2ndQuadrant announces the release of Barman version 2.1, a Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

This minor release fixes a few bugs. It also introduces the --archive option to the switch-xlog command, in order to help users during the installation process of a new server.

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

Links

• Website
• Download
• Documentation
• Man page, section 1
• Man page, section 5
• Support
• Client utilities for Barman
• pgespresso extension

Release notes

• Add --archive and --archive-timeout options to switch-xlog command
• Preliminary support for PostgreSQL 10 (#73)
• Minor additions:
  • Add last archived WAL info to 'diagnose' output
  • Add start time and execution time to the output of 'delete' command
• Minor bug fixes:
  • Return failure for 'get-wal' command on inactive server
  • Make 'streaming_archiver_names' and 'streaming_backup_name' options global (#57)
  • Fix rsync failures due to files truncated during transfer (#64)
  • Correctly handle compressed history files (#66)
  • Avoid de-referencing symlinks in 'pg_tblspc' when preparing recovery (#55)
  • Fix comparison of last archiving failure (#40, #58)
  • Avoid failing recovery if postgresql.conf is not writable (#68)
  • Fix output of 'replication-status' command (#56)
  • Exclude files from backups like pg_basebackup (#65, #72)
  • Exclude directories from other Postgres versions while copying tablespaces (#74)

Download

• Release Notes
• Sources
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 5 (dependencies)
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 6 (dependencies)
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 7 (dependencies)
• PyPI
• pgespresso on PostgreSQL Extension framework (PGXN)
• pgespresso RPM/Debian packages
• barman-cli RPM/Debian packages
• Online documentation
• PDF documentation

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 to reduce risk and help DBAs during the recovery phase.

Barman is distributed under GNU GPL 3 and maintained by 2ndQuadrant.

Devart has released a new version of dbForge Data Compare for PostgreSQL – a powerful and easy to use tool for table data comparison and synchronization.

Devart, a Czech software provider of database connectivity solutions and tools for database management and development, announced the release of dbForge Data Compare for PostgreSQL that comes with support for PostgreSQL 9.5, 9.6, redesigned Comparison Document, and with the new Document Categories feature.

Data Compare for PostgreSQL has the following new features and improvements:

• Support for PostgreSQL 9.5, 9.6
• Comparison document has been completely redesigned
• New JSON View and redesigned XML view in Data Editor and Viewer window
• Ability to assign categories for documents from different connections
• New installation wizard and redesigned skins
• New easy to use trial product activation

dbForge Data Compare for PostgreSQL is a Postgre Data Diff and Sync tool that allows users to review all the differences in tables being compared and execute an automatically generated script to remove these differences.

For more information about dbForge Data Compare for PostgreSQL, please visit https://www.devart.com/dbforge/postgresql/datacompare/.

About Devart

Devart is one of the leading developers of database tools and administration software, ALM solutions, data providers for various database servers, data integration and backup solutions. The company also implements Web and Mobile development projects.

Learn more about Devart at https://www.devart.com.

Following the success of first pan-Asia Postgres event - pgDay Asia 2016 held in March 2016, we are pleased to announce pgDay Asia 2017 to be held in Singapore. The conference will be held along with FOSSASIA - one of the largest FOSS conference on the planet. pgDay Asia will be PostgreSQL conference series for all PostgreSQL enthusiasts in the Asia Pacific region.

For more details on FOSSASIA check FOSSASIA 2017 website

So, you will be able to enjoy one of the largest PostgreSQL conference in Asia and one of the largest FOSS conferences to meet new friends in Asia in the same week!

We would also like to open Call For Paper for pgDay Asia 2017. Some of the topics which can be used for submitting a talk are- 1. Migration projects 2. Performance troubleshooting and tuning 3. noSQL and geo-spatial features of Postgres 4. Unique use-case and customer stories 5. Postgres internals and their value for end users

For some examples you can refer to the papers which were presented at last year's event

Of course we are happy to receive proposal for talk on other PostgreSQL related topics as well.

