REDMOND, Wash., and WALLDORF, Germany — May 19 , 2014 — Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) have expanded their global partnership to deliver new solutions that are intended to help improve employee productivity, enhance workforce mobility and drive increased business value for customers and partners.

Monday’s announcement aims to extend the companies’ long-term partnership in three critical areas: enterprise cloud computing with business-critical SAP applications certification for Microsoft Azure; improved interoperability between data from SAP applications and Microsoft Office, including general availability of connectivity between SAP® BusinessObjects™ business intelligence (BI) solutions and Microsoft’s Power BI offering; and mobile productivity with expanded development and support for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1.

“Microsoft and SAP have a great history together, and we are committed to meeting the diverse needs of our enterprise customers,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud & Enterprise, Microsoft. “Our expanded partnership with SAP demonstrates our continued commitment to deliver the applications and services our customers need — in their private clouds, service provider clouds, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office.”

“This has been an exciting year for one of the leading strategic partnerships in our industry,” said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. “For our customers, SAP and Microsoft are among the top strategic vendors relied upon to drive their business’ success. We are proud of how we listened to our customers and together developed — and will continue to develop — innovative new programs focused on the cloud, mobility, analytics and interoperability that we expect will provide unparalleled value for our customers.”

SAP applications on Microsoft Azure

It is anticipated that by the end of Q2 2014, Microsoft and SAP will support SAP® Business Suite software, SAP Business All-In-One solutions, SAP Mobile Platform, SAP Adaptive Server® Enterprise (SAP ASE) and the developer edition of the SAP HANA® platform on Azure. In addition, Microsoft and SAP expect that customers and developers will be able to deploy and provision a number of preconfigured SAP solutions, within minutes, directly to Azure using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool.

New and existing SAP customers will be able to take advantage of the “pay per use” model in Azure to reduce infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership. Customers will be able to take advantage of the compute resources in Azure to support SAP solutions and quickly scale capacity as computing requirements change, paying only for the resources used.

Improved data access and interoperability

Monday, Microsoft and SAP made Excel connectivity to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions through Microsoft’s Power BI offering generally available. Microsoft and SAP also announced plans to deepen interoperability between applications and platforms with a new version of the SAP Gateway for Microsoft, which is expected to help customers automate business processes and access SAP applications and data through Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. Customers can get started today with the current SAP Gateway for Microsoft and upgrade to the new version when it becomes available in the second half of 2014. More information is available at SAP Gateway for Microsoft.

Increased mobile collaboration

Microsoft and SAP plan to help customers conduct business anywhere and anytime by developing and co-marketing SAP mobile apps for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1. These new applications will be managed and secured by the SAP Mobile Secure portfolio or Windows Intune. Examples of prospective offerings resulting from this increased collaboration will be showcased at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held June 3–5, 2014, in Orlando, Florida. More information can be found here.

Monday’s announcements bring exciting new capabilities to customers and opportunities for partners and developers through the combined strengths of Microsoft and SAP applications and platforms. You can learn more here.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 258,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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Yesterday saw the first beta release of the new PostgreSQL version 9.4. Along with the sources, we uploaded binary packages to Debian experimental and apt.postgresql.org, so there's now packages ready to be tested on Debian wheezy, squeeze, testing/unstable, and Ubuntu trusty, saucy, precise, and lucid.

If you are using one of the release distributions of Debian or Ubuntu, add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list to have 9.4 available:

deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ codename-pgdg main 9.4

On Debian jessie and sid, install the packages from experimental.

Happy testing!

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announced that the first beta release of PostgreSQL 9.4, the latest version of the world's leading open source database, is available today. This beta contains previews of all of the features which will be available in version 9.4, and is ready for testing by the worldwide PostgreSQL community. Please download, test, and report what you find.

Major Features

The new major features available for testing in this beta include:

• JSONB: 9.4 includes the new JSONB "binary JSON" type. This new storage format for document data is higher-performance, and comes with indexing, functions and operators for manipulating JSON data.
• Replication: The new Data Change Streaming API allows decoding and transformation of the replication stream. This lays the foundation for new replication tools that support high-speed and more flexible replication and scale-out solutions.
• Materialized Views with "Refresh Concurrently", which permit fast-response background summary reports for complex data.
• ALTER SYSTEM SET, which enables modifications to postgresql.conf from the SQL command line and from remote clients, easing administration tasks.

These features expand the capabilities of PostgreSQL, and introduce new syntax, APIs, and management interfaces.

Additional Features

There are many other features in the 9.4 beta, all of which need testing by you:

• Dynamic Background Workers
• Replication Slots
• Write Scalability improvements
• Aggregate performance improvements
• Reductions in WAL volume
• GIN indexes up to 50% smaller and faster
• Updatable security barrier views
• New array manipulation and table functions
• Time-delayed standbys
• MVCC system catalog updates
• Decrease lock level for some ALTER TABLE commands
• Backup throttling
• WITHIN GROUP

There have also been many internal changes in the inner workings of the Write Ahead Log (WAL), GIN indexes, replication, aggregation, and management of the system catalogs. The means we need you to help us find any new bugs that we may have introduced in these areas before the full release of 9.4.

For a full listing of the features in version 9.4 Beta, please see the release notes. Additional descriptions and notes on the new features are available on the 9.4 Features Wiki Page.

Test 9.4 Beta 1 Now

We depend on our community to help test the next version in order to guarantee that it is high-performance and bug-free. Please download PostgreSQL 9.4 Beta 1 and try it with your workloads and applications as soon as you can, and give feedback to the PostgreSQL developers. Features and APIs in Beta 1 will not change substantially before final release, so it is now safe to start building applications against the new features. More information on how to test and report issues

Get the PostgreSQL 9.4 Beta 1, including binaries and installers for Windows, Linux and Mac from our download page.

Full documentation of the new version is available online, and also installs with PostgreSQL.