PostgreSQL 9.3 Beta 1 Released

The short log is missing one of the most important and awesome new feature to <i>application</i> writers: a bunch of new PQresultErrorFields[0] on constraint failure, providing access to (context-dependent) the raw schema name, table name, column name, constraint name and datatype involved.<p>Previously these remained locked into the database and to get programmatically-useable info (for logging, better error messages or to translate in terms of e.g. your ORM) you had to parse error messages which were potentially localized and usually lacked half the necessary information.<p>And even better, for python developers, psycopg2 already supports these fields[1][2]<p>[0] <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/libpq-exec.html#LIBPQ-PQRESULTERRORFIELD" rel="nofollow">http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/libpq-exec.html#...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://psycopg.lighthouseapp.com/projects/62710/tickets/149" rel="nofollow">http://psycopg.lighthouseapp.com/projects/62710/tickets/149</a><p>[2] <a href="http://initd.org/psycopg/docs/extensions.html#psycopg2.extensions.Diagnostics" rel="nofollow">http://initd.org/psycopg/docs/extensions.html#psycopg2.exten...</a>

So, what's still missing in postgres?<p>To make the responses as constructive as possible, please also specify:<p>* Whether you currently use postgres, and what other systems you use (presumably ones that do have the feature that is missing in postgres)<p>* Whether you currently need the feature, or whether you anticipate the need in the future, or whether you expect that other people will need it<p>* Whether the missing feature is preventing you from using postgres, or just a significant pain point (which could include ease-of-use issues)

Postgres type system is so much better than any other RDBMS that it's a shame NoSQL guys didn't spend more time building on top of it. While their optimizer could use some work here and there it's improving all the time.<p>We are doing some pretty obscure stuff to it and it's serving us well. Oracle on the other hand requires so much attention and special handling with it's type system, that if there were an alternative, I wouldn't even bother with it.

The PostgreSQL team just keeps on giving. There is nothing that can stop these guys.

"Indexed regular expression search"<p>How does that work from a computer science point of view?<p>UPDATE: Found this talk about it from PGCon last year: <a href="http://lanyrd.com/2012/pgcon/schdzf/" rel="nofollow">http://lanyrd.com/2012/pgcon/schdzf/</a>

Materialized Views! Well, sort of; it appears they don't automatically refresh when data has been updated in the underlying tables ala Oracle's implementation, but this gets you rather close.

Eversince I heard Mike Krieger of Instagram Tech Talk at airbnb about how scaleable Postgres was for them, I've become very interested in Postgres. Probably will use it for my next startup.

for a more in depth list of changes / new features look at release note[1] and the wiki 9.3Beta1 page[2]<p>[1] <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release-9-3.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release-9-3.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9.3" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9...</a>

I was working professionally with Oracle and MSSQL databases (with way bigger focus on the latter). I did some freelance projects with MySQL databases, heck, I managed to hack some small things on Pervasive once or twice.<p>PostgreSQL was always an outsider which I had ignored, but in my recent position PostgreSQL is the main database engine for our whole stack. It took my about a month to get used to the differences in the syntax and PostgreSQL related stuff and I'm amazed about the features and quality of it, especially when you remember that this is a free and open source database engine.<p>On the other hand, if PostgreSQL devs would start a Kickstarter project for PGSQL specific version of Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, my both hands (and feet) would pay. I had tried Database Visualiser (paid version), PGAdmin and few others, but none of those as is even close to the capabilities of Management Studio.<p>Does anybody maybe know any alternative or have any tips to share?

The "User-defined background workers for automating database tasks" feature sounds very interesting: <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/bgworker.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/bgworker.html</a><p>I wonder if it would be possible to plug a python/node interpreter into that.

Clearly the best addition in 9.3 is \watch to psql

"pg_isready database connection checker"<p>Will pg have less time for YC and HN since he'll be checking so many database connections now?