PostgreSQL 8.0.0 Officially Goes Beta

After almost 9 months of development, the PostgreSQL Global Development
Group is proud to announce that development on PostgreSQL 8.0.0 has now
finished, and is ready for some serious testing.

For those wondering about the 8.0.0 designation on this release, there
have been several *very* large features included in this release that we
felt warranted the jump. As with all of our releases, we aim to have this
one as rock solid as possible, but *at least* one of the features added to
this release involved such changes that may warrant a bit extra testing
post-release before deploying it in production.

Although the list of new features in 8.0.0 is extensive, with both SMB
(Win32 Native Support) and Enterprise (Nested Transactions and Point in
Time Recory) features being added, there is one thing that hasn't been
included as part of the core distribution, and that is a Windows
Installer, which can be found at:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller

For a complete list of changes/improvements since 7.4.0 was released,
please see:

http://developer.postgresql.org/beta-history.txt

That said, and without further ado, Beta 1 is currently available for
download on all mirrors:

http://www.postgresql.org/mirrors-ftp.html

And, thanks to David Fetter, the Beta is also available via BitTorrent at:

http://bt.postgresql.org

As with all releases, the success of this release falls in the your hands
... to go from Beta -> Release, we need as many people out there to put it
through her paces as possible, on as many platforms as possible. We urge
anyone, and everyone, to download a copy and run her through her
regression tests, and report any/all problems, and bugs, to

pgsql-bugs(at)postgresql(dot)org

The more bugs we can find, and eliminate, during Beta, the more successful
the Release will be ...

On behalf of all of the developers, Happy Bug Hunting ...