The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces that the first beta release of PostgreSQL 15 is now available for download. This release contains previews of all features that will be available when PostgreSQL 15 is made generally available, though some details of the release can change during the beta period.
You can find information about all of the features and changes found in PostgreSQL 15 in the release notes:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/15/release-15.html
In the spirit of the open source PostgreSQL community, we strongly encourage you to test the new features of PostgreSQL 15 on your systems to help us eliminate bugs or other issues that may exist. While we do not advise you to run PostgreSQL 15 Beta 1 in production environments, we encourage you to find ways to run your typical application workloads against this beta release.
Your testing and feedback will help the community ensure that the PostgreSQL 15 release upholds our standards of delivering a stable, reliable release of the world's most advanced open source relational database. Please read more about our beta testing process and how you can contribute:
https://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta/
PostgreSQL 15 adds new features for simplifying and enhancing the developer experience.
This release introduces MERGE,
a SQL standard command for conditionally performing write operations (INSERT,
UPDATE, or DELETE) on data. Prior to this release, the same behavior could
be accomplished either using stored procedures or, on a limited-basis, with
INSERT ... ON CONFLICT.
With PostgreSQL 15, developers can write simple, expressive queries to choose
the appropriate data modification action to take.
PostgreSQL added support for JSON in 2012 as part of the 9.2 release. The SQL/JSON standard, published five years later, specified a variety of interfaces for accessing and manipulating JSON data stored in relational databases. PostgreSQL 15 builds on its existing support for the SQL/JSON path language by including more standard SQL/JSON functions. These include SQL/JSON constructors, query / introspection functions, and the ability to convert JSON data into a table.
PostgreSQL 15 adds more regular expression functions,
including regexp_count , regexp_instr, regexp_like, and regexp_substr.
the range_agg
function, introduced in PostgreSQL 15 for aggregating
range data types into
multirange types, now supports aggregating multirange types too.
PostgreSQL 15 continues to build on its performance gains over the past several
releases. This release includes a significant speedup for sorting data when
sorting over larger data sets. In particular, these are data sets that exceed
the work_mem parameter.
The performance gains of PostgreSQL 15 extend to a variety of query types.
This includes the introduction of parallelization for
SELECT DISTINCT
statements and improvements in performance to
window functions
that use row_number(), rank(), and count(). Applications that use the
PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper
postgres_fdw to manage
data on remote PostgreSQL servers can now enable
transactions to be committed in parallel. There are also several performance enhancements for queries
involving tables with partitions.
PostgreSQL system and TOAST tables, used for storing data that is larger than a single page (8kB), can now utilize index deduplication and benefit from smaller indexes and faster lookups.
The psql \copy command, used to bulk load data, also has performance
improvements in PostgreSQL 15.
Building on the previous release that introduced LZ4 compression, PostgreSQL 15 adds support for Zstandard (zstd) compression to various components.
pg_basebackup, a
utility used to take full backups of a PostgreSQL cluster, now supports
server-side compression using Gzip, LZ4, or Zstandard compression. The
pg_basebackup client can now also decompress backups that use LZ4 and
Zstandard compression.
Write-ahead log (WAL) files can now be compressed using both LZ4 and Zstandard
compression through the
wal_compression
configuration parameter. Additionally, PostgreSQL 15 also adds the
recovery_prefetch
option that can help speed up recovery operations by prefetching data blocks.
This release adds a new module called pg_walinspect
that lets you inspect information about WAL files directly from SQL.
PostgreSQL 15 lets you perform WAL archiving without running a shell command by
specifying an
archive_library.
An example WAL archiving library can be found in the
basic_archive module.
Additionally, extensions can now define their own WAL resource managers that
lets them work with logical replication.
PostgreSQL 15 introduces both row filtering and column filtering for logical replication. Additionally, users can now conveniently specify to publish all tables in a schema, where previously it was only possible to do this for all tables in a database.
This release also adds more support for handling
conflicts.
A subscriber can now specify disable_on_error to automatically stop logical
replication on an error.
PostgreSQL 15 makes it possible to skip applying changes using the
ALTER SUBSCRIPTION ... SKIP
command.
PostgreSQL 15 introduces the
jsonlog format for logging. This allows PostgreSQL logs to be consumed by many programs
that perform structured log aggregation and analysis. PostgreSQL 15 now by
default logs checkpoints and autovacuum operations that are slow.
The psql client now has a
command called \dconfig for inspecting the values of configuration parameters.
By default, \dconfig displays any configuration parameter that is not set to
its default value.
PostgreSQL 15 now stores all server-level statistics in shared memory. The server no longer runs a statistics collector process.
The ALTER TABLE
command can now modify a table's ACCESS METHOD, which is used to set the
storage system used by the table.
PostgreSQL 15 introduces new defaults when databases are created within a
PostgreSQL cluster. When a new database is created, users outside of the
database owner (represented by pg_database_owner)
and superusers can no longer create objects in the default public schema.
PostgreSQL 15 adds support for "security invoker views", which uses the privileges of the user executing the query instead of the user who created the view.
Unprivileged users in PostgreSQL 15 can now be
granted privileges to
change server variables via SET and ALTER SYSTEM.
Many other new features and improvements have been added to PostgreSQL 15. Many of these may also be helpful for your use cases. Please see the release notes for a complete list of new and changed features:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/15/release-15.html
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 general availability of PostgreSQL 15. 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 first beta release of version 15. The PostgreSQL Project will release additional betas as required for testing, followed by one or more release candidates, until the final release in late 2022. For further information please see the Beta Testing page.