News

Oxford, United Kingdom – August 11, 2016

Bi-Directional Replication for PostgreSQL (Postgres-BDR, or BDR) is the first open source multi-master replication system for PostgreSQL to reach full production status, developed by 2ndQuadrant and assisted by a keen user community. BDR is specifically designed for use in geographically distributed clusters, using highly efficient asynchronous logical replication, supporting anything from 2-48 nodes in a distributed database.

Significant improvements related to stability and bug fixes have been made in this release. The most important factors of this release are:

• Smoother handling of schema changes (DDL) statements allowing increased operational stability and reduced maintenance.
• Various bug fixes for operational issues demonstrating high level of maturity
• Performance tuning, especially of global sequence handling
• Removal of the now deprecated UDR
• Extensive documentation improvements based upon user feedback

For a more comprehensive list of release notes, please click here

Postgres-BDR 9.4 1.0 will be supported until December 2019, when PostgreSQL 9.4 goes EOL. BDR continues to be developed and BDR9.6 will be released within 6 months. The BDR project has already delivered the majority of its code into PostgreSQL core, though it will likely be about 2-3 more years before this functionality is available in PostgreSQL core.

BDR is well suited for databases where:

• Data is distributed globally

• Majority of data is written to only one node at a time (For example, the US node mostly writes changes to US customers, each branch office writes mostly to branch-office-specific data, and so on.)

• There is a need for SELECTs over complete data set (lookups and consolidation)

• There are OLTP workloads with many smaller transactions

• Transactions mostly touching non overlapping sets of data

• There is partition and latency tolerance

However, this is not a comprehensive list and use cases for BDR can vary based on database type and functionality.

In addition, BDR aids business continuity by providing increased availability during network faults. Applications can be closer to the data and more responsive for users, allowing for a much more satisfying end-user experience.

BDR is developed and supported by 2ndQuadrant. 2ndQuadrant provides professional support for BDR, as well as consultation and training.  With our deep knowledge of distributed databases, we will ensure that you are able to evaluate your use case and applications and determine the most suitable product or solution.

BDR is also available in 2ndQuadrant Cloud, initially on AWS.

For more information, please visit the homepage: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/postgres-bdr-2ndquadrant/.

Oxford, United Kingdom – July 12, 2016

2ndQuadrant, the leading developers of PostgreSQL, are delighted to announce the release of repmgr 3.1.4 – the most popular tool for PostgreSQL failover management.

First introduced in 2010, repmgr helps DBAs and System Administrators manage a cluster of PostgreSQL databases. By taking advantage of the Hot Standby capability introduced in PostgreSQL 9, repmgr greatly simplifies the process of setting up and managing databases with high availability and scalability requirements.

Several improvements and bug fixes have been implemented, particularly better path handling and node shutdown detection during switchover operations. Please click here to view the release notes.

Oxford, United Kingdom – May 12, 2016

The Postgres-XL community has released a new version of the software, tagged as 9.5r1.1. This is a minor update to earlier 9.5r1 release, but contains some very important bug fixes. We encourage everyone to immediately upgrade to this latest release. Being a minor release, you only need to download the latest sources from , compile, install new binaries and restart your servers. So it should be fairly straight forward.

Oxford, United Kingdom – May 2, 2016

2ndQuadrant, the leading developers of PostgreSQL, are delighted to announce the release of pglogical 1.1 – the next generation in replication systems for PostgreSQL.

The 1.1 release brings new features along with bug fixes to pglogical. Same salient features are listed below:

• Sequence replication support
• Support for replica triggers
• Foreign keys are no longer checked on the replica
• Multiple subscriptions between single pair of nodes
• The create_subscription function does not synchronize structure change by default
• User can specify affected replication sets in replicate_ddl_command function
• New functions for manipulating connection strings of nodes
• PGLogical processes are clearly marked in the pg_stat_activity
• Better behavior on worker crashes
• Logging improvements
• Ubuntu Xenial package

pglogical offers Logical Replication as a PostgreSQL extension, which provides the flexibility of trigger-based replication with the efficiency of log-based replication. This ground-breaking new technology has benefits for many key use cases

• UPGRADE      Upgrade PostgreSQL from 9.4 to 9.5, without downtime
• SCALE OUT    Copy all or a selection of database tables to other nodes in a cluster
• AGGREGATE    Accumulate changes from sharded database servers into a Data Warehouse
• INTEGRATE    Feed database changes in real-time to other systems

pglogical is open source and available for download as binary packages for PostgreSQL 9.4 and 9.5 versions. Visit http://2ndquadrant.com/pglogical/ for more detail.

