At EDB, we’re obsessed with applying our energy and expertise to supercharge PostgreSQL for the enterprise. That’s why our software suite consists of our flagship database management system—EDB Postgres Advanced Server—and many tools to help customers enable high availability, disaster recovery, management, and migration from legacy databases.
The focus for this year’s annual release has been usability, security and Oracle database compatibility.
Here are three good reasons to upgrade:
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Managing databases, especially multiple databases is inherently complicated. We have made usability improvements in Postgres Enterprise Manager, a GUI-based management tool that combines monitoring, alerting, and tuning of multiple open source PostgreSQL and/or EDB Postgres Advanced Server clusters. Modifying a schema or an object can be difficult if you don’t know how to navigate to it in the GUI. Now you can use the search field to find and expose an object by name.
Additional integrations make it easier to initiate backups through Backup Recovery Tool and automated failover through Failover Manager. Lastly, Postgres Enterprise Manager is now compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 AA. Complying with WCAG significantly improves access for people with disabilities, and it also means that large enterprises and those in the public sector can meet compliance requirements.
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Database security is always of paramount importance. The data must be secure and access to the data equally so. We have extended security features on multiple fronts, such as improving options for fine grained permissions, cleanly erasing memory that contains sensitive information, and enhanced auditing. On two other fronts, we have made very notable improvements: client certificates and enhanced encryption options.
Client certificates are used by an application or user to authenticate requests to a database. Many tools already use this kind of authentication, and with release 13, EDB*Loader (a bulk data loading utility) and PostgreSQL foreign data wrappers can use certificate-based authentication too.
The other significant improvements are in encryption, which are incorporated throughout the software suite. The default minimum TLS version was upgraded to TLS 1.2 and channel binding can be used with SCRAM authentication. In addition, passwords in Failover Manager configuration files are stored with stronger encryption, and Failover Manager agent communication is encrypted with jgroups message encryption features. All of these improvements allow PostgreSQL and our tools to be used in environments with higher security needs.
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Migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL just got faster. The data and code have to be moved and DBAs retrained on a new database management system. New Oracle database compatibility features in EDB Postgres Advanced server streamlines migration at the syntax and stored procedure level. Syntax compatibility enables customers to automatically partition data using LIST or HASH methods.
With this feature, EDB Postgres Advanced Server automatically creates a new partition when newly inserted data exceeds the range of an existing partition. The DDL commands CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE can now specify a custom index with "USING INDEX’ as well as a PARALLEL/NOPARALLEL option. All of these capabilities are analogous to Oracle commands reducing the learning curve for former Oracle DBAs, and migrating schemas with less risk and effort.
With regard to stored procedures, we have added support for DEFINE_COLUMN_LONG, COLUMN_VALUE_LONG, LAST_ERROR_POSITION. With compound triggers, both the statement-level and row-level action can be put into a single trigger. Compound triggers functionality has been enhanced to support WHEN clause with NEW/OLD variables and STATEMENT level trigger events. This functionality reduces the need for complex rewrites of application logic in Procedural Language and expedites the migration process.
These are just a handful of the enhancements added to EDB Postgres Advanced Server 13 and tools. Our engineering team has worked diligently to bring our annual release to market and keep our commitment to deliver it quickly and with quality.
Please refer to technical documentation on the respective products for more details. If you are an EDB customer, we encourage you to download and upgrade now. If you are not a customer, we encourage you to try our software by following the same link.