PostgreSQL 9.1 now available
Making for some reasonably good news on 9/11, the next version of PostgreSQL, version 9.1, has been released.
Major enhancements include:
- Synchronous replication
- continuing the enhancements to built-in WAL-based replication
- Per-column collations
- to support linguistically-correct sorting down to the column level
- Unlogged tables
- improving performance for the handling of ephemeral data (e.g. – such as caches)
- K-Nearest-Neighbor Indexing
- indexing on distances for geographical and text-search queries
- Serialized Snapshot Isolation
- implementing “true serializability”
- Writable Common Table Expressions
- recursive and similar queries can now update data
- Security Enhanced Postgres
- Similar to SE-Linux, providing Mandatory Access Controls for higher grade security
- Foreign Data Wrappers
- attach to other databases and data sources
- Extensions
- managing deployment of additional database features
Many of these continue the trend of continuing to enhance features added in earlier versions (e.g. – synchronous replication, KNN, Writable CTEs)
Some introduce new kinds of functionality (e.g. – SE-Postgres, FDW, Extensions), where new seeds are sown, that we may expect to flower into further new features in future versions.