Re: PostgreSQL 12: Feature Highlights

On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 6:28 PM Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Now that a draft of the release notes are available[1] this seems like a
> good time to begin determining what features we want to highlight prior
> to the Beta 1 announcement. First, a small editorial :)
>
> Reading through the list a few times, it is quite impressive the breadth
> of features that are available for PostgreSQL 12 and the impact they can
> have on our user workloads. I think this is very exciting and I think
> our users will be very impressed with this release :) It also presents
> some challenges for coming up with features to highlight, but I call
> this a "good problem."
>
> (I am less inclined to "trim the list" for the sake of doing so for a
> Beta 1 announcement, as based on an analysis of the data, often what
> people read are the announcements itself and not the release notes, so
> trying to get as much info in front of people without making it too
> tedious is the goal.)
>
> Knowing that the target audience of the announcements are users of
> PostgreSQL, and knowing the main goals of the beta announcement is to
> both make people aware of features and to encourage testing, I think we
> need to divide things into a few groups:
>
> - Feature Highlights
> - Changes that could affect existing operating environments
>
> Also note below that the way I am listing them out does not constitute a
> rank order as this list is just an initial compilation.
>
> With further ado...
>
> # Feature Highlights
>
> 1. Partitioning Improvements
>
> - Performance, e.g. enhanced partition pruning, COPY performance, ATTACH
> PARTITION
> - Foreign Keys
> - Partition bounds now support expressions
>
> 2. Query parallelism is now supported in SERIALIZABLE transaction mode
>
> 3. Indexing
>
> - Improvements overall performance to standard (B-tree) indexes with
> writes as well as with bloat
> - REINDEX CONCURRENTLY
> - GiST indexes now support covering indexes (INCLUDE clause)
> - SP-GiST indexes now support K-NN queries
> - WAL overhead reduced on GiST, GIN, & SP-GiST index creation
>
> 4. CREATE STATISTICS now supports most-common value statistics, which
> leads to improved query plans for distributions that are non-uniform
>
> 5. WITH queries (CTEs) can now be inlined, subject to certain restrictions
>
> 6. Support for JSON path queries per the SQL/JSON standard as well as
> support for indexing on equality expressions

Support for JSON path queries per the SQL/JSON specification in SQL-2016, which
can be accelerated by existing (on disk) indexes.

>
> 7. Introduction of generated columns that compute and store an
> expression as a value on the table
>
> 8. Enable / disable page checksums for an offline cluster
>
> 9. Authentication
>
> - GSSAPI client/server encryption support
> - LDAP server discovery
>
> 10. Introduction of CREATE ACCESS METHOD that permits the addition of
> new table storage types
>
> # Changes That Can Affect Existing Operating Environments
>
> 1. recovery.conf merged into postgresql.conf;
> recovery.signal/standby.signal being used for switching into non-primary
> mode
>
> 2. JIT enabled by default
>
> As always, constructive feedback welcome. With the goal in mind that
> this will be turned into a Beta 1 announcement, please indicate if you
> believe something is missing or if something does not belong on this list.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Jonathan
>
> [1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/release-12.html
>

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