PostgreSQL 9.3.0 released!

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.

Links
-----

* Downloads:
http://www.postgresql.org/downloads
* Press Kit:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/presskit93
* Release Notes:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/release-9-3.html
* What's New in 9.3:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9.3

--
Dave Page
PostgreSQL Core Team
http://www.postgresql.org/