The new openSUSE is just around the corner so let’s take a closer look at some of the new features that you can look forward to. This time, we will concentrate on the features for servers: databases, virtualization and OpenStack packages.
Databases
openSUSE 12.3 includes the newest stable releases of most popular databases. We will have PostgreSQL, Oracle MySQL, MariaDB and a few more.
For PostgreSQL, we will have version 9.2 which comes with some nice features and especially with something to make modern web development even easier – basic JSON support. It has a JSON data type that will validate whether entered data is in fact valid JSON and store it in one cell. So you don’t have to validate it before storing, although you might want to parse it and store it in different columns/tables according to the semantics. The more interesting part it the database itself can now reply to your queries using JSON. It is currently not possible to use JSON to write structured data (apart from storing everything in one cell), but workarounds exist and we have something to look forward to in upcoming versions.
