with many improvements and features. Let's find out all about them.

Despite its age, PostgreSQL isn't declining in popularity. On the contrary it's always ahead of the rest and this release is no exception; it's a mix of performance improvements and new developer features.

The most important improvements of the new release include:

• Overhauled memory management implementation for vacuum, consuming up to 20x less memory
• Optimizations to storage access and high concurrency workloads, with up to 2x better write throughput due to improvements with write-ahead log (WAL) processing. In addition great speeding up of table sequential scans
• Quicker bulk loading and exports, with up to a 2x performance improvement when exporting large rows using the COPY command
• Query execution improvements for indexes with optimizations for NOT NULL constraints as well as for queries with IN clauses that use B-tree indexes

Now let's move to the features targeting developers:

• Most importantly, the SQL/JSON standard with a few exceptions gets implemented. As such, JSON_TABLE is now available which lets developers convert JSON data into a standard PostgreSQL table, SQL/JSON constructors (JSON, JSON_SCALAR, JSON_SERIALIZE) and query functions (JSON_EXISTS, JSON_QUERY, JSON_VALUE) are now also supported. New data conversion methods have been added to the jsonpath language in accordance with the SQL standard
• The MERGE command now works with views too
• Support for identity columns in partitioned tables
• The COPY command can now ignore format conversion errors
• PL/pgSQL now supports arrays with inheritance constructs of the %TYPE and %ROWTYPE types
• Improved EXPLAIN support
• The function to_char has learned to understand the codes TZ (abbreviation from time zone) and OF (time zone offset from UTC) a while back

and so on. But that's not the only two sectors that saw changes; Logical replication and Security were also affected. 

The former gets failover control which means that it makes PostgreSQL more enduring in high availability scenarios, while the latter gets pumped up with enabling direct TLS handshakes as well as auditing of connections without authentication.

Cloud vendors have already begun upgrading to this new version, like Neon, which made the latest major version now available to all Neon users including those on the Free plan.

Postgres users rejoice!

More Information

PostgreSQL 17 Release Notes 

Related Articles

It's 2024. Why Does PostgreSQL Still Dominate?   

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info