NEW YORK, NEW YORK: SEPTEMBER ##, 2003 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE The PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) is pleased to announce the availability of version 7.4 of the PostgreSQL Object Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS). This major release is the work of our world wide network of hundreds of developers and contributors over the last 9 months. It provides commercial-grade enterprise database functionality and performance with the flexibility and low total cost of ownership widely associated with Open Source software. "If you tried PostgreSQL before, and went with a commercial database like Oracle or DB2 instead, it's time to re-evaluate," says Rod Taylor of Inquent Technologies. "PostgreSQL's expanding enterprise feature set and performance improvements over the last two years make PostgreSQL competitive with even the highest-end database systems. And you can't beat the cost." Version 7.4 includes a host of new features which make PostgreSQL a more powerful and scalable database for large enterprises. These include AMD Opteron(tm) optimization, improved index maintenance tools, and enhanced support of full text indexing which adds ranked result sets. Combined with the recent contribution of the eRServer(c) replication solution by PostgreSQL Inc., these advances fulfill PostgreSQL's potential to run high-availability, large-scale data centers. Hash aggregation in memory, query planner improvement for subqueries, a new wire protocol, and expanded functional and expressional indexes were also added by the PGDG. These features will improve query and procedure performance for all size databases, in some cases by as much as 400%, The new version maintains PostgreSQL's status as one of the fastest SQL databases in the world. Lamar Owen, Director of Information Technology for the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, commented on the new features, "The improved performance of PostgreSQL 7.4 for very large, data-warehouse tables will allow me to provide efficient access to a huge library of astronomical photography and spectrography, correlated with geological and meteorological observations, over the Internet. The improved indexing capabilities for custom and composite types will allow unprecedented ease in analyzing this data, which tends to be difficult to shoehorn into traditional index paradigms." Facilitating the desire of database developers to migrate their projects to PostgreSQL, 7.4 is more accessible and standardized than any previous version. First, the PGDG has "raised the bar" on ANSI SQL standard compliance by completely overhauling messaging internals and enhancing metadata reporting, creating a complete SQL standard error-reporting and information schema framework. Second, the online documentation has been extensively reorganized and expanded to give new PostgreSQL users an easier start. Third, to make things even easier for users accustomed to a graphical environment, two of the most popular GUI administration tools for PostgreSQL, pgAdmin and phgPgAdmin, are releasing dramatically revised new versions to accompany PostgreSQL 7.4. "We have used PostgreSQL successfully for over two years in a mission-critical capacity to support our registry systems," said Ram Mohan, Chief Technology Officer for Afilias Limited, the company responsible for running the backend database containing all .info and .org Internet domain names worldwide. "This upgrade of PostgreSQL improves the scalability and capacity of PostgreSQL and will help to ensure continued advancements to future releases." RELEASE DETAILS ------------------------------------- More information on this release, including a full list of new features and full text of all quotes, is available at:     About PostgreSQL:     With more than 16 years of development by hundreds of the world's most generous and brilliant minds from the open source community, PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database. With its long time support of an enterprise level feature set including transactions, stored procedures, triggers, and subqueries, PostgreSQL is being used by many of today's most demanding businesses and government agencies.     Corporations such as BASF, Red Hat, Afilias Limited, Cisco, Chrysler, OpenMFG and 3Com, organizations like WGCR Radio, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, and Open Source projects including Bricolage, OpenACS and GForge rely on PostgreSQL's rock solid performance record and open development process. PostgreSQL is available under a BSD License for both commercial and non-commercial use. To find out more about PostgreSQL or to download it, please visit:     http://www.postgresql.org/