Posted on 2023-09-14 by PostgreSQL Global Development Group

PostgreSQL Project

September 14, 2023 – The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the
release of PostgreSQL 16, the latest version of the world’s most advanced open
source database.

PostgreSQL 16 raises its
performance, with notable improvements to query parallelism, bulk data loading,
and logical replication. There are many features in this release for developers
and administrators alike, including more SQL/JSON syntax, new monitoring stats
for your workloads, and greater flexibility in defining access control rules for
management of policies across large fleets.

“As relational database patterns evolve, PostgreSQL continues to make
performance gains in searching and managing data at scale,” said Dave Page, a
PostgreSQL Core Team member. “PostgreSQL 16 gives users more methods to scale-up
and scale-out their workloads, while giving them new ways to gain insights and
optimize how they manage their 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.

Performance Improvements

PostgreSQL 16 improves the performance of existing PostgreSQL functionality
through new query planner optimizations. In this latest release, the
query planner can parallelize
FULL and RIGHT
joins,
generate better optimized plans for queries that use
aggregate functions
with a DISTINCT or ORDER BY clause, utilize incremental sorts for
SELECT DISTINCT
queries, and optimize
window functions
so they execute more efficiently. It also improves RIGHT and OUTER
“anti-joins”, which enables users to identify rows not present in a joined
table.

This release includes improvements for bulk loading using
COPY in both single
and concurrent operations, with tests showing up to a 300% performance
improvement in some cases. PostgreSQL 16 adds support for
load balancing
in clients that use libpq, and improvements to vacuum strategy that reduce the
necessity of full-table freezes. Additionally, PostgreSQL 16 introduces CPU
acceleration using SIMD in both x86 and ARM architectures, resulting in
performance gains when processing ASCII and JSON strings, and performing array
and subtransaction searches.

Logical replication

Logical replication
lets users st