The anticipated December 15th release obviously didn't happen for a variety of reasons. PostgreSQL 8.0 is now at Release Candidate 3, and the latest target is now January 15th, with this being the final Release Candidate.

This release contains mainly documentation changes. An initdb is not required.

• Release announcement: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2005-01/msg00027.php
• Mirrors: http://wwwmaster.postgresql.org/download/mirrors-ftp
• Bittorrent: http://bt.postgresql.org

The recent outage seems to have ended (announcement) and all sites now seem to be working. Mail is coming through too.

The lastest Weekly News indicates that 8.0 will be released around the 15th of December. With no more catalogue changes likely, this site is now running on 8.0rc1.

It looks like a major outage has hit many websites and other internet services run by the PostgreSQL project. The main site http://www.postgresql.org is still up, but many subsidiary projects such as gborg, techdocs, pgAdmin and the mailing lists are down.

Update: http://www.postgresql.org is now carrying a notice attributing the outage to "a network problem at our primary data center"

Following three months of beta testing, the first release candidate has been packaged and made available for download. It contains mainly minor fixes and documentation updates. The changelog from Beta 5 is at ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/v8.0.0beta/ChangeLog-Beta5-to-RC1.

This release does not require an initdb.

• Release announcement: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2004-12/msg00003.php
• Mirrors: http://www.postgresql.org/mirrors-ftp.html
• Bittorrent: http://bt.postgresql.org
• pginstaller (for Win32): http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller/

The latest version of PostgreSQL's GUI tool, pgAdmin III has been released following a year of development. Running on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD it supports new features to be introduced in the coming PostgreSQL 8.0 release.

Users of some client software designed to support PostgreSQL 8.0, which is currently in late beta, are occasionally reporting errors along the lines of:

  column n.nsptablespace does not exist

This is a result of a last-minute change to the system catalogues, which has not yet been incorporated into the latest releases of some client applications such as phpPgAdmin and EMS PostgreSQL-Manager.

One more, probably the final beta version has just been released, containing a lot of minor fixes. One extreme case with tables containing more than 65535 columns causing crashes has been fixed. In the Windows version the default external editor in psql is now NOTEPAD.EXE. The changelog from Beta 4 is at ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/v8.0.0beta/ChangeLog-Beta4-to-Beta5.

This beta requires an initdb.

• Mirrors: http://www.postgresql.org/mirrors-ftp.html
• Bittorrent: http://bt.postgresql.org
• pginstaller (for Win32): http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller/

Among the many "headline" features scheduled for the upcoming PostgreSQL 8.0 release, such as the Windows version, there is a whole bunch of less glamourous additions which might not blow the PHB's mind, but make life that little bit easier for the humble DBA / developer. Some of these involve PostgreSQL's SERIAL type.