Designed, built, and tested by a large and thriving community and backed by a growing number of corporate sponsors and support companies, version 8.1 will expand the scope of PostgreSQL application development.
The new release includes performance improvements and advanced SQL features which will support bigger data warehouses, higher-volume transaction processing, and more complex distributed enterprise software.
Major new features in this release include:
Roles:
PostgreSQL now supports database roles, which simplify the management of large numbers of users with complex overlapping database rights.
IN/OUT Parameters:
PostgreSQL functions now support IN, OUT and INOUT parameters, which substantially improves support of complex business logic for J2EE and .NET applications.
Two-Phase Commit (2PC):
Long in demand for WAN applications and heterogeneous data centers using PostgreSQL, this feature allows ACID-compliant transactions across widely separated servers.
Some Performance Enhancements found in this release include:
Improved Multiprocessor (SMP) Performance:
The buffer manager for 8.1 has been enhanced to scale almost linearly with the number of processors, leading to significant performance gains on 8-way, 16-way, dual-core, and multi-core
CPU servers.
Bitmap Scan:
Indexes will be dynamically converted to bitmaps in memory when appropriate, giving up to twenty times faster index performance on complex queries against very large tables.
Table Partitioning:
The query planner is now able to avoid scanning whole sections of a large table using a technique known as Constraint Exclusion.
Shared Row Locking:
PostgreSQL's "better than row-level locking" now supports even higher levels of concurrency through the addition of shared row locks for foreign keys.
For a more complete listing of changes in this release, please see the Release Notes visible at:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/release.html
PostgreSQL 8.1.0 can be downloaded from the following locations:
FTP Mirrors
Bittorrent
Windows Installer
Other Binaries, including Linux, Mac OSx and Solaris
Sourceforge
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