PostgreSQL 9.2 released

10 SEPTEMBER 2012: The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces
PostgreSQL 9.2, the latest release of the leader in open source
databases. Since the beta release was announced in May, developers and
vendors have praised it as a leap forward in performance, scalability
and flexibility. Users are expected to switch to this version in
record numbers.

"PostgreSQL 9.2 will ship with native JSON support, covering indexes,
replication and performance improvements, and many more features. We
are eagerly awaiting this release and will make it available in Early
Access as soon as it’s released by the PostgreSQL community," said
Ines Sombra, Lead Data Engineer, Engine Yard.

Links

- Downloads, including packages and installers:
http://www.postgresql.org/downloads
- Release Notes: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/release-9-2.html
- Documentation: http://www.postgresql.org/downloads
- What's New in 9.2:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9.2
- Press Kit: http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/presskit92

Improved Performance and Scalability

With the addition of linear scalability to 64 cores, index-only scans
and reductions in CPU power consumption, PostgreSQL 9.2 has
significantly improved scalability and developer flexibility for the
most demanding workloads. Organizations like the U.S. Federal
Aviation Administration and Heroku.com run applications on PostgreSQL,
and HP has adopted it for their remote support software and to power
their HP-UX/Itanium solutions.

Improvements in vertical scalability increase PostgreSQL's ability to
efficiently utilize hardware resources on larger servers. Advances in
lock management, write efficiency, index-only access and other
low-level operations allow the database engine to handle even
larger-volume workloads.

Numerically, this means:
- Up to 350,000 read queries per second (more than 4X faster)
- Index-only scans for data warehousing queries (2–20X faster)
- Up to 14,000 data writes per second (5X faster)

Also, the addition of cascading replication enables users to run even
larger stacks of horizontally scaled servers under PostgreSQL 9.2.

"NewsBlur, a social news reader, relies on Postgres for storing
millions of sites and subscriptions. Solid and reliable for years,"
said Samuel Clay, founder of newsblur.com. "We're consistently on the
bleeding edge (9.1 now, moving to 9.2 soon for the cascading
replication alone) and it's been a pleasure since 8.4."

Flexible Developer Support

The flexibility of PostgreSQL is reflected in the diversity of
organisations that have adopted it. For example NASA, the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange and Instagram all rely on it to perform
mission-critical applications. Version 9.2 extends this flexibility
even further by including support for Range Types and JSON, allowing
developers to use PostgreSQL in completely new ways.

Range Types allow developers to create better calendaring, scientific,
and financial applications. No other major SQL database supports this
feature, which enables intelligent handling of blocks of time and
numbers.

With PostgreSQL 9.2, query results can be returned as JSON data types.
Combined with the new PL/V8 Javascript and PL/Coffee database
programming extensions, and the optional HStore key-value store, users
can now utilize PostgreSQL like a "NoSQL" document database, while
retaining PostgreSQL's reliability, flexibility and performance.

"Native JSON support in PostgreSQL provides an efficient mechanism for
creating and storing documents for web APIs. We use front-end
libraries like jQuery to request tabular and tree-structured data; and
the new features make it convenient and provide performance advantages
in retrieving that data as JSON, " said Taras Mitran, Senior
Architect, IVC Inc.