PostgreSQL 9.2 improves performance and scalability

With the addition of linear scalability to 64 cores, index-only scans and reductions in CPU power consumption, PostgreSQL 9.2 has improved scalability and developer flexibility for the most demanding workloads.

Organizations like the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Heroku.com run applications on PostgreSQL, and HP has adopted it for their remote support software and to power their HP-UX/Itanium solutions.

Improvements in vertical scalability increase PostgreSQL’s ability to efficiently utilize hardware resources on larger servers. Advances in lock management, write efficiency, index-only access and other low-level operations allow the database engine to handle even larger-volume workloads.

Numerically, this means:

• Up to 350,000 read queries per second (more than 4X faster)
• Index-only scans for data warehousing queries (2-20X faster)
• Up to 14,000 data writes per second (5X faster).

Also, the addition of cascading replication enables users to run even larger stacks of horizontally scaled servers under PostgreSQL 9.2.

The flexibility of PostgreSQL is reflected in the diversity of organisations that have adopted it. For example NASA, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Instagram all rely on it to perform mission-critical applications. Version 9.2 extends this flexibility even further by including support for Range Types and JSON, allowing developers to use PostgreSQL in completely new ways.

Range Types allow developers to create better calendaring, scientific, and financial applications. No other major SQL database supports this feature, which enables intelligent handling of blocks of time and numbers.

With PostgreSQL 9.2, query results can be returned as JSON data types. Combined with the new PL/V8 Javascript and PL/Coffee database programming extensions, and the optional HStore key-value store, users can now utilize PostgreSQL like a “NoSQL” document database, while retaining PostgreSQL’s reliability, flexibility and performance.