PostgreSQL 8.5alpha3 Now Available

The third alpha release for PostgreSQL version 8.5, 8.5alpha3, is now
available.  This alpha contains several new major features added since
the previous alpha.  Please download, install, and test it to give us
early feedback on the features being developed for the next version of
PostgreSQL.

Features added in alpha3 include:

* Hot Standby, allowing read-only connections during recovery, provides
  a built-in master-slave replication solution.
* Exclusion constraints, a generalized version of unique constraints,
  offer novel ways to guarantee logical data integrity.
* SQL standard conforming ORDER BY within aggregate function calls,
  removes the need for ugly workarounds to get ordered aggregate
  function input.
* Access control for large objects was added.
* Regular expression functions support case-insensitive matching and
  locale-dependent character classification when the server encoding is
  UTF8.
* PL/pgSQL is installed by default.
* The PL/pgSQL parser has been reworked to behave much more sanely.
* Various improvements were made in PL/Perl and PL/Python.

These new major features mean that we need you to participate in testing
them.  If you are able to help with organized alpha testing, please see
the Alpha/Beta testing page:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/HowToBetaTest

Alpha releases are not stable and should never be used in production;
they are for testing new features only.  There will be one more alpha
release, in about 2 months, before an 8.5 beta release.  There is no
guarantee that any features or APIs present in the alphas will be
present, or the same, in the final release.

More detail is available in the Release Notes included with each alpha
release:
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/release-8-5.html

Alpha release information page:
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/alpha

Download the alpha release here:
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/8.5alpha3/

Alpha releases are made in source code form only.  Binary packages
for some operating systems will be prepared in the coming days.