To submit you proposal for presentation please go to this submission link

Dates

Friday, March 17th - Postgres Talks at pgDay Asia Saturday, March 18th - pgDay 2017 at FOSSASIA 2017

Venue

To be Announced

Important Dates

2016-12-16: Proposals acceptance begins 2017-01-16: Proposals acceptance ends 2017-01-20: Authors of accepted proposals contacted

If you need any additional information please contact our team at pgday-asia@googlegroups.com

Let's meet many PG and FOSS folks in Singapore!

This conference is organized by the PostgreSQL people from Asian communities (You can see the list on the web site). If you have any question, feel free to contact us on pgday-asia@googlegroups.com. The finances and local logistics for pgDay Asia 2016 are being handled by Ashnik Pte Ltd, Singapore this year.

As always, this event will not be possible without generous sponsorship and support from many different organizations. We will be soon sharing details of sponsorship opportunities at pgDay Asia 2017.

Registration for the FOSDEM PGDay 2017 in Brussels is now open.

FOSDEM PGDay 2017 is a one day, one track conference which is held as an extension to the PostgreSQL activities at FOSDEM. It takes place on Ferbruary 3rd in the Brussels Marriott hotel.

Registration for the FOSDEM PGDay 2017 is required. Registration for FOSDEM itself or the PostgreSQL Devroom at FOSDEM is not required.

More information on the event, venue and schedule as well as registration can be found here:

https://2017.fosdempgday.org/

FOSDEM PGDay 2017 is a one day conference held this year on February 3rd followed immediately by the two day FOSDEM conference in Brussels at which we'll be hosting additional sessions on February 5th.

For more information on FOSDEM PGDay, please see:

https://2017.fosdempgday.org/

For more information on FOSDEM, please see:

https://fosdem.org/2017/

The call for papers for both the PGDay and FOSDEM Devroom has now been extended until midnight CET, 4th December. If you would like to submit a talk, please see the website:

https://2017.fosdempgday.org/callforpapers/

Talks may be on any topic related to PostgreSQL in some way. Suggested topic areas include:

• Developing applications with or for PostgreSQL
• Administering large scale PostgreSQL installations
• Case studies and/or success stories of PostgreSQL deployments (or interesting failures)
• PostgreSQL tools and utilities
• PostgreSQL internals hacking
• Community and local user groups
• Tuning and performance improvements
• Migration from other database systems
• Scaling, Clustering and High Availability
• Replication
• Recovery and Backup strategies
• Benchmarking and hardware
• PostgreSQL related products
• DevOps and continuous deployment/configuration/integration around PostgreSQL

Of course, we're happy to receive proposals for talks on other PostgreSQL related topics as well.

NOTE: Please submit talks through our website for both the PGDay and FOSDEM Devroom. DO NOT use the FOSDEM Pentabarf system as we are notmanaging the PostgreSQL talks though it.

The PostgreSQL Europe team will also have a table throughout the FOSDEM event; please feel free to stop by to chat with us about PostgreSQL and pickup some swag!

Version 4.0 of DbWrench is now available for download.

This release marks the switch from version 3 to version 4 of the product cycle. This release focused on the complete replacement of the editor code complete framework. We believe the new code complete framework is more compact and much more responsive. Also the look and styling for the database documentation has been improved.

It is our hope that these improvement will make DbWrench easier to use and make you more productive.

A free trial download of this latest version is available at www.dbwrench.com.

Thank you for your continued support of our product!

We are pleased to announce the launch of The Israel PostgreSQL Community website.

Our goal is to promote PostgreSQL knowledge and usage in Israel by collaboration of all interested in it users.

The site will publish PostgreSQL global and regional community news and events.

We will promote PostgreSQL usage among students and pupils by providing lectures in colleges and high schools. We'll be glad for any help from the community for any relevant presentation content that can be useful for those populations.

There is a forum with variety of topics and blog section with relevant posts.

We are going to organize PGDAY at the beginning of the next year in Israel.

We are calling all PostgreSQL users in Israel to join effort and build strong and valuable community.

We initiated the process of product documentation translation. This is the time consuming process and we'll be glad if other users will be able to help us.