2ndQuadrant’s respected 24/7 Production Support provides the fastest and highest rated response service for PostgreSQL anywhere and is available now worldwide.

2ndQuadrant leads the drive for improving the enterprise functionality for PostgreSQL, contributing major features every year in performance, replication, business intelligence and usability.

Oxford, United Kingdom – April 18, 2016

The Postgres-XL community is pleased to announce the 1st release of Postgres-XL 9.5. This release has been fully synced up till PostgreSQL 9.5.2.

Postgres-XL is a massively parallel database built on top of, and very closely compatible with PostgreSQL 9.5 and its set of advanced features. Postgres-XL is fully open source and many parts of it will feed back directly or indirectly into later releases of PostgreSQL, as we begin to move towards a fully parallel sharded version of core PostgreSQL.

Postgres-XL is different because it supports both Business Intelligence and OLTP workloads in the same horizontally scalable server. This allows Postgres-XL to support a diverse range of workloads

• OLTP workloads that need write-scalability as well as read-scalability
• Business Intelligence requiring OLAP with massive parallelism
• Operational Data Store/ Central Data Backbone
• Distributed Key-Value store using JSONB, similar to NoSQL
• Internet of Things applications
• Mixed-workload environments

Star schema style SQL queries exhibit large performance gains from massively parallel processing (MPP). Many queries show fully linear performance gains, for example a 16-node XL cluster is 16 times faster than PostgreSQL on one node. Postgres-XL is able to successfully complete the complex TPC-H business intelligence benchmark, showing its capability to address much more than basic operations.

Besides proving its mettle on Business Intelligence workloads, Postgres-XL has performed remarkably well on OLTP workloads when running pgBench (based on TPC-B) benchmark. In a 4-Node (Scale: 4000) configuration, compared to PostgreSQL, XL gives up to 230% higher TPS (-70% latency comparison) for SELECT workloads and up to 130% (-56% latency comparison) for UPDATE workloads. Yet, it can scale much, much higher than even the largest single node server.

Postgres-XL’s High Availability functionality has also been enhanced in this release. Popular features such as BRIN indexes, JSONB and GIN index compression are fully supported, as are many popular extensions.

Postgres-XL is available for download here: http://www.postgres-xl.org/download/

You can go through XL’s comprehensive documentation here: http://files.postgres-xl.org/documentation/index.html

We expect R2 to bring further features to Postgres-XL 9.5 in the next few months.

2ndQuadrant has led the development of Postgres-XL 9.5, building upon the work of many others over a long period of continuous development, with easily more than 10 man years of development. After six months of professional formal alpha-level testing & tuning, and an additional 2 months in Beta phase with user feedback, the project has now reached the next stage of maturity and we are now ready to release it for production use.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s

Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2015) under grant agreement n° 318633. Postgres-XL has also received support and assistance from European Space Agency’s Gaia project, as well as other users in industry.

For more details, please visit: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/postgres-xl/

Oxford, United Kingdom – March 29, 2016

The Postgres-XL community is pleased to announce the 2nd Beta release of Postgres-XL 9.5 R1.

Postgres-XL is a massively parallel database built on top of, and very closely compatible with PostgreSQL 9.5 and its set of advanced features. Postgres-XL is fully open source and many parts of it will feed back directly or indirectly into later releases of PostgreSQL, as we begin to move towards a fully parallel sharded version of core PostgreSQL.

Some of the major enhancements that went into the Beta2 release are:

• Improve handling of Append and MergeAppend plans. They are now pushed down to the datanodes whenever possible.
• Add support for 3-stage aggregation for json_agg() aggregate, thus improving performance for the aggregate handling.
• Add support for checking status of a coordinator or datanode standby without requiring it to be started as a Hot Standby.
• Fix a bug in parameter handling, which was causing certain errors in plpgsql procedure execution.
• Correctly include the string terminator in calculating GID size, without which the GID will look corrupted and unusable after a crash recovery.
• Fix handling of binary data transfer for JDBC as well as libpq protocols.
• Add support for process level control for overriding log levels for elog messages.

