Horton

Re: PG 18 release notes draft committed

Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>

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From: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
To: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
Cc: PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2025-09-16T17:59:07Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

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 18 relnotes: add AFTER trigger user change item

  2. doc PG 18 relnotes: modify async I/O item for other improvements

  3. doc PG 18 relnotes: split apart log_connections item

  4. doc PG 18 relnotes: move ANALYZE item,split ANALYZE/EXPLAIN item

  5. doc PG 18 relnotes: clarify multiplication item

  6. doc PG 18 relnotes: add removal details to MD5 item

  7. doc PG 18 relnotes: fix markup

  8. doc PG 18 relnotes: clarify btree skip-scan item

  9. doc PG 18 relnotes: update to current

  10. doc PG 18 relnotes: adjust CREATE SUBSCRIPTION attribution

  11. doc PG 18 relnotes: clarify btree skip scan item

  12. doc PG 18 relnotes: mv. hash joins and GROUP BY item to General

  13. Add support for runtime arguments in injection points

  14. doc PG 18 relnotes: fix missing parens for crc32c()

  15. PG 18 relnotes: adjust RETURNING new/old item

  16. doc PG 18 relnotes: adjust pg_log_backend_memory_contexts()

  17. doc PG 18 relnotes: add pg_log_backend_memory_contexts() mention

  18. doc PG 18 relnotes: adjust pgbench per-script reporting item

  19. doc PG 18 relnotes: mention GROUP SET fixes

  20. doc PG 18 relnotes: adjust partition planning item

  21. doc PG 18 relnotes: small adjustments regarding options

  22. doc PG 18 relnotes: move partition locking item to General Perf

  23. doc PG 18 relnotes: adjust partition items

  24. doc PG 18 relnotes: reword OAuth item

  25. doc PG 18 relnotes: add mention of pg_stat_reset_backend_stats()

  26. doc PG 18 relnotes: adjust hash item

  27. doc PG 18 relnotes: split partition optimizer item into two

  28. doc PG 18 relnotes: adjust COPY and REJECT_LIMIT items

  29. doc PG 18 relnotes: move and clarify constraint items

  30. doc PG 18 relnotes: add commit for cancel key and protocol neg.

  31. doc PG 18 relnotes: fix libpq wording

  32. doc PG 18 relnotes: add GROUP BY column elimination item

  33. doc PG 18 relnotes: move protocol version item to "server"

  34. doc PG 18 relnotes: adjust libpq trace & potocol version items

  35. doc PG 18 relnotes: reword and reorder items

  36. doc: Fix memory context level in pg_log_backend_memory_contexts() example.

  37. Make levels 1-based in pg_log_backend_memory_contexts()

  38. Introduce file_copy_method setting.

  39. libpq: Handle NegotiateProtocolVersion message differently

  40. Add timingsafe_bcmp(), for constant-time memory comparison

  41. Optimization for lower(), upper(), casefold() functions.

  42. Fix ALTER SUBSCRIPTION ... SET PUBLICATION ... command.

  43. Add connection establishment duration logging

  44. Modularize log_connections output

  45. Ensure that AFTER triggers run as the instigating user.

  46. Detect redundant GROUP BY columns using UNIQUE indexes

  47. Move cancel key generation to after forking the backend

On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 5:03 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> I was able to squeeze in this detail in the attached, applied patch.

I noticed that Crunchy Data had a blog post about the skip scan, where
the author got tripped up by the description of skip scan that current
appears in the release notes.

See: https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/get-excited-about-postgres-18

The blog post incorrectly says "Note that this optimization only works
for queries which use the = operator, so it will not work with
inequalities or ranges". This is incorrect; skip scan works perfectly
fine with inequality operators. I'm sure that this confusion arose
because of the wording from the release notes.

Adding to the confusion, Crunchy also had a Tweet about skip scan that
used an inequality operator (which will work correctly):

https://x.com/crunchydata/status/1965751871848468499

I'm sure that this was due to the release note description, since
there was some discussion of it on a LinkedIn post that promoted the
blog post.

In light of all this, I propose that we change the current feature
description, from:

"This allows multi-column btree indexes to be used by queries that
only equality-reference the second or later indexed columns."

to:

"This allows multi-column btree indexes to be used by queries that
only specify conditions on the second or later indexed columns."

-- 
Peter Geoghegan