Draft Seven

My apologies Jan - I didn't ignore your comment, I must have overlooked
it. See my re-wording below - is that more like what you were expecting?

I came up with a good compromise for the "thousands of developers/12
commiters vs. hundreds of developers" discussion, though we still might
want to address Chris Browne's points. While the body text does
illuminate these points, it might be beneficial to make them painfully
obvious:

>a) It's not some tiny clique vulnerable to the vagaries of one
> organization's business risks;
>b) It's not _controlled_ by one organization, either;
>c) It is also not some sort of anarchy that lets just anyone check in
> their favorite security holes.

If I have overlooked anyone else, please let me know.

Thanks,
--Josh

---

August 24, 2004 - The PostgreSQL Global Development group today made
available version 8 of the PostgreSQL Object-Relational Database
Management System, the most advanced open source database in the world.
With this new release, professional users have a world-class, scalable,
open source database solution that has many of the features provided by
commercial products.

PostgreSQL 8.0 contains many new features that make the database the
strongest contender against the likes of Oracle and DB2. Many companies,
such as Fujitsu, Afilias, RedHat, the Command Prompt consultancy, and SRA,
who view PostgreSQL as a strategic part of their overall I.T. plan, have
sponsored development of the new features, which include:

Native Windows Support: PostgreSQL now works natively with Windows
systems and does not need an emulation layer. This provides dramatically
improved performance over previous versions, and offers a compelling
alternative to Microsoft SQL Server for independent software vendors,
corporate users, and individual Windows developers.

Savepoints: Savepoints allow specific parts of a database transaction to
be aborted without affecting the whole transaction. This feature is
valuable for application developers who require error recovery within
complex transactions.

Point in Time Recovery: Point in Time Recovery provides a full recovery
model that allows data recovery from bare-metal to the point of failure or
to a specific point in time, based around automatically archived
transaction logs.

Tablespaces: This feature allows the database administrator to choose
which filesystems are used for schemas, tables, and indexes. This allows
the administrator to separate different parts of their data onto separate
disks to improve performance.

Improved Memory and I/O usage: With this release of PostgreSQL, disk
input/output subsystems have been improved to use shared buffers more
effectively, yielding more predictable loads and substantially better
performance during peak usage times.

There are also several new external components which complement the core
PostgreSQL database engine:

- Slony-I is a a "master-slave" replication system with cascading and
failover capabilities. It even lets you replicate between two different
versions of PostgreSQL, allowing for simple and painless upgrades.
- PostgreSQL has beefed up several areas of its language interoperability
including the procedural languages PL/Perl, PL/PHP and PL/Java.
- With this version, Postgresql also offers the .Net provider, Npgsql.

Version 8 is the collective work of hundreds of developers, building on
almost twenty years of development dating back to the University of
California at Berkeley. The PostgreSQL group has over one thousand
members, working at different companies all over the world.

PostgreSQL is licensed under the BSD license, giving maximum flexibility
for both commercial and noncommercial use. This puts PostgreSQL users in
full control of how PostgreSQL is deployed in their organizations. The
PostgreSQL database can be downloaded freely at http://www.postgresql.org.