For a more detailed list, please look at the release notes here: http://files.postgres-xl.org/documentation/release.html

Postgres-XL is available for download here: http://www.postgres-xl.org/download/

You can go through XL’s comprehensive documentation here: http://files.postgres-xl.org/documentation/index.html

2ndQuadrant has led the development of Postgres-XL 9.5, building upon the work of many others over a long period of continuous development, with easily more than 10 man years of development.

We encourage users to contribute their comments and usage reports to the Postgres-XL community at [email protected].

Oxford, United Kingdom – February 29, 2016

2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of version 1.6.0 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

This major release introduces WAL streaming support, improving disaster recovery capabilities of PostgreSQL backup solutions based on Barman, by reducing Recovery _Point Objective_ consistently to nearly 0. Currently, Barman still requires standard WAL archiving based on PostgreSQL’s archive_command. This limitation will be removed once Barman supports replication slots (available from PostgreSQL 9.4).

Barman 1.6.0 introduces also support to _pigz_ compression, as well as Python-native gzip and bzip2 compression algorithms.

Minor bugs have also been fixed.

For a complete list of changes, see the “Release Notes” section below.

Links

• Website: http://www.pgbarman.org/
• Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
• Documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation/
• Man page, section 1: http://docs.pgbarman.org/barman.1.html
• Man page, section 5: http://docs.pgbarman.org/barman.5.html
• Support: http://www.pgbarman.org/support/
• pgespresso extension: https://github.com/2ndquadrant-it/pgespresso

Release notes

• Support for streaming replication connection through the streaming_conninfo server option
• Support for the streaming_archiver option that allows Barman to receive WAL files through PostgreSQL’s native streaming protocol. When set to ‘on’, it relies on pg_receivexlog to receive WAL data, reducing Recovery Point Objective. Currently, WAL streaming is an additional feature (standard log archiving is still required)
• Implement the receive-wal command that, when streaming_archiver is on, wraps pg_receivexlog for WAL streaming. Add –stop option to stop receiving WAL files via streaming protocol. Add –reset option to reset the streaming status and restart from the current xlog in Postgres.
• Automatic management (startup and stop) of receive-wal command via cron command
• Support for the path_prefix configuration option
• Introduction of the archiver option (currently fixed to on) which enables continuous WAL archiving for a specific server, through log shipping via PostgreSQL’s archive_command
• Support for streaming_wals_directory and errors_directory options
• Management of WAL duplicates in archive-wal command and integration with check command
• Verify if pg_receivexlog is running in check command when streaming_archiver is enabled
• Verify if failed backups are present in check command
• Accept compressed WAL files in incoming directory
• Add support for the pigz compressor (thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli [email protected])
• Implement pygzip and pybzip2 compressors (based on an initial idea of Christoph Moench-Tegeder [email protected])
• Creation of an implicit restore point at the end of a backup
• Current size of the PostgreSQL data files in barman status
• Permit archive_mode=always for PostgreSQL 9.5 servers (thanks to Christoph Moench-Tegeder [email protected])
• Complete refactoring of the code responsible for connecting to PostgreSQL
• Improve messaging of cron command regarding sub-processes
• Native support for Python >= 3.3
• Changes of behaviour:
  • Stop trashing WAL files during archive-wal (commit:e3a1d16)
• Bug fixes:
  • Atomic WAL file archiving (#9 and #12)
  • Propagate “-c” option to any Barman subprocess (#19)
  • Fix management of backup ID during backup deletion (#22)
  • Improve archive-wal robustness and log messages (#24)
  • Improve error handling in case of missing parameters

Download

• Release Notes: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.6.0/
• Sources: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.6.0/barman-1.6.0.tar.gz/download
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 5:
  • Barman: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.6.0/barman-1.6.0-1.rhel5.noarch.rpm/download
  • Dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/rhel5-deps/
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 6:
  • Barman: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.6.0/barman-1.6.0-1.rhel6.noarch.rpm/download
  • Dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/rhel6-deps/
• PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/barman/1.6.0
• pgespresso on PostgreSQL Extension framework (PGXN): http://pgxn.org/dist/pgespresso/
• pgespresso RPM/Debian packages: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/pgespresso/
• Online documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation
• PDF documentation: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.6.0/barman-tutorial.en.pdf/download

About

BARMAN (Backup and Recovery Manager) is an open source administration tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written in Python. It allows your organisation to perform remote backups of multiple servers in business critical environments and help DBAs during the recovery phase. Barman’s most requested features include backup catalogues, incremental backup, retention policies, remote backup and recovery, archiving and compression of WAL files and backups. Barman is distributed under GNU GPL 3.

