PostgreSQL 8.3.0 was released on February 4, 2008. There are a number of valuable enhancements in this version including Heap Only Tuples and integration of full text search. It is also reputed to provide a performance increase of at least 5% over 8.2.6.

As usual, RHEL compatible RPMS are available at postgresql.org. However, there is a new (to me at least) project at http://yum.pgsqlrpms.org/ which provides a YUM repository for recent updates (actually everything from 7.4 to 8.3) to PostgreSQL suitable for RHEL 4.5 and 5 and Fedora 7 and 8. They also provide a YUM configuration RPM for each distro as well.

Those who, like me, choose to judiciously update packages in advance of the upstream vendor and wish to employ postgrsql 8.3 may find this a much more convenient method than manually upgrading and updating via RPM. Note that a pgdump of all existing databases before upgrading, removal of the tablespace in /var/lib/pgsql/data, performing an initdb following the software upgrade and finally a restore from the backup are still (and painfully) required to upgrade from versions older than 8.3.0

Note as well that some the preset configuration values in postgres.conf have changed, that some options have been removed and new ones added so that a diff between the former conf file and the new one followed by some manual editing is required to preserve local customizations. I caution against simply copying the old postgres.conf file over into the upgraded installation.