The PostgreSQL team has announced a major update to its open-source relational database. PostgreSQL 11 has been released with performance improvements, and specific enhancements for large databases and high computational workloads. According to the team, this is the first major release since last year when PostgreSQL 10 was released.
Additionally, the release includes updates to the table partitioning system, support for stored procedures, query parallelism improvements and parallelized data definition capabilities.
“For PostgreSQL 11, our development community focused on adding features that improve PostgreSQL’s ability to manage very large databases,” said Bruce Momjian, a core team member of the PostgreSQL global development group. “On top of PostgreSQL’s proven performance for transactional workloads, PostgreSQL 11 makes it even easier for developers to run big data applications at scale.”
The release adds the ability to partition data with a hash key or hash partitioning and works to improve data federation ability with functionality improvements for partitions. In addition, it introduces a catch-all default partition for data and supports moving rows to the correct partition. Other partitioning updates include improved query performance and support for the upsert feature on partitioned tables.
PostgreSQL 11 also adds transactions support in stored procedures. “Developers have been able to create user-defined functions in PostgreSQL for over 20 years, but prior to PostgreSQL 11, these functions were unable to manage their own transactions,” the team wrote in a post. With PostgreSQL 11’s SQL procedures and full transaction management capabilities, developers can now create advanced server-side apps that involve incremental bulk data loading, the team explained.
In addition, the release adds support for Just-In-Time compilation. This is designed to accelerate the execution of expressions during query execution, the team explained.
Other features include performance gains in parallel sequential scans, the ability to execute SELECT queries and functionality for working with windows functions.
The next upcoming release for PostgreSQL will be PostgreSQL 11.1, which will contain bug fixes. The next release with new features will be PostgreSQL 12.