Oxford, United Kingdom – February 18, 2016

The Postgres-XL community is pleased to announce Postgres-XL 9.5 R1 Beta 1.

Postgres-XL is a massively parallel database built on top of, and very closely compatible with PostgreSQL 9.5 and its set of advanced features. Postgres-XL is fully open source and many parts of it will feed back directly or indirectly into later releases of PostgreSQL, as we begin to move towards a fully parallel sharded version of core PostgreSQL.

Postgres-XL is different because it supports both Business Intelligence and OLTP workloads in the same horizontally scalable server. This allows Postgres-XL to support a diverse range of workloads

• OLTP workloads that need write-scalability as well as read-scalability
• Business Intelligence requiring OLAP with massive parallelism
• Operational Data Store/ Central Data Backbone
• Distributed Key-Value store using JSONB, similar to NoSQL
• Internet of Things applications
• Mixed-workload environments

Star schema style SQL queries exhibit large performance gains from massively parallel processing (MPP). Many queries show fully linear performance gains, for example a 16-node XL cluster is 16 times faster than PostgreSQL on one node. Postgres-XL is able to successfully complete the complex TPC-H business intelligence benchmark, showing its capability to address much more than basic operations.

Postgres-XL’s High Availability functionality has also been enhanced in this release. Popular features such as BRIN indexes, JSONB and GIN index compression are fully supported, as are many popular extensions.

Postgres-XL is available for download here: http://www.postgres-xl.org/download/

You can go through XL’s comprehensive documentation here: http://files.postgres-xl.org/documentation/index.html

2ndQuadrant has led the development of Postgres-XL 9.5, building upon the work of many others over a long period of continuous development, with easily more than 10 man years of development. After six months of professional formal alpha-level testing and tuning, the project has now reached the next stage of maturity and we are now ready to have initial users contribute their comments and usage reports to the Postgres-XL community at [email protected].

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s

Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2015) under grant agreement n° 318633. Postgres-XL has also received support and assistance from European Space Agency’s Gaia project, as well as other users in industry.

For more details, please visit: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/postgres-xl/

Oxford, United Kingdom – February 11, 2016

2ndQuadrant, the leading developers of open source PostgreSQL, today announced the release of 2UDA 9.5.1, which contains the latest point release for PostgreSQL database server. This release updates the packaged PostgreSQL server to 9.5.1 containing fixes to two security issues, as well as several bugs found over the last four months.

Detailed release notes can be found here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/release-9-5-1.html

2ndQuadrant Unified Data Analytics (2UDA) is a data analytics application suite that unifies databases, spreadsheets, data mining and visualisation in one seamless desktop installer. 2UDA (pronounced ‘tudor’) is packaged and ready to install on your personal computer, with a choice of operating systems: Linux, OSX and Windows. Once installed, 2UDA gives users access to the dramatic data visualisation and data mining capabilities of Orange 3, working directly against the powerful PostgreSQL 9.5 relational database, as well as spreadsheet function of LibreOffice 5 Calc, 2UDA provides all three of these open source applications through one, easy to use installation package.

To know more, please visit: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/resources/2uda/

Oxford, United Kingdom – January 22, 2016

2ndQuadrant, the leading developers of open source PostgreSQL, has released a hotfix to the previously announced (and first release) of pglogical.

pglogical is a logical replication system implemented entirely as a PostgreSQL extension. Fully integrated, it requires no triggers or external programs. This alternative to physical replication is a highly efficient method of replicating data using a publish/subscribe model for selective replication.

We are extremely grateful to all early adopters and users of pglogical for both providing positive comments and essential feedback on any issues spotted.

Along with our our continuous internal testing, the feedback has brought our attention to a number of bugs which are now resolved in this new release.

These important bug fixes, incorporated in this new release include:

• Fixing crash on multi-column primary keys
• Moving the DDL commands enqueued by pglogical.replicate_ddl_command to new predefined replication set called ddl_sql
• More predictable application_name for easier monitoring and setup of synchronous replication using the standard synchronous_standby_names configuration parameter
• Various fixes in documentation
• Fixing compatibility with some other extensions (e.g. pg_sslstatus)
• Fixing crash in origin tracking in cascaded setups
• Improving compile-time compatibility with 9.5 PGDG Debian packages
• Fixing relcache invalidation on the subscriber
• Fixing hanging synchonizer backround worker after individual table was added to replication and synchronization has finished
• Making tests work correctly for cross-version installations

To download pglogical 1.0.1 or to find out more about about this ground-breaking replication technology click here.

