and report issues

Get the PostgreSQL 9.4 Beta 2, 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.