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.