Oxford, United Kingdom – January 07, 2016

2ndQuadrant is pleased to announce the General Availability release of 2UDA 9.5. 2UDA (2ndQuadrant Unified Data Analytics) is a data analytics application suite that unifies databases, spreadsheets, data mining and visualisation in one seamless desktop installer.

This new release continues to provide easy installation of three open source applications for visual data analysis: PostgreSQL 9.5, Orange 3. and LibreOffice 5, which together offer a powerful combination of database, data visualization and spreadsheet in a single, easy-to-use package.

Following the General Availability release of PostgreSQL 9.5 today , the development team are pleased to offer a number of improvements to take advantage of the latest PostgreSQL features, creating a highly stable product and fixing discovered and reported bugs in previous releases of  2UDA.

Significant improvements to Orange address the requests for additional features and now include:

• Scatter Plot’s Rank projections supports regression data and missing values
• Logistic regression has a new output for the fitted coefficients
• Bootstrap sampling in the Data Sampler widget
• Additional information in the SQL log (when in debug mode)
• Better handling of approximate SQL table sizes (run ANALYZE after sampling, fix bug in Data Table)
• Fix bug when setting the color variable in Classification Tree Graph
• Fix in implementation of RReliefF
• Redesign of SVM widgets layout
• Various fixes for compatibility with newest numpy and scipy

A detailed listing of PostgreSQL 9.5 changes can be found here.

This is the fourth bugfix release of the 5.0.x branch of LibreOffice which contains new features and program enhancements.  As such, the version is stable and is suitable for all users. Detailed release notes can be accessed here.

We are particularly appreciative of users trialling 2UDA and providing valuable feedback to the development team, on all of the previous pre-GA releases. This has helped us to build a robust software package, the result of which is 2UDA 9.5.

2UDA 9.5 is available to download here.

You’ll also find more details about the 2UDA project, including a tutorial to download.

Oxford, United Kingdom – January 01, 2016

2ndQuadrant, the leading developers of PostgreSQL, is delighted to announce the availability of pglogical – the next generation in replication systems for PostgreSQL.

pglogical offers Logical Replication as a PostgreSQL extension, which provides the flexibility of trigger-based replication with the efficiency of log-based replication. This ground-breaking new technology has benefits for many key use cases

• ^{UPGRADE Upgrade PostgreSQL from 9.4 to 9.5, without downtime}
• ^{SCALE OUT Copy all or a selection of database tables to other nodes in a cluster}
• ^{AGGREGATE Accumulate changes from sharded database servers into a Data Warehouse}
• ^{INTEGRATE Feed database changes in real-time to other systems}
• ^{PROTECT  Provide backup or high availability for clusters, replacing earlier technologies}

Early feedback shows this is a popular and important new feature for PostgreSQL and is expected to further drive the adoption of Postgres within larger enterprises.

Existing PostgreSQL users will find the efficiency of pglogical particularly exciting with preliminary testing demonstrating a significant increase in transaction throughput (without lag) over other replication methods. In our test pglogical performed up to 5 times faster than Slony and Londiste3 on OLTP workloads using pgBench. More details on the test results are available here.

pglogical is open source and available for download as binary packages for both the current stable release PostgreSQL 9.4 and the soon to be announced PostgreSQL 9.5 version. Click here for more details.

2ndQuadrant’s respected 24/7 Production Support provides the fastest and highest rated response service for PostgreSQL anywhere and is available now worldwide.

2ndQuadrant leads the drive for improving the enterprise functionality for PostgreSQL, contributing major features every year for more than 10 years in performance, replication, business intelligence and usability.

Oxford, United Kingdom – December 18, 2015

2ndQuadrant is pleased to announce the release of the RC1 version of 2UDA (2ndQuadrant Unified Data Analytics).  2UDA is a data analytics application suite that unifies databases, spreadsheets, data mining and visualisation in one seamless desktop installer.

This new release continues to provide easy installation of three open source applications for visual data analysis: PostgreSQL 9.5 RC1, Orange 3.2. and LibraOffice 5.0, which together offer a powerful combination of database, data visualization and spreadsheet in a single, easy-to-use package.

Following the initial release of 2UDA Beta 1 back in October and subsequent release of Beta 2 in November, the development team have continued to make lots of improvements, creating a highly stable product and fixing all of the bugs discovered to date.

