PostgreSQL 9.2 Beta 1 Now Available for Testing

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces the beta release of
PostgreSQL 9.2, which will include major increases in performance and
both vertical and horizontal scalability. The PostgreSQL Project asks
all users to download and begin testing 9.2 Beta as soon as possible.

Major performance and scalability advances in this version include:

* Index-only scans, allowing users to avoid inefficient scans of base tables
* Enhanced read-only workload scaling to 64 cores and over 300,000
queries per second
* Improvements to data write speeds, including group commit
* Reductions in CPU power consumption
* Cascading replication, supporting geographically distributed standby
databases

PostgreSQL 9.2 will also offer many new features for application
developers, including:

* JSON data support, enabling hybrid document-relational databases
* Range types, supporting new types of calendar, time-series and
analytic applications
* Multiple improvements to ALTER and other statements, easing runtime
database updates

For a full listing of the features in version 9.2 Beta, please see the
release notes:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release-9-2.html

We depend on our community to help test the next version in order to
guarantee that it is high-performance and bug-free. Please download
PostgreSQL 9.2 Beta and try it with your workloads and applications as
soon as you can, and give feedback to the PostgreSQL developers. More
information on how to test and report issues:
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta

Get PostgreSQL 9.2 beta, including binaries and installers for
Windows, Linux and Mac from our download page:
http://www.postgresql.org/download

Full documentation of the new version is available online
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static), and also installs with
PostgreSQL.