PostgreSQL 8.0 enters beta!

Sxooter

In the words of my favorite square pupiled robot, "woo hoo!"

PostgreSQL 8.0 is in beta. Less than one year after its last major release, 7.4, the new version is out. And guess what this one supports? Windows (NT and up, sorry 98 users, time to upgrade I guess. edit -- actually it may well support 98, but I'm not sure yet. )

Also supports sub transactions / savepoints, point in time recovery, new improved background writer, vacuum delay settings to allow 24/7 operation under very heavy loads with no break needed for vacuuming, and a few other improvements. Read the release notes here:

http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/release.html#RELEASE-8-0

The source tar ball can be found here:

[url]ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/v8.0.0beta/[/url]

grab either

postgresql-8.0.0beta1.tar.bz2

postgresql-8.0.0beta1.tar.gz

and build it to test it. I'm lobbying for a binary windows version ready to go in the beta directory, we'll see how far that gets.

melody

It's beautiful software (again) from the postgres lot. I guess they're getting too predictable now.

Benchmarking shows some nice speed improvements over 7.4 as well... (for all that are interested in trimming a few nanoseconds off here and there...)

Hold off with the Windows release though... we don't want the Postgres name tarnished too much by a dogy underlying OS... :-)

Melody

Sxooter

Originally posted by melody
Hold off with the Windows release though... we don't want the Postgres name tarnished too much by a dogy underlying OS... :-)

Melody

haha. If you only knew how much work has gone into trying to make it crash proof. Most people don't know this, but one of the standard tests for PostgreSQL is to initiate some ungodly number of parallel writes to the database and pull the plug in the middle, and make sure the database comes back up without errors. Getting a database to do this on Windows is NOT easy.

csn

Why's that? Lack of fsync() or something?

Sxooter

yeah, fsync in unix is a single call, and all files held open by that process are fsynced. In windows, there's an fsync call, but it doesn't actually work. I.e. it says "oh yeah, they're synced" then goes ahead and lazily does it in the background.

There's another call that works, but you have to call it repeatedly with the handle to each and every open file you want to sync.