Warning: IANADBA
I was just reading the release notes for PostgreSQL 8.3 beta1, and there’s quite a lot of exciting improvements coming:
- Full text search is now a built-in feature
- Support for the SQL/XML standard, including a new xml builtin data type (For the enterprisy users)
- enum data types (I’m not a big fan of enums in a database, but lots of people like them.)
- UUID data type, similar to that defined by RFC 4122. (Very useful feature in some clustering situations. Some people even argue GUIDs/UUIDs should replace integer surrogate keys most of the time.)
- ORDER BY … NULLS FIRST/LAST (A minor little feature, but I remember wishing for it once upon a time.)
- And some excellent performance improvements, especially if you’re data doesn’t have to be flushed to disk to finish a transaction (potentially dangerous, but acceptable for many use cases).
While I haven’t had the pleasure of using PostgreSQL for a few months, I prefer it over MySQL and recommend it to anyone looking for an open source database with advanced features and excellent reliability.