PostgreSQL has roughly one-quarter of the market share of MySQL, and I’d guess that PHP projects favor MySQL even more.  But PostgreSQL deserves some love from the PHP community too.  PostgreSQL is open source with a simpler license that’s closer to PHP’s license.  As RDBMS technology, PostgreSQL has always been more advanced than MySQL.  Don’t you wish MySQL supported check constraints?  Sequences?  Recursive queries, common table expressions, and window functions?

This week PostgreSQL.org has announced the release of 9.0 beta 1, showing that the project continues to advance rapidly (8.4 went GA less than a year ago).  The new beta release includes quite a few exciting and long-awaited features, including, but not limited to:

• New, easy to use binary replication
• Continuous archive to warm standby or read-only slaves
• Anonymous blocks
• Mass grant/revoke operations
• 64-bit support on Windows
• Named parameters for stored procedures
• Per-column and conditional triggers

Josh Berkus has written a post encouraging users to test many interesting but perhaps less-publicized features in PostgreSQL 9.0.

Devrim Gunduz has written a blog on how to install PostgreSQL 9.0 beta 1 on your Fedora/CentOS/RHEL Linux server.

The PostgreSQL wiki has a helpful article on How to Beta Test.

You can download PostgreSQL 9.0 beta 1 source at postgresql.org, or binaries for Linux, Mac or Windows at enterprisedb.com (you’re invited to register to gain access to tutorials, but you can download the software without registering).