Significant improvements to Orange address the requests for additional features and now include:

• A ‘Report’ button that can prepare reports of performed analyses.

• Data loading from Google Sheets URLs

• New widgets added: Distance Transformation, Random Forest Regression, Regression Tree, Regression Tree Graph.

For more details on all the new features and enhancements, refer to the release notes .

We are particularly appreciative of the people trialling 2UDA and providing valuable feedback to the development team, for both the beta 1 release and more recently beta 2. This is helping us build a robust software package ahead of GA in January 2016. We encourage everyone to continue to test 2UDA as new versions are released and give us your feedback.

2UDA RC1 is available to download here.

You’ll also find more details about the 2UDA project, including a tutorial to download.

^{Release notes can be viewed here.} 

^{Release notes for PostgreSQL 9.5 RCI can be viewed here.}

Oxford, United Kingdom – November 16, 2015

2ndQuadrant is pleased to pre-announce pglogical – the next generation in replication systems for PostgreSQL.

pglogical is a logical replication system implemented entirely as a PostgreSQL extension. Fully integrated, it requires no triggers or external programs. This alternative to physical replication is a highly efficient method of replicating data using a publish/subscribe model for selective replication.

Logical streaming replication allows database managers to:

• UPGRADE Upgrade PostgreSQL from 9.4 to 9.5, without downtime
• SCALE OUT Copy all or a selection of database tables to other nodes in a cluster
• AGGREGATE Accumulate changes from sharded database servers into a Data Warehouse
• INTEGRATE Feed database changes in real-time to other systems
• PROTECT  Provide backup or high availability for clusters, alongside or instead of  Physical Streaming Replication

Having pioneered replication functionality in PostgreSQL for a number of years, this announcement follows our earlier announcement (and successful launch) of bi-direction replication (BDR), this time providing a user-level data replication solution and an alternative to full master-master replication.

pglogical will be a feature topic of 2ndQuadrant’s appearance at PGConf Silicon Valley (Nov. 17 -18), and will be complemented by a training session run by one of our consultants, Petr Jelinek on the first day of this conference.   We will also be talking about pglogical at our booth in the exhibition area.

More details here.

Oxford, United Kingdom – October 28, 2015

Version 0.9.3 is a maintenance release focused on stability. Significant improvements to BDR and UDR in this release include:

• Fix bdr_internal_sequence_reset_cache on UDR (#132)
• Ignore bdr.bdr_connections rows where node is dropped (#97, #50, #126)
• Compatibility improvements for upgrading from 0.7.3

More details on BDR can be found here.

There are no compatibility-affecting changes in this release.

Oxford, United Kingdom – October 22, 2015

The development of PostgreSQL, recently released as version 9.5 Beta, has benefited from EU funding thanks to 2ndQuadrant’s dedicated work and co-ordination of a major research project called AXLE. 2ndQuadrant facilitates the development of scalable, open source PostgreSQL and is a world leader in PostgreSQL support services.

The research initiative received €1million in R&D funding from an EU FP7 grant and has served as a catalyst for development of the PostgreSQL platform, which will continue to have a profound effect on its integration at an enterprise level.

As the three year project comes to conclusion next month, the team at 2ndQuadrant will have contributed more than 10 man years of effort towards enhancing PostgreSQL through the AXLE Project. More details here.

AXLE (Advanced Analytics for Extremely Large European Databases) has brought together a diverse group of researchers covering hardware, database kernel and visualization experts all focused on solving the needs of extremely large data analysis. With PostgreSQL at the heart of the project, the goal was to produce positive outcomes that could benefit many – in this case several new advanced features which will make their way into PostgreSQL in the next and subsequent releases.

 “We’ve got a strong team, and we’re committed to the future development of PostgreSQL,” said Simon Riggs, CTO at 2ndQuadrant and Principal Investigator for the AXLE project. “To have advanced in key areas over the past 36 months demonstrates the power funding can have on a collaborative project like this. There will be several new open source software products released – in addition to the contributions we’ll make to Postgres – as a result of the work we’ve done with our partners on the AXLE project. And it’s just the start.”

Specific to PostgreSQL, the outcomes include atomic locking, Block Range indexes, DDL triggers and the TABLESAMPLE feature – a feature demonstrated in action with the recent launch of a data analytics application suite called 2UDA (2ndQuadrant.com/2uda), which unifies databases, spreadsheets, data mining and visualisation in one seamless desktop installer.

