Try Postgres 8.4 Beta1 using OpenSolaris Appliance for VirtualBox

Postgres 8.4 Beta1 community binaries are now for OpenSolaris 2008.11. The Beta1 binaries for OpenSolaris can be downloaded from postgresql.org binary location. Postgres 8.4 binaries for Solaris 10 are also available.

For people who don't have OpenSolaris installed on their laptop but want to try out the new improved DTrace Probes in Postgres 8.4beta1, you can install the Minimal OpenSolaris Appliance OVF image for VirtualBox 2.2 and install the Postgres 8.4beta1 binaries in the appliance to try it out. You can also use the DTrace probes on your Mac OS X too.

Easiest way to install the binaries on the OpenSolaris Appliance is to first install SUNWwget package from the OpenSolaris repository

pkg install SUNWwget

and then using copy the download mirror url for those binaries using http and download it with wget in the appliance

wget "http://wwwmaster.postgresql.org/redir/198/h/binary/v8.4beta\
/solaris/opensolaris/i386/postgresql-8.4beta1-opensolaris.i386-32.tar.bz2"

The community binaries typically should be untarred in /opt.

bzcat postgresql-8.4beta1-opensolaris.i386-32.tar.bz2 |tar -xf -

This will then have the binaries in /opt/postgres/8.4beta1/. If you also untar the 64-bit binaries then the the 64-bit binaries are available from /opt/postgres/8.4beta1/64.

One thing that I have noticed with these binaries that it does not pick up the libraries if installed in /opt by default so depending on the type of bits you may need to set the following

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/postgres/8.4beta1/lib; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

or

LD_LIBRARY_PATH_64=/opt/postgres/8.4beta1/lib/64; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH_64

Beyond that everything should work as you would expect. Well almost... One thing to also note is that the new 8.4 GUC parameter effective_io_concurrency to allow readahead for bitmap scan index scans is disabled on OpenSolaris / Solaris 10.

 If you do find something that doesn't seem to work, please feel free to leave comments.