Re: PostgreSQL 12: Feature Highlights

Hi,

On 5/12/19 11:28 AM, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Now that a draft of the release notes are available[1] this seems like a
> good time to begin determining what features we want to highlight prior
> to the Beta 1 announcement.

Thank you everyone for your feedback. Below is v2 of the list for the
Beta 1 announcement. A few things to note:

- Based on feedback I made several INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations on
the list ;)

- I know it's listing out a lot of features, but this is the Beta 1
release, which, among several goals, is to make people aware of as many
impactful features as possible for purposes of awareness and getting
people to help test.

- The press release will be better worded - this is just a list :)

Without further ado:

# Feature Highlights

1. Indexing

- Improvements overall performance to standard (B-tree) indexes with
writes as well as with bloat
- REINDEX CONCURRENTLY
- GiST indexes now support covering indexes (INCLUDE clause)
- SP-GiST indexes now support K-NN queries
- WAL overhead reduced on GiST, GIN, & SP-GiST index creation

2. Partitioning Improvements

- Improved partition pruning, which improves performance on queries over
tables with thousands of partitions that only need to use a few partitions
- Improvements to COPY performance and ATTACH PARTITION
- Allow foreign keys to reference partitioned tables

3. WITH queries (CTEs) can now be inlined, subject to certain restrictions

4. Support for JSON path queries per the SQL/JSON specification in the
SQL:2016 standard. A subset of these expressions can be accelerated with
on-disk indexes.

5. Support for case-insensitive and accent-insensitive collations

6. CREATE STATISTICS now supports most-common value statistics, which
leads to improved query plans for distributions that are non-uniform

7. Introduction of generated columns that compute and store an
expression as a value on the table

8. Introduction of CREATE ACCESS METHOD that permits the addition of new
table storage types

9. Enable / disable page checksums for an offline cluster

10. Authentication

- GSSAPI client/server encryption support
- LDAP server discovery

# Changes That Can Affect Existing Operating Environments

1. recovery.conf merged into postgresql.conf;
recovery.signal/standby.signal being used for switching into non-primary
mode

2. JIT enabled by default

Thanks,

Jonathan