The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announced yesterday the release of PostgreSQL v7.3, now available for download. Numerous changes include: support for the SQL 92 Schema spec, enhanced dependency tracking for complex databases, prepared queries for maximized performance on common requests, expanded logging options, supports data in many international characters sets, dozens of performance enhancements. Update: A report at eWeek about mySQL & PostgreSQL’s progress.
PostgreSQL v7.3 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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this is a serous question
They got a wave and mp3 file sitting on the frontpage that pronounce it.
http://www.au.postgresql.org/postgresql.wav
http://www.au.postgresql.org/postgresql.mp3
I used it for my honours project. The DB had several tables with millions of rows of data, PostgreSQL handled it with ease. JDBC? No problem. PHP access? Of course. There are even several books available on-line. It’s fantastic.
My only complaint was the speed of queries using subselects. I hope the improved this a bit in 7.3. It could have just been bad queries on my part, though.
There was a discussion about a possible 20% slowdown on the new PostgreSQL version:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2002-11/msg01100.php
OSNews uses MySQL and we never had a problem, but I do prefer PostgreSQL too because it supports more query stuff but mostly because it scales better under high load (on low load, mysql might be faster, but on high load PostgreSQL is just better – of course the commercial DB2 and Oracle are better than both PostgreSQL and mySQL
BTW, I heard that the PostgreSQL project is one of the best managed open source projects!
Thanks Eugenia for post about slow down. Now, I ain’t going to upgrade, until they fix or else on this.
Still no sign of built-in replication ? I thought this one was planned for 7.3.
I think I’ll stick to MySQL – version 4.0 with InnoDB table handler is pretty decent now.
Compare to what’s missing in MySQL: stored procedures, views, subselects, rules, triggers, check constraints … and mature fast transactions with multi-version concurrency. In fact there are ways in which PostgreSQL has already beat Oracle, regardless of price. *Fast* transaction commits; no insane auto-commit on a broken connection; much better interactive client (psql vs. sqlplus); much better self-tuning out of the box; etc. Give us replication and background auto-vacuum, and we’ll be floored.
I would have thought this was at least some kind of news here. Look at how much discussion it created at Slashdot.
Don’t people realize what an amazing piece of software you can get for free here? Creating an enterprise-quality DBMS is arguably one of the most difficult accomplishments in the field of computing. It’s definitely every bit as demanding (in different ways) as creating an OS like Linux.
And yes, it is one of the best-run open source projects. Browse around in http://archives.postgresql.org/ (by my estimate at least a million posts are archived now) and you will find that every question has been answered somewhere in here.