The PostgreSQL project has announced the release of PostgreSQL 9.2 with improved scalability and developer flexibility.

The release of PostgreSQL 9.2 has been announced by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. Making the announcement, Ines Sombra, Lead Data Engineer at Engine Yard, said:

"PostgreSQL 9.2 will ship with native JSON support, covering indexes, replication and performance improvements, and many more features.”

The performance improvements come via support for up to 64 cores, alongside better lock management and index-only access. Read queries are four times faster while index-only scans for data warehousing queries are between two and 20 times faster.

On the developer side, the main changes are support for range restricted types and JSON. Range Types let you work more effectively with dates, times series and financial data for analysis. You can also create your own custom range types. The support for JSON data types meaning you can store JSON documents, and JSON functions let you convert array and row data into JSON format. Query results can be returned as JSON data types.

Other improvements for developers are extensions for PL/V8 JavaScript and PL/Coffee, and an optional HStore key-value store. These are designed to let you develop apps that use PostgreSQL as though it’s a NoSQL document database.