Please visit us at http://postgresql.org.il/.

I am proud to announce the 2.0.0 version of E-Maj.

E-Maj is a PostgreSQL extension which enables fine-grained write logging and time travel on subsets of the database.

This new version supports PostgreSQL 9.1+ versions. It is now installed as a native postgres extension. The new "E-Maj rollback consolidation" feature brings more flexibility while the use of event triggers brings more reliability. The E-Maj phpPgAdmin plugin has been improved as well to use these new features.

The core extension is available at pgxn.org or github.org. It includes a general presentation and a detailed documentation. The phpPgAdmin plugin is also available at github.org.

Have fun with E-Maj !

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports the next major release of the PostgreSQL open source database, version 9.6.1. New features include parallel query, phrase search, and improvements to performance and usability. With this release, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL also supports the bloom and pg_visibility extensions.

You can create a new Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 9.6.1 database instance with just a few clicks from the AWS Management Console or you can upgrade an existing PostgreSQL 9.5 database instance using point-and-click upgrade. Upgrading from version 9.3 and 9.4 requires you to perform a point-and-click upgrade to the next major version, reaching version 9.5 before upgrading to 9.6.1. Each upgrade operation involves a short period of unavailability for your database instance. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Visit the product page to learn more about Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

The JDBC group is pleased to announce the release.

Notable fixes

• ? can now be used in non-prepared statements (fixed regression of 9.4.1210)

Thanks to all of the contributors

The PostgreSQL Magazine project is back with an original concept named The Paper Elephant : a folded newspaper with a dynamic look & feel.

As always the content comes directly from the community ! In this first issue, we gathered articles from key members of the PostgreSQL project: Josh Berkus talks about the new version numbering scheme,
Hans-Jürgen Schönig writes about performance and Craig Kierstens an overview of JSON, JSONB and hstore. You'll also find an interview of Paul Ramsey from the PostGIS project.

The Paper Elephant is an independent media edited by and for the PostgreSQL Community. This issue was created with the financial help of PostgreSQL Europe and many benevolent contributors ( witers, editors, reviewers ). Kudos to all of them.

Just like the name says, The Paper Elephant is a "paper first" media: it is designed to be printed out and distributed during events (conferences, meetups, etc.) to promote PostgreSQL.

The first edition will be available at PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2016, Paris Open Source Summit 2016 and FOSDEM 2017. If you want to distribute the magazine at a local IT event, please Contact Us !

If you want a glimpse of the newspaper, you can download the PDF version here: http://pgmag.org/download

The Paper Elephant is an open and community-driven project. Joins us at http://www.pgmag.org/contribute

November 1, 2016: Crunchy Data is proud to announce pgBackRest 1.09, Reliable PostgreSQL Backup & Restore.

Release 1.09

Since 1.0 we have improved scalability, added backup from a standby, selective restore, and support for the 9.6 non-exclusive backup method. All the major new features since 1.0 are detailed below.

Links

• Website
• Download
• Release Notes
• Documentation
• User Guide
• Support

New Features

Improved Multi-Processing Scalability

Converted Perl threads to child processes to improve compatibility and greatly increase scalability. 3TB/hour backup speeds can be achieved with 32 cores and 10GbE, including compression and checksums.

Backup from a Standby Cluster

Performing backups on a standby host greatly reduces CPU and IO load on the master host. pgBackRest copies the majority of the files from the standby and only a few from the master, while still producing a backup exactly as if it were performed entirely on the master.

Selective Restore

Selected databases can be restored from a cluster backup to save space when not all the databases are required. WAL replay during restore takes place for all databases so some space will be used, but generally far less than if the unneeded databases were restored completely. After recovery completes the unrestored databases will not be accessible but can be dropped in the usual way.

Non-Exclusive Backups

Support for non-exclusive backups in PostgreSQL 9.6.

