PostgreSQL 9.0 is here

In the realm of Real Databases, PostgreSQL has made their long-awaited 9.0 release. It comes with a bunch of interesting new features, not the least of which is builtin replication, and another bunch of interesting improvements to already-existing features.

My personal favourite:

LISTEN/NOTIFY now support a payload. Previously, I'd done things like storing a changelog in a table and then calling NOTIFY, or hackery with a NOTIFY string that included the primary key encoded somehow, resulting in the need for many LISTEN strings. But this is just so much easier, and much more, well, reasonable.

Also:

EXPLAIN enhancements. The output is now available in JSON, XML, or YAML format, and includes buffer utilization and other data not previously available.

Cute.