The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces the release of PostgreSQL 9.3, the latest version of the world's leading open source relational database system. This release expands PostgreSQL's reliability, availability, and ability to integrate with other databases. Users are already finding that they can build applications using version 9.3 which would not have been possible before.
"PostgreSQL 9.3 provides features that as an app developer I can use immediately: better JSON functionality, regular expression indexing, and easily federating databases with the Postgres foreign data wrapper. I have no idea how I completed projects without 9.3," said Jonathan S. Katz, CTO of VenueBook.
Writable External Data
Version 9.3 makes PostgreSQL's Foreign Data Wrappers writable, enabling two-way data interchange between systems. Today's complex IT environments involve multiple databases and semi-structured data sources, and PostgreSQL helps you integrate them into a coherent stack. The project has also released postgres_fdw, a higher-performance, read/write PostgreSQL-to-PostgreSQL federation driver.
"Writable foreign data wrappers enable us to plug in and seamlessly test various backend alternatives, allowing us to address different needs quickly and prototype intelligently," explained Lee Holloway, Co-founder and Lead Engineer at CloudFlare. "It is exciting to conceive and toss up new data stores (including our in-house experimental ones written in Go) and then watch them read, write, and even transact each other."
Enhanced Reliability and Availability
"Postgres has been my favorite choice for its well known stability, robustness, strong coherency, safety, ACID, and SQL conformance," said Pascal Bouchareine, director of research and development at Gandi.net. "I'm especially excited to hear more about the fast failover coming in 9.3."
This new release includes features to further improve and extend PostgreSQL's well-known reliability and availability:
- Data Page Checksums: help administrators quickly detect failing disks and bad hardware that corrupts data
- Fast Failover: enables sub-second switchoffs from master to replica, supporting "carrier-grade" availability
- Streaming-Only Remastering: easier, faster reconfiguration of cascading replicas after failover
Developer-friendly Features
As with every annual release, PostgreSQL 9.3 includes many features to make working with PostgreSQL easier, more flexible and more fun for application developers, administrators and architects. These features include:
- Additional JSON constructor and extractor methods
- Automatically updatable VIEWs
- Parallel pg_dump to speed backups of large databases
- LATERAL JOINs
Further, PostgreSQL 9.3's User-Defined Background Workers allow developers to write task managers, request handlers, parallel processors, queuing tools and other helper applications to enable PostgreSQL as a workload coordinator. One example of this already released is Mongres, a background worker which accepts MongoDB queries, interprets them and passes them on to PostgreSQL.