Directory/File Exclusions

Exclude directories during backup that are cleaned, recreated, or zeroed by PostgreSQL at startup. These include pgsql_tmp and pg_stat_tmp. The postgresql.auto.conf.tmp file is now excluded in addition to files that were already excluded: backup_label.old, postmaster.opts, postmaster.pid, recovery.conf, recovery.done.

Exclude contents of $PGDATA/pg_replslot directory so that replication slots on the master do not become part of the backup.

Enhanced Info Command

Enhanced text output of info command to include timestamps, sizes, and the reference list for all backups.

Check Command

Added check command to validate that pgBackRest is configured correctly for archiving and backups.

Flexible Configuration

More flexible configuration for databases. Master and standby can both be configured on the backup server and pgBackRest will automatically determine which is the master. This means no configuration changes for backup are required after failing over from a master to standby when a separate backup server is used.

About

pgBackRest aims to be a simple, reliable backup and restore system that can seamlessly scale up to the largest databases and workloads. Instead of relying on traditional backup tools like tar and rsync, pgBackRest implements all backup features internally and uses a custom protocol for communicating with remote systems. Removing reliance on tar and rsync allows for better solutions to database-specific backup challenges. The custom remote protocol allows for more flexibility and limits the types of connections that are required to perform a backup which increases security.

Crunchy Data supports the ongoing and active development of pgBackRest as an entirely open source project, released under the BSD-compatible MIT license.

Yohz Software announces the release of DB Doc 3.2 on October 24, 2016, and is available for immediate download.

Changes in this version:

• Added support for PostgreSQL 9.6
• Improved PDF and Word export progress report.
• Added tables, views, domains, sequences, and functions listing page for PDF and Word reports.

DB Doc benefits:

• Create documents in HTML, CHM, PDF, and MS Word formats
• Eliminate tedious and time-consuming manual documentation tasks
• Satisfy audit requirements by keeping complete and timely documentation
• Document a database in a couple of clicks
• View inter-object and inter-database dependencies in your documents
• Document layouts can be fully customizable to suit your requirements
• Keep teams up to date by distributing documentation
• Runs on Windows XP to Windows 10
• Runs in Wine, so you can use DB Doc on your favorite Linux distribution
• Supports PostgreSQL 8.3 to 9.6, without the need for any additional database drivers.

For more details about DB Doc, visit the product page here.

The pgAdmin Development Team are pleased to announce the release of pgAdmin 4 v1.1. This is the second release of pgAdmin 4, and includes over 40 bug fixes and improvements. For details, please see the issue tracker roadmap.

pgAdmin 4 is a complete rewrite of pgAdmin, built using Python and Javascript/jQuery. A desktop runtime written in C++ with Qt allows it to run standalone for individual users, or the web application code may be deployed directly on a webserver for use by one or more users through their web browser. The software has the look and feel of a desktop application whatever the runtime environment is, and vastly improves on pgAdmin III with updated user interface elements, multi-user/web deployment options, dashboards and a more modern design.

For more information, checkout the screenshots and online documentation

pgAdmin 4 will be bundled with the EDB PostgreSQL 9.6.1 installers, or can be downloaded in source, PIP wheel, macOS or Windows packages from the pgAdmin website.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of our database system, including 9.6.1, 9.5.5, 9.4.10, 9.3.15, 9.2.19, and 9.1.24. This is also the last update for the PostgreSQL 9.1 series as it is now end-of-life. This release fixes two issues that can cause data corruption, which are described in more detail below. It also patches a number of other bugs reported over the last three months. The project urges users to apply this update at the next possible downtime.

WAL-logging of truncated relations

Prior to this release, there was a chance that a PostgreSQL instance would try to access data that no longer existed on disk. If the free space map was not updated to be aware of the truncation, a PostgreSQL database could return a page that was already truncated and produce an error such as:

ERROR:  could not read block 28991 in file "base/16390/572026": read only 0 of 8192 bytes

If checksumming is enabled, checksum failures in the visibility map could also occur.

This issue is present in the 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, and 9.6 series of PostgreSQL releases.

pg_upgrade issues on big-endian machines

On big-endian machines (e.g. many non-Intel CPU architectures), pg_upgrade would incorrectly write the bytes of the visibility map leading to pg_upgrade failing to complete.

