Two weeks ago, PostgreSQL announced the first beta version of the new major 9.1 version, with a lot of anticipated new features like synchronous replication or better support for multilingual databases. Please see the release announcement for details.

Due to my recent moving and the Ubuntu Developer Summit it took me a bit to package them for Debian and Ubuntu, but here they are at last. I uploaded postgresql-9.1 to Debian experimental; currently they are sitting in the NEW queue, but I’m sure our restless Debian archive admins will get to it in a few days. I also provided builds for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10. and 11.04 in my PostgreSQL backports for stable Ubuntu releases PPA.

I provided full postgresql-common integration, i. e. you can use all the usual tools like pg_createcluster, pg_upgradecluster etc. to install 9.1 side by side with your 8.⁴⁄₉.0 instances, attempt an upgrade of your existing instances to 9.1 without endangering the running clusters, etc. Fortunately this time there were no deprecated configuration options, so pg_upgradecluster does not actually have to touch your postgresql.conf for the 9.0 →9.1 upgrade.

They pass upstream’s and postgresql-common’s integration test suite, so should be reasonably working. But please let me know about everything that doesn’t, so that we can get them in perfect shape in time for the final release.

I anticipate that 9.1 will be the default (and only supported) version in the next Debian release (wheezy), and will most likely be the one shipped in the next Ubuntu LTS (in 12.04). It might be that the next Ubuntu release 11.10 will still ship with 9.0, but that pretty much depends on how many extensions get ported to 9.1 by feature freeze.