PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1 Released

The first beta release of PostgreSQL 9.3, the latest version of the world's best open source database, is now available. This beta contains previews of all of the features which will be available in version 9.3, and is ready for testing by the worldwide PostgreSQL community. Please download, test, and report what you find.

Major Features

The major features available for testing in this beta include:

• Writeable Foreign Tables, enabling pushing data to other databases
• pgsql_fdw driver for federation of PostgreSQL databases
• Automatically updatable VIEWs
• MATERIALIZED VIEW declaration
• LATERAL JOINs
• Additional JSON constructor and extractor functions
• Indexed regular expression search
• Disk page checksums to detect filesystem failures

In 9.3, PostgreSQL has greatly reduced its requirement for SysV shared memory, changing to mmap(). This allows easier installation and configuration of PostgreSQL, but means that we need our users to rigorously test and ensure that no memory management issues have been introduced by the change. We also request that users spend extra time testing the improvements to Foreign Key locks.

Additional Features

Additional features included in this release are:

• Fast failover to replicas for high availability
• Streaming-only remastering of replicas
• Performance and locking improvements for Foreign Key locks
• Parallel pg_dump for faster backups
• Directories for configuration files
• pg_isready database connection checker
• COPY FREEZE for reduced IO bulk loading
• User-defined background workers for automating database tasks
• Recursive view declaration
• lock_timeout directive

For a full listing of the features in version 9.3 Beta, please see the release notes. Additional descriptions and notes on the new features are available on the 9.3 Features Wiki Page.

Test 9.3 Beta 1 Now

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 9.3 Beta 1 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 1 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 9.3 Beta 1, 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.