Joshua Berkus recently gave a heads up on the Advocacy list of the forthcoming release of the first beta for PostgreSQL 9.1, tentatively scheduled for May 3.  I have been following the development fairly closely, though given the number of changes, not in depth.  Good time to point out the Waiting for.. blog series from Hubert ‘depesz’ Lubaczewski found here. It covers many of the changes and uses examples to illustrate, a very handy resource. So what is 9.1 offering?

First some of the headliners.

Synchronous Replication:
Extends the built in replication to eliminate any lag between the master and standby   databases. For those who absolutely need a 1:1 correspondence with their standbys.

Per column collation:
A different language for each column, the Tower of Babel realized:)

Unlogged tables:
Permission is granted to run with scissors. You can now create tables that do not log to the Write Ahead Log(WAL).  This makes data operations on the table faster, at the cost of data security. Data will not be recovered in the event of a crash, nor are unlogged tables replicated.

SE-Postgres.
Speaking of security Postgres will now have access to the SE-Linux framework.

The above are great and I will be exploring them at some point, but what follows are the new features I am really excited about.

PL/Python changes:
Thanks to Jan Urbanski and others there have been a host of changes to the procedural language support for Python.  To mention a few; table function support, better error handling, explicit subtransactions.

pg_basebackup:
Thanks Magnus. A way of doing a basebackup for replication using a Postgres connection. Very handy.  Along with this,  the replication permission for non-superusers.

SQL/MED:
Basically pulling external data sources into Postgres. The implementation for  9.1 is basic, but the potential is too great to ignore.

Extensions:
A easier way to work with database plugins. Combined with the PGXN site a definite plus.

I have just scratched the surface on what is new and improved in PostgreSQL 9.1, for a more in depth look I suggest the latest alpha Release Notes. I mentioned specific people above because I have associated their names with particular features.  Lest I forget, a big thank you to all those who have participated.  There is much to be proud of in this release as in the previous ones.