The first beta of Version 8.4 of the world's most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL, was just released by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. After fourteen months of development, 8.4 is ready for testing by PostgreSQL users all over the world in order to make it our best release ever.

Version 8.4 includes hundreds of patches and dozens of new features. Among them:

• Windowing Functions
• Common Table Expressions & Recursive Joins
• Default & Variadic parameters for functions
• Parallel Restore
• Column Permissions
• Per-database locale settings
• Improved hash indexes
• Improved join performance for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries
• Easier-to-use Warm Standby
• Free Space Map auto-tuning
• Visibility Map (reduces vacuum overhead)
• Version-aware psql (backslash commands)
• Support SSL certs for user authentication
• Per-function runtime statistics
• Easy editing of functions in psql
• New contrib modules: pg_stat_statements, auto_explain, citext, btree_gin

Please download and install version 8.4 and test out these new features as soon as you can! You can especially help the PostgreSQL developers by trying new features in combination, and by doing a test port of your production applications to version 8.4. Performance comparisons with 8.3 are also very helpful. Tell us what you find!

• Beta Information Page
• Release Notes
• Source Code
• Windows Installers and Binaries: see the Beta Information Page

Translation teams are at this time asked to begin completing the message translations for the 8.4 release. The PostgreSQL project always needs more translators! If you are bilingual please consider joining a translation team to help translate PostgreSQL (mailing list).

The usual duration of the beta testing period for a new version of PostgreSQL is 6 weeks. However, that time can vary significantly depending on what bugs our testing discovers. The PostgreSQL project does not release until all significant known bugs are fixed.