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PostgreSQL 15 Press Kit

Contents

Original Press Release

PostgreSQL 15 Released!

October 13, 2022 - The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of PostgreSQL 15, the latest version of the world’s most advanced open source database.

PostgreSQL 15 builds on the performance improvements of recent releases with noticeable gains for managing workloads in both local and distributed deployments, including improved sorting. This release improves the developer experience with the addition of the popular MERGE command, and adds more capabilities for observing the state of the database.

"The PostgreSQL developer community continues to build features that simplify running high performance data workloads while improving the developer experience," said Jonathan Katz, a PostgreSQL Core Team member. "PostgreSQL 15 highlights how, through open software development, we can deliver to our users a database that is great for application development and safe for their critical data."

PostgreSQL, an innovative data management system known for its reliability and robustness, benefits from over 25 years of open source development from a global developer community and has become the preferred open source relational database for organizations of all sizes.

Improved Sort Performance and Compression

In this latest release, PostgreSQL improves on its in-memory and on-disk sorting algorithms, with benchmarks showing speedups of 25% - 400% based on which data types are sorted. Using row_number(), rank(), dense_rank(), and count() as window functions also have performance benefits in PostgreSQL 15. Queries using SELECT DISTINCT can now be executed in parallel.

Building on work from the previous PostgreSQL release for allowing async remote queries, the PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper, postgres_fdw, now supports asynchronous commits.

The performance improvements in PostgreSQL 15 extend to its archiving and backup facilities. PostgreSQL 15 adds support for LZ4 and Zstandard (zstd) compression to write-ahead log (WAL) files, which can have both space and performance benefits for certain workloads. On certain operating systems, PostgreSQL 15 adds support to prefetch pages referenced in WAL to help speed up recovery times. PostgreSQL's built-in backup command, pg_basebackup, now supports server-side compression of backup files with a choice of gzip, LZ4, and zstd. PostgreSQL 15 includes the ability to use custom modules for archiving, which eliminates the overhead of using a shell command.

Expressive Developer Features

PostgreSQL 15 includes the SQL standard MERGE command. MERGE lets you write conditional SQL statements that can include INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE actions within a single statement.

This latest release adds new functions for using regular expressions to inspect strings: regexp_count(), regexp_instr(), regexp_like(), and regexp_substr(). PostgreSQL 15 also extends the range_agg function to aggregate multirange data types, which were introduced in the previous release.

PostgreSQL 15 lets users create views that query data using the permissions of the caller, not the view creator. This option, called security_invoker, adds an additional layer of protection to ensure that view callers have the correct permissions for working with the underlying data.

More Options with Logical Replication

PostgreSQL 15 provides more flexibility for managing logical replication. This release introduces row filtering and column lists for publishers, letting users choose to replicate a subset of data from a table. PostgreSQL 15 adds features to simplify conflict management, including the ability to skip replaying a conflicting transaction and to automatically disable a subscription if an error is detected. This release also includes support for using two-phase commit (2PC) with logical replication.

Logging and Configuration Enhancements

PostgreSQL 15 introduces a new logging format: jsonlog. This new format outputs log data using a defined JSON structure, which allows PostgreSQL logs to be processed in structured logging systems.

This release gives database administrators more flexibility in how users can manage PostgreSQL configuration, adding the ability to grant users permission to alter server-level configuration parameters. Additionally, users can now search for information about configuration using the \dconfig command from the psql command-line tool.

Other Notable Changes

PostgreSQL server-level statistics are now collected in shared memory, eliminating both the statistics collector process and periodically writing this data to disk.

PostgreSQL 15 makes it possible to make an ICU collation the default collation for a cluster or an individual database.

This release also adds a new built-in extension, pg_walinspect, that lets users inspect the contents of write-ahead log files directly from a SQL interface.

PostgreSQL 15 also revokes the CREATE permission from all users except a database owner from the public (or default) schema.

PostgreSQL 15 removes both the long-deprecated "exclusive backup" mode and support for Python 2 from PL/Python.

About PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database, with a global community of thousands of users, contributors, companies and organizations. Built on over 30 years of engineering, starting at the University of California, Berkeley, PostgreSQL has continued with an unmatched pace of development. PostgreSQL's mature feature set not only matches top proprietary database systems, but exceeds them in advanced database features, extensibility, security, and stability.

About PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database, with a global community of thousands of users, contributors, companies and organizations. Built on over 30 years of engineering, starting at the University of California, Berkeley, PostgreSQL has continued with an unmatched pace of development. PostgreSQL's mature feature set not only matches top proprietary database systems, but exceeds them in advanced database features, extensibility, security, and stability.

Learn more about PostgreSQL and participate in our community at PostgreSQL.org.

More About the Features

For explanations of the above features and others, please see the following resources:

Where to Download

There are several ways you can download PostgreSQL 14, including:

Other tools and extensions are available on the PostgreSQL Extension Network.

Documentation

PostgreSQL 15 comes with HTML documentation HTML documentation as well as man pages, and you can also browse the documentation online in both HTML and PDF formats.

Licence

PostgreSQL uses the PostgreSQL License, a BSD-like "permissive" license. This OSI-certified license is widely appreciated as flexible and business-friendly, since it does not restrict the use of PostgreSQL with commercial and proprietary applications. Together with multi-company support and public ownership of the code, our license makes PostgreSQL very popular with vendors wanting to embed a database in their own products without fear of fees, vendor lock-in, or changes in licensing terms.

Contacts

Website

Email

Images and Logos

Postgres and PostgreSQL and the Elephant Logo (Slonik) are all registered trademarks of the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada. If you wish to use these marks, you must comply with the trademark policy.

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Corporate Support

PostgreSQL enjoys the support of numerous companies, who sponsor developers, provide hosting resources, and give us financial support. See our sponsors page for some of these project supporters.

There is also a large community of companies offering PostgreSQL Support, from individual consultants to multinational companies.

If you wish to make a financial contribution to the PostgreSQL Global Development Group or one of the recognized community non-profit organizations, please visit our donations page.