Thanks to AXLE, 2ndQuadrant has pushed forward the development of row level security and auditing, as well as developing logical replication to the point where the company will offer zero-downtime major release upgrades. Work also continues on Hybrid Row/Column Storage and many improvements in query optimization functionality.

The project has also helped the development of Postgres-XL, a scalable PostgreSQL-based database cluster that aids better access to data for business intelligence and business analytics, plus scale out across multiple nodes.

AXLE has also breathed life into Postgres-XL 9.5, a scalable PostgreSQL-based database cluster that allows both business intelligence and transactional workloads. Postgres-XL is the first open source project to offer these capabilities and is developed communally by 2ndQuadrant, Huawei, NTT and a growing community, with active users in US, EU and Asia.

To deliver against the AXLE project’s objectives, 2ndQuadrant has attracted the industry’s top talent over the past three years.  This team of top gun developers will continue to drive progress once the project concludes, developing the features requested by the many major companies worldwide who have now committed to using ‘pure open source’ PostgreSQL for their enterprise deployments

Oxford, United Kingdom – October 13, 2015

After launching 2UDA back in August, we’re pleased to announce the release of the Beta (1) version of our unified analytics suite.

2UDA (which stands for 2ndQuadrant Unified Data Analytics) is a data analytics application suite that unifies databases, spreadsheets, data mining and visualisation in one seamless desktop installer.

As part of a continuous development program, this new release features a number of major changes which include:

• Incorporated PostgreSQL 9.5 Beta1 release
• Incorporated latest code for Orange3
• Include and install PostgreSQL extensions required by new Orange widgets
• Add ability to upgrade existing installation for future releases

Of particular interest is the use of the ‘tablesample’ feature of PostgreSQL 9.5, which 2UDA project lead Umair Shahid has created an interesting blog about

the latest version of 2UDA and get involved in the project by providing your valuable user experience and general feedback.

Oxford, United Kingdom – August 19, 2015.

Enhanced alpha release of new data analytics application available.

2ndQuadrant is pleased to announce further enhancements to 2UDA (pronounced ‘Tudor’), our new data analytics application suite currently under development, and available to try now.

This second alpha release brings a number of enhancements and product updates, based on user feedback and the continuous development of the core applications 2UDA unifies:

• PostgreSQL server daemon is now an OS service (named “org.2ndQ.2UDA.postgres-9.5”) on OS X
• PostgreSQL server daemon is now an OS service (named “2uda-postgresql-9.5”) on Linux (tested on Ubuntu 14.04, CentOS 7, openSUSE 13.2, & Fedora 22)
• Windows installer is now certified from Microsoft and signed digitally
• Latest PostgreSQL 9.5 after its Alpha 2 release has been included. Details of changes are listed
• Latest Orange 3 has been included. This version uses the new tablesample patch in PostgreSQL rather than relying on blocksample extension.
• Latest LibreOffice 5 has been included.
• The installer now checks for server readiness before loading sample database. This prevents a bug where sample data got loaded while the server was still consolidating its connections.
• Other small bugs and tweaks.

2UDA is a data analytics application suite that unifies databases, spreadsheets, data mining and data visualisation in one seamless desktop installer.

Available to download now, 2UDA is packaged and ready to install with a choice of operating systems: Linux, OSX and Windows.

Although primarily aimed at Data Analysts and Data Scientists, we encourage trial participation from developers and DBAs at this stage of the product development, to help us improve the function and user experience for all users.

2ndQuadrant announced today the world’s first commercial technical support service for PostgreSQL on Linux for the IBM z Systems mainframe, giving organizations a faster and more efficient way for working with large amounts of data with the world’s leading open-source database.

PostgreSQL on IBM z Systems provides clients who run mission-critical databases with a compelling offering by delivering new levels of speed, security and availability. As part of its commitment to open-source software, IBM unveiled this week a new LinuxONE portfolio of computing systems based on the z Systems mainframe that features the industry’s fastest processor, up to 10 terabytes of memory and the flexibility to use popular open-source software, including PostgreSQL.

“As organizations turn to open-source software for their most important functions, they also need computing systems that can meet these demands and deliver higher levels of performance,” said Ross Mauri, General Manager for IBM z Systems. “Thanks to our work with 2ndQuadrant, organizations can combine the flexibility, cost advantages and rich features of PostgreSQL with the world-class performance of IBM LinuxONE to handle large amounts of data even faster and gain insights in time to take meaningful actions.”

