PostgreSQL 8.4.0-1

PostgreSQL 8.4.0-1 is a powerful and easy-to-use database system, with more than 15 years of active development  and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness.

PostgreSQL runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. PostgreSQL is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. PostgreSQL will also support storage of binary large objects, including video, sounds, or pictures. PostgreSQL has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.

An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance.

PostgreSQL supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. PostgreSQL is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data.

Major Features:

1. Immunity to over-deployment: Over-deployment is what some proprietary database vendors regard as their #1 license compliance problem.  With PostgreSQL, no-one can sue you for breaking licensing agreements, as there is no associated licensing cost for the software. This has several additional advantages:
   • More profitable business models with wide-scale deployment.
   • No possibility of being audited for license compliance at any stage.
   • Flexibility to do concept research and trial deployments without needing to include additional licensing costs.
2. Better support than the proprietary vendors: In addition to our strong support offerings, we have a vibrant community of PostgreSQL professionals and enthusiasts that your staff can draw upon and contribute to.
3. Significant saving on staffing costs: Our software has been designed and created to have much lower maintenance and tuning requirements than the leading proprietary databases, yet still retain all of the features, stability, and performance. In addition to this, our training programs are generally regarded as being far more cost effective, manageable, and practical in the real world than that of the leading proprietary database vendors.
4. Legendary reliability and stability: Unlike many proprietary databases, it is extremely common for companies to report that PostgreSQL has never, ever crashed for them in several years of high activity operation.  Not even once.  It just works.
5. Extensible: The source code is available to all at no charge.  If your staff have a need to customize or extend PostgreSQL in any way then they are able to do so with a minimum of effort, and with no attached costs.  This is complemented by the community of PostgreSQL professionals and enthusiasts around the globe that also actively extend PostgreSQL on a daily basis.
6. Cross platform: PostgreSQL is available for almost every brand of Unix (34 platforms with the latest stable release), and Windows compatibility is available via the Cygwin framework. Native Windows compatibility is also available with version 8.0 and above.
7. Designed for high volume environments: We use a multiple row data storage strategy called MVCC to make PostgreSQL extremely responsive in high volume environments.  The leading proprietary database vendor uses this technology as well, for the same reasons.
8. GUI database design and administration tools: There are many high-quality GUI Tools available for PostgreSQL from both open source developers and commercial providers. A list is available on our wiki as a community guide to PostgreSQL GUI Tools.
9. Technical Features
   • Fully ACID compliant.
   • ANSI SQL compliant.
   • Referential Integrity.
   • Replication (non-commercial and commercial solutions) allowing the duplication of the master database to multiple slave machines.
   • Native interfaces for ODBC, JDBC, .Net, C, C++, PHP, Perl, TCL, ECPG, Python, and Ruby.
   • Rules.
   • Views.
   • Triggers.
   • Unicode.
   • Sequences.
   • Inheritance.
   • Outer Joins.
   • Sub-selects.
   • An open API.
   • Stored Procedures.
   • Native SSL support.
   • Procedural languages.
   • Hot stand-by (commercial solutions).
   • Better than row-level locking.
   • Functional and Partial indexes.
   • Native Kerberos authentication.
   • Support for UNION, UNION ALL and EXCEPT queries.
   • Loadable extensions offering SHA1, MD5, XML, and other functionality.
   • Tools for generating portable SQL to share with other SQL-compliant systems.
   • Extensible data type system providing for custom, user-defined datatypes and rapid development of new datatypes.
   • Cross-database compatibility functions for easing the transition from other, less SQL-compliant RDBMS.
     

Enhancements

• Windowing Functions
• Common Table Expressions and Recursive Queries
• Default and variadic parameters for functions
• Parallel Restore
• Column Permissions
• Per-database locale settings
• Improved hash indexes
• Improved join performance for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries
• Easier-to-use Warm Standby
• Automatic sizing of the Free Space Map
• Visibility Map (greatly reduces vacuum overhead for slowly-changing tables)
• Version-aware psql (backslash commands work against older servers)
• Support SSL certificates for user authentication
• Per-function runtime statistics
• Easy editing of functions in psql
• New contrib modules: pg_stat_statements, auto_explain, cite...