Pgpool-II 4.4 beta1 is now released.

Pgpool Global Development Group is pleased to announce the availability of Pgpool-II 4.4 beta1.
This is not intended to be used in production but is close to the release version. So users are encouraged to test it out.

Pgpool-II is a tool to add useful features to PostgreSQL, including:

* connection pooling
* load balancing
* automatic fail over and more.

For more information, please see the [website](https://www.pgpool.net/).

V4.4 contains new features and enhancements, including:

* Add new dynamic spare process management feature. This feature allows selecting between static and dynamic process management modes.

* Allow to specify replication delay by time in streaming replication mode. For this purpose new parameter delay_threshold_by_time is introduced.

* As PostgreSQL already does, Pgpool-II now supports unix_socket_directories, unix_socket_group and unix_socket_permissions for more flexible and precise control of UNIX domain sockets.

* Allow to use comma separated multiple listen addresses in listen_addresses and pcp_listen_addresses. They control which interfaces accept connection attempts, which can help prevent repeated malicious connection requests on insecure network interfaces.

* Allow to customize the command used by trusted_servers for checking upstream connection. For this purpose new parameter trusted_server_command is introduced.

* Import PostgreSQL 15's SQL parser.

* Speed up query cache by reducing lock contention. This allows concurrent running clients to fetch cache contents much more quicker.

You can download it from [here](http://pgpool.net/mediawiki/index.php/Developer_releases).

Please take a look at [release notes](https://www.pgpool.net/docs/44/en/html/release-4-4-0.html).