Re: Beta 1 Release Draft

On Apr 27, 2013, at 7:53 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:

> All,
>
> So, I've taken another tack on this.  I realized that the important
> thing about the beta was not to provide narrative marketing information
> about the beta features, but rather to get our users to test the new
> features.  This means, among other things, listing as many of them as
> possible, rather than highlighting a few "big" ones.  We'll do that for
> the final release.
>
> So, here's a draft based on that idea.  Please provide feedback,
> improvements, and corrections as soon as you can; we may need to send
> this out as early as Thursday.
>
> ============================
>
> PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1 Released
> =============================
>
> The first beta release of PostgreSQL 9.3, the latest version of the
> world's best open source database, is now available.  This beta contains
> previews of all of the features which will be available in version 9.3,
> and is ready for testing by the worldwide PostgreSQL community.  Please
> download, test, and report what you find.
>
> Major Features
> --------------
>
> The major features available for testing in this beta include:
>
> * Writeable Foreign Tables
> * pgsql_fdw driver for federation of PostgreSQL databases
> * Automatically updatable VIEWs
> * MATERIALIZED VIEW declaration
> * LATERAL JOINs
> * Additional JSON constructor and extractor functions
> * Indexed regular expression search
> * Disk page checksums to detect filesystem failures
>
> In 9.3, PostgreSQL has switched from using SysV shared memory to using
> Posix shared memory and mmap for memory management.  This allows easier
> installation and configuration of PostgreSQL, but means that we need our
> users to rigorously test and ensure that no memory management issues
> have been introduced by the change.
>
> Additional Features
> -------------------
>
> Additional features included in this release are:
>
> * Streaming-only remastering of replicas
> * Performance and locking improvements for Foreign Key locks
> * Parallel pg_dump for faster backups
> * Directories for configuration files
> * pg_isready database connection checker
> * 64-bit Large Object API
> * COPY FREEZE for reduced IO bulk loading
> * User-defined background workers for automating database tasks
> * Recursive view declaration
>
> For a full listing of the features in version 9.3 Beta, please see the
> [release
> notes](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release-9-3.html).
> Additional descriptions and notes on some of -the new features are
> available on the [9.3 Features Wiki
> Page](http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.3_Features).
>
> Test 9.3 Beta 1 Now
> -------------------
>
> We depend on our community to help test the next version in order to
> guarantee that it is high-performance and bug-free.  Please download
> PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1 and try it with your workloads and applications as
> soon as you can, and give feedback to the PostgreSQL developers.
> Features and APIs in Beta 1 will not change substantially before final
> release, so it is now safe to start building applications against the
> new features. [More information on how to test and report
> issues](http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta)
>
> Get the PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1, including binaries and installers for
> Windows, Linux and Mac from [our download
> page](http://www.postgresql.org/download).
>
> Full documentation of the new version [is available
> online](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static), and also installs
> with PostgreSQL.

+1 I think this is very good.

Jonathan