The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces that the second beta release of PostgreSQL 11 is now available for download. This release contains previews of all features that will be available in the final release of PostgreSQL 11 (though some details of the release could change before then) as well as bug fixes that were reported during the first beta.
In the spirit of the open source PostgreSQL community, we strongly encourage you to test the new features of PostgreSQL 11 in your database systems to help us eliminate any bugs or other issues that may exist. While we do not advise for you to run PostgreSQL 11 Beta 2 in your production environments, we encourage you to find ways to run your typical application workloads against this beta release.
To upgrade to PostgreSQL 11 Beta 2 from Beta 1 or an earlier version of PostgreSQL, you will to use a strategy similar to upgrading between major versions of PostgreSQL (e.g. pg_upgrade or pg_dump / pg_restore). For more information, please visit the documentation section on upgrading.
The PostgreSQL 11 Beta 1 release announced "Channel Binding for SCRAM Authentication" as a major feature as it could prevent man-in-the-middle attacks when using SCRAM authentication. During the course of testing, it was determined that libpq, the client connection library for PostgreSQL, is unable force the use of channel binding.
While this functionality can be fixed in a future version of PostgreSQL, for now channel binding for SCRAM authentication will not be considered a major feature for PostgreSQL 11.
There have been many bug fixes for PostgreSQL 11 reported during the Beta 1 period and applied to the Beta 2 release. Several bug fixes reported for version 10 or earlier that also affected version 11 are included in the Beta 2 release. These fixes include:
xpath and xpath_exists functions, as well as XMLTABLEINSERTs and generating incorrect paths for partitionwise aggregatespg_replication_slot_advance including returning NULL if the slot is not advanced and changes for how the slot is updated depending on if it is a physical or logical replication slotpg_resetwal works with relative paths to data directoryvariance and similar aggregate functions return accurate results when executed using parallel queryCOPY FROM .. WITH HEADER would drop a line after every 4,294,967,296 lines processedSHOW ALL to display superuser configuration settings to roles that are allowed to read all settingspg_upgrade that ensures defaults are written when using the "fast ALTER TABLE .. ADD COLUMN" feature with a non-NULL defaultThis update also contains tzdata release 2018e, with updates for North Korea. The 2018e also reintroduces the negative-DST changes that were originally introduced in 2018a, which affects historical and present timestamps for Ireland (1971-), as well as historical timestamps for Namibia (1994-2017) and the former Czechoslovakia (1946-1947). If your application is storing timestamps with those timezones in the affected date ranges, we ask that you please test to ensure your applications behave as expected.
The stability of each PostgreSQL release greatly depends on you, the community, to test the upcoming version with your workloads and testing tools in order to find bugs and regressions before the release of PostgreSQL 11. As this is a Beta, minor changes to database behaviors, feature details, and APIs are still possible. Your feedback and testing will help determine the final tweaks on the new features, so please test in the near future. The quality of user testing helps determine when we can make a final release.
A list of open issues is publicly available in the PostgreSQL wiki. You can report bugs using this form on the PostgreSQL website:
https://www.postgresql.org/account/submitbug/
This is the second beta release of version 11. The PostgreSQL Project will release additional betas as required for testing, followed by one or more release candidates, until the final release in late 2018. For further information please see the Beta Testing page.