As the world’s leading authority on the open source PostgreSQL RDBMS, 2ndQuadrant has been working closely with engineers at IBM, and has successfully tested and optimised PostgreSQL to run on several Linux distros and produced z System-tuned packages.

As part of the optimisation program, 2ndQuadrant evaluated PostgreSQL 9.4 running on IBM z System infrastructure against a comparable Intel Haswell-based system with an OLTP type workload and achieved significant performance gains, including an increase of 2.6 times on read-only transactions.

More details on these results and other performance statistics can be found at here.

“I’m excited we’re able to bring the cost-effective power of PostgreSQL to the world beating z Systems platform, supported with the level of robustness, performance and security that customers demand,” said Simon Riggs, Founder and CTO of 2ndQuadrant. “This announcement brings new breakthrough capability to the system that underpins the transactions of the global economy.”

2ndQuadrant will continue to work with IBM on future releases of PostgreSQL.

The ‘Platinum Production Support for z/Linux’ offers users of IBM’s z System the reassurance of one of the best enterprise-class support offerings available from any vendor, with 24/7 coverage and guarantees of 15 minute response, 4 hour work-around and 24 hour bug fix for severity 1 issues with PostgreSQL.

More details about this new service are available here.

Media enquiries: 

Jenny Norman

On +44 (0)1223 781220

[email protected]

Oxford, United Kingdom – July 08, 2015.

Version 0.9.2 of the BDR (Bi-Directional Replication) extension for PostgreSQL has been released.

This is a maintenance release in the current stable 0.9.x series, focused on bug fixes, stability and usability improvements. In particular bdr_init_copy, the pg_basebackup-based node bring-up tool, is significantly improved in this update.

This release also updates the BDR-patched version of PostgreSQL itself to version 9.4.4.

Sources and RPMs (for RHEL and CentOS 6 and 7, Fedora 21 and 22) are available. Debian/Ubuntu packages will be pushed to the repository soon.

As before, the sources will build and run fine on any Linux/BSD or on Mac OS X, but do not currently support Windows.

See the release notes for more details on what has changed in this release.

For further information on BDR, click here.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has announced that the alpha release of PostgreSQL 9.5, the latest version of the world’s leading open source database, is available today, 02 July 2015  This release contains previews of all of the features which will be available in the final release of version 9.5, although some details will change before then.

Among new major features available for testing in this alpha are:

•  Block-Range Indexes (BRIN) which enable compact indexing of very large tables
• Large speed improvements in in-memory sorting and hashing
• Automated management of transaction log size
• INSERT ON CONFLICT UPDATE, otherwise known as “UPSERT”
• Grouping Sets, CUBE and ROLLUP analytic operations
• Row-Level Security (RLS) support
• More JSONB data manipulation functions and operators
• Added the pg_rewind tool and other high availability improvements to replication
• Multiple enhancements to Foreign Data Wrappers, including
• IMPORT FOREIGN SCHEMA
• Large increases in multi-core and large memory scalability

As with other major releases, the improvements in PostgreSQL include changes to large amounts of code. We count on everyone to test the altered version with your workloads and testing tools in order to find bugs and regressions before the release of PostgreSQL 9.5.0. In addition to testing that the new features work as documented, consider testing the following:

• Do the improvements in sorting and general performance actually increase performance in your application?
• Do our code changes cause PostgreSQL to not function on your platform?
• We’ve made changes to the transaction log, including compression. Does failover and disaster recovery still work as expected?
• Do the changes in operator precedence change the results of your queries?
• Does RLS work correctly to secure your data?

As this is an Alpha, changes to database behaviors, feature details, and APIs are still possible. Your feedback and testing will help determine the final tweaks on the new features, so test soon. The quality of user testing helps determine when we can make a final release.

This is the alpha release of version 9.5, indicating that some changes to features are still possible before release.  The PostgreSQL Project will release 9.5 beta 1 in August, and then periodically release additional betas as required for testing until the final release in late 2015.  For more information, and suggestions on how to test the alpha and betas, see the Beta Testing page.

Full documentation and release notes of the new version is available online and also installs with PostgreSQL.  Also see the What’s New page for details on some features.

Downloads Page:  http://www.postgresql.org/download/

Alpha Testing Information:  http://www.postgresql.org/developer/alpha

9.5 Alpha Release Notes:  http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release-9-5.html

What’s New in 9.5:  https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9.5