techno.blog("Dion")

I am a big fan of PostgreSQL. One of the pain points, however, is using it on Windows. You can try to build the damn thing with cygwin installed (which is painful), or you can download an old build for use.

Native Windows support was going to be in 7.4, but got pushed out to 8.0. Now we see the beginings of the labours:

After almost 9 months of development, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group is proud to announce that development on PostgreSQL 8.0.0 has now finished, and is ready for some serious testing.

For those wondering about the 8.0.0 designation on this release, there have been several *very* large features included in this release that we felt warranted the jump. As with all of our releases, we aim to have this one as rock solid as possible, but *at least* one of the features added to this release involved such changes that may warrant a bit extra testing post-release before deploying it in production.

Although the list of new features in 8.0.0 is extensive, with both SMB (Win32 Native Support) and Enterprise (Nested Transactions and Point in
Time Recory) features being added, there is one thing that hasn’t been included as part of the core distribution, and that is a Windows Installer, which can be found at:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller

For a complete list of changes/improvements since 7.4.0 was released, please see:

http://developer.postgresql.org/beta-history.txt

That said, and without further ado, Beta 1 is currently available for download on all mirrors (look under source/v8.0.0beta):

http://www.postgresql.org/mirrors-ftp.html

And, thanks to David Fetter, the Beta is also available via BitTorrent at:

http://bt.postgresql.org