If you are using a big-endian machine (many non-Intel architectures are big-endian) and have used pg_upgrade to upgrade from a pre-9.6 release, you should assume that all visibility maps are incorrect and need to be regenerated. It is sufficient to truncate each relation's visibility map with contrib/pg_visibility's pg_truncate_visibility_map() function. Please read the "Updating" section for post-installation instructions on how to resolve this issue on your PostgreSQL instances.

This issue is present only in the PostgreSQL 9.6.0 release.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

In addition to the above, this update also fixes a number of bugs reported in the last few months. Some of these issues affect only the 9.6 series, but many affect all supported versions. There are more than 50 fixes provided in this release, including:

• Fix use-after-free hazard in execution of aggregate functions using DISTINCT, which could lead to crashes
• Fix incorrect handling of polymorphic aggregates used as window functions, which could lead to crashes
• Fix incorrect creation of GIN index WAL records on big-endian machines
• Fix file descriptor leakage when truncating a temporary relation of more than 1GB
• Fix query-lifespan memory leak in a bulk UPDATE on a table with a PRIMARY KEY or REPLICA IDENTITY index
• Fix SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE to correctly lock tuples that have been updated by a subsequently-aborted transaction
• Fix COPY with a column name list from a table that has row-level security enabled
• Fix deletion of speculatively inserted TOAST tuples when backing out of INSERT ... ON CONFLICT
• Fix timeout length when VACUUM is waiting for exclusive table lock so that it can truncate the table
• Fix bugs in merging inherited CHECK constraints while creating or altering a table
• Fix replacement of array elements in jsonb_set()
• Fix possible sorting error when aborting use of abbreviated keys in btree indexes
• On Windows, retry creation of the dynamic shared memory control segment after an access-denied error
• Fix pgbench's calculation of average latency
• Make pg_receivexlog work correctly with --synchronous without slots
• Make pg_rewind turn off synchronous_commit in its session on the source servere
• Don't try to share SSL contexts across multiple connections in libpq
• Support OpenSSL 1.1.0
• Install TAP test infrastructure so that it's available for extension testing
• Several fixes for logical WAL decoding and replication slots
• Several fixes for minor issues in pg_dump, pg_xlogdump, and pg_upgrade
• Several fixes for minor issues in the query planner and in the output of EXPLAIN
• Several fixes for timezone support

This update also contains tzdata release 2016h for DST law changes in Palestine and Turkey, plus historical corrections for Turkey and some regions of Russia. Switch to numeric abbreviations for some time zones in Antarctica, the former Soviet Union, and Sri Lanka.

The IANA time zone database previously provided textual abbreviations for all time zones, sometimes making up abbreviations that have little or no currency among the local population. They are in process of reversing that policy in favor of using numeric UTC offsets in zones where there is no evidence of real-world use of an English abbreviation. At least for the time being, PostgreSQL will continue to accept such removed abbreviations for timestamp input. But they will not be shown in the pg_timezone_names view nor used for output.

In this update, AMT is no longer shown as being in use to mean Armenia Time. Therefore, we have changed the Default abbreviation set to interpret it as Amazon Time, thus UTC-4 not UTC+4.

EOL Notice for Version 9.1

PostgreSQL version 9.1 is now End-of-Life (EOL). No additional updates or security patches will be released by the community for this version. Users still on 9.1 are urged to upgrade as soon as possible. See our Versioning Policy (https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/) for more information.

Updating

All PostgreSQL update releases are cumulative. As with other minor releases, users are not required to dump and reload their database or use pg_upgrade in order to apply this update release; you may simply shut down PostgreSQL and update its binaries.

If your system was affected by the big-endian pg_upgrade bug, please read Visibility Map Problems and follow the instructions on how to fix your this issue on your PostgreSQL instances.

Users who have skipped one or more update releases may need to run additional, post-update steps; please see the release notes for earlier versions for details.

Links:

• Download
• Release Notes
• Security Page
• Versioning Policy