PostgreSQL 8.1.0 Officially Released

8 November 2005, Frankfurt, Germany (OpenDBCon):

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group proudly announces the release of
PostgreSQL 8.1, further extending PostgreSQL's lead as the most advanced
open source database management system.

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 thie relese 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
- http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/latest/

Bittorrent
- http://www.postgresql.org/download/bittorrent

Windows Installer
- http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/v8.1.0/win32

Other Binaries, including Linux, Mac OSx and Solaris
- http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/v8.1.0/

Sourceforge
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgsql