Victoria, British Columbia -- Companies from around the world have joined forces to fund performance improvements to the PostgreSQL open source database. By pooling resources, the contributing companies have saved money while gaining important new database features for their businesses. Now, Refractions Research is pleased to report the completion of this collaborative effort to bring important concurrency improvements to the PostgreSQL GiST indexing subsystem.

The GiST indexing system is used by several PostgreSQL extensions, most notably the OpenFTS text indexing system, and Refractions' own PostGIS spatial database extension.

"A few months ago, we learned that the GiST developers were looking for funding to provide row-level locking in the GiST indexes", said Paul Ramsey, President of Refractions, "We knew how important this improvement would be to our users, so we went to our user community, told them we were looking for funding, and put up the first $2000 ourselves to prime the pump."

Members of the PostGIS community were quick to respond. In total $8000 were raised to support the enhancements, from corporate donors Refractions, Cadcorp, GlobeXplorer, Mobile Meridian, WebBased, Intevation, RealGo, Mercator GeoSystems and from individuals.

"With the number of users of our systems expected to quadruple this year, the improvements to GiST were crucial to support the ever increasing demands being placed upon our central on-line systems", said Mark Cave-Ayland, Senior Developer at WebBased. "We are very pleased to have been able to contribute financially toward this project for the benefit of all users."

"We and our users have benefited from the free availability of PostGIS for some time now, and so we were happy to support this important project that takes the final step towards enterprise status", stated Martin Daly, technical director, Cadcorp. "We know from our own experience that PostGIS is now capable of handling very large datasets, right up to national coverage of Ordnance Survey MasterMap™: a spatial dataset of over 425 million features."

Refractions provided centralized accounting, quality assurance, and results verification free of charge. "It was important for contributors to know that a third party had validated the improvements before signing off on invoices", said Ramsey.

The improvements were carried out by the PostgreSQL GiST developers, Oleg Bartunov of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute and Teodor Sigaev of Delta-Soft LLC.

Bartunov stressed the broad utility of the upgrade. "Our work ensures all GiST-based PostgreSQL extensions, such as tsearch2, ltree, intarray, PostGIS automatically inherit concurrency and recovery support."

The GiST improvements are currently available in the PostgreSQL CVS software repository, and will be included in the upcoming version 8.1 release of PostgreSQL.