PostgreSQL 9.2 has been released, and the open source database is now poised to drive even greater user adoption for Web, transactional and big data applications.

Thanks to index-only scans, reductions in CPU power consumption and the addition of linear scalability to 64 cores, PostgreSQL 9.2 offers significant improvements in scalability and developer flexibility. Thanks to several improvements in vertical scalability, PostgreSQL has the ability to better utilize hardware resources on larger servers. The results of these recent enhancements/advances are impressive, including up to 350,000 read queries per second making it more than 4X faster, index-only scans for data warehousing queries which are 2–20X faster, and up to 14,000 data writes per second (5X faster).

While PostgreSQL is far from a digital household name, the list of users is quite impressive (and may warrant further exploration). Organizations like the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Heroku.com run applications on PostgreSQL, as well as NASA, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Instagram and HP, which has adopted it for their remote support software and to power their HP-UX/Itanium solutions.