Draft of 8.4 beta announcement, please edit

All,

I've put up a draft of the beta release announcement here:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/84ReleaseDraft

It's also below. Please edit, correct, and improve this announcement
draft. The beta release will be sometime soon, but not quite yet. Thanks!

=================

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 most stable, secure and high-integrity release ever.

As with PostgreSQL 8.3 (released in 2008), version 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 (backwards-compatible)
* 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 (greatly reduces vacuum overhead for
slowly-changing tables)
* Version-aware psql (backslash commands work against older servers)
* Support SSL certs for 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!

Release Notes:

Source Code:

Windows Installers:

Other Binaries:

Beta Information Page:

Bug Report Form:

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.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com