PostgreSQL 8.4 Beta Released

The first beta of Version 8.4 of the world's most advanced open source
database, PostgreSQL, was just released by the PostgreSQL Global
Development Group. After fourteen months of development, 8.4 is ready for
testing by PostgreSQL users all over the world in order to make it our
best release ever.

8.4 includes hundreds of patches and dozens of new features. Among them:

* Windowing Functions
* Common Table Expressions & Recursive Joins
* Default & Variadic parameters for functions
* Parallel Restore
* Column Permissions
* Per-database locale settings
* Improved hash indexes
* Improved join performance for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries
* Easier-to-use Warm Standby
* Free Space Map auto-tuning
* Visibility Map (reduces vacuum overhead)
* Version-aware psql (backslash commands)
* Support SSL certs for user authentication
* Per-function runtime statistics
* Easy editing of functions in psql
* New contrib modules: pg_stat_statements,
auto_explain, citext, btree_gin

Please download and install version 8.4 and test out these new features as
soon as you can! You can especially help the PostgreSQL developers by
trying new features in combination, and by doing a test port of your
production applications to version 8.4. Performance comparisons with 8.3
are also very helpful. Tell us what you find!

Beta Information Page:
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta

Release Notes:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/release-8-4.html

Source Code:
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/v8.4beta/

Windows Installers and Binaries: see the Beta Information Page

Translation teams are at this time asked to begin completing the message
translations for the 8.4 release. The PostgreSQL project always needs more
translators! If you are bilingual please consider joining a translation
team to help translate PostgreSQL:

Translation home page: http://babel.postgresql.org/

Translators mailing list: pgtranslation-translators(at)pgfoundry(dot)org

The usual duration of the beta testing period for a new version of
PostgreSQL is 6 weeks. However, that time can vary significantly depending
on what bugs our testing discovers. The PostgreSQL project does not
release until all significant known bugs are fixed.