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Re: First draft of PG 19 release notes

David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>

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From: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>, David Geier <geidav.pg@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2026-04-20T01:30:25Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Mon, 20 Apr 2026 at 07:25, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
>
> On 2026-04-19 14:36:57 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > That is not my recollection, and I thought I would have heard more about
> > it if that was the case.
>
> I don't know what to tell you. Just looking at emails to you with a subject
> that contains release and a body that contains performance quickly unearthed:

> David:
> https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvrun6b+cAj6bgb6_1irnu+t7GU_uCdj1XvMQsPT0KngkQ@mail.gmail.com

This isn't a "I told you so" comment, but I do feel that it's hard to
unsee the irony in the originally omitted item being discussed there
(tidstore), which in the end was the top-listed headline feature for
v17. I feel that was just too powerful a signal to how much others do
think this stuff is worthwhile mentioning.

> > I have always hesitated to expand the list of items with concern that
> > general Postgres users will lose interest in reading it.  I have in mind
> > that the release notes are not for me or hackers subscribers to read.

There is a "General Performance" section for this, so maybe people who
don't care about performance can skip these more easily.

I do agree that there is some threshold. Sometimes we do commit
patches which we know increases performance some way, but nobody
tested by how much. There are likely many of these, but one example
[1] that I don't think has any business on the release notes, but it
should help performance somehow/somewhere. It just might or might not
be measurable. Filtering out those seems good.

Maybe there's something committers can put in the commit message to
make it more obvious which commits matter by referencing some actual
performance numbers that were published that showed a definitive
speedup (not just a measurment of noise). I do expect that it's a
fairly horrible job if we're going to ask Bruce to trawl each thread
to find what performance numbers were posted. In the past I've tried
to list some example numbers in commit messages to help Bruce (e.g.
final paragraph in [2] and [3]). I'm not sure if it does help, or if
there's something better that could be done instead.

David

[1] https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=49ce41810faca2722424b3d8fabda79bf4902339
[2] https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=c456e39113809376f6604e720910ccd24e18e034
[3] https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=58a359e585d0281ecab4d34cab9869e7eb4e4ca3

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →

  1. doc PG 19 relnotes: remove VALIDATE CONSTRAINT lock item

  2. Fix ALTER DOMAIN VALIDATE CONSTRAINT locking

  3. Revert "Enable fast default for domains with non-volatile constraints"

  4. doc PG 19 relnotes: improve awkward or confusing wording

  5. doc PG 19 relnotes: more fixes

  6. doc PG 19 relnotes: various corrections

  7. doc PG 19 relnotes: adjust item to mention pg_replication_slots

  8. doc PG 19 relnotes: remove "Add fake LSN support to hash index"

  9. doc PG 19 relnotes: add two optimizer hooks

  10. doc PG 19 relnotes: remove "Optionally" for CPU optimizations

  11. doc PG 19 relnotes: adjustments/removal of items

  12. doc PG 19 relnotes: add UTF-8 case folding performance item

  13. doc PG 19 relnotes: correct two items

  14. doc PG 19 relnotes: add missing commits and details

  15. doc PG 19 relnotes: fix typo, "date" -> "data"

  16. doc PG 19 relnotes: add author and move items

  17. doc PG 19 relnotes: update author

  18. doc PG 19 relnotes: add free space map all-visible item

  19. doc PG 19 relnotes: remove "Lakshmi N" as author of checksums

  20. doc PG 19 relnotes: fix "now targets"

  21. doc PG 19 relnotes: adjust ShmemRequestStruct item

  22. Improve various new-to-v19 appendStringInfo calls

  23. doc: Fix data_checksums data type

  24. Fix WITHOUT OVERLAPS' interaction with domains.

  25. Online enabling and disabling of data checksums

  26. Doc: split functions-posix-regexp section into multiple subsections.

  27. make immutability tests in to_json and to_jsonb complete

  28. Optimize tuple deformation

  29. pgstattuple: Optimize pgstattuple_approx() with streaming read

  30. Use fake LSNs to improve nbtree dropPin behavior.

  31. Use streaming read for VACUUM cleanup of GIN

  32. Clean up ICU includes.

  33. ICU: use UTF8-optimized case conversion API

  34. Add the MODE option to the WAIT FOR LSN command

  35. Speedup tuple deformation with additional function inlining