The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has announced the beta release of PostgreSQL 9.2, which it says will include increases in performance as well as vertical and horizontal scalability.
According to the development group, the major performance and scalability advances in this version include:
- Index-only scans, allowing users to avoid inefficient scans of base tables,
- Enhanced read-only workload scaling to 64 cores and over 300,000 queries per second,
- Improvements to data write speeds, including group commit,
- Reductions in CPU power consumption, and
- Cascading replication, supporting geographically distributed standby databases.
PostgreSQL 9.2 will also offer many new features for application developers, including:
- JSON data support, enabling hybrid document-relational databases,
- Range types, supporting new types of calendar, time-series and analytic applications, and
- Multiple improvements to ALTER and other statements, easing runtime database updates.
For a full listing of the features in version 9.2 beta, see the release notes at www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release-9-2.html.