The team behind the open-source database PostgreSQL today announced the release of PostgreSQL 15.

According to the project maintainers, this release builds on the performance improvements of recent releases with gains for managing workloads in both local and distributed deployments, including improved sorting.

PostgreSQL 15 is intended to improve the overall developer experience with the addition of the MERGE command for writing conditional SQL statements that can include INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE actions within one statement as well as several capabilities for observing the state of the database.

“The PostgreSQL developer community continues to build features that simplify running high performance data workloads while improving the developer experience,” said Jonathan Katz, a PostgreSQL core team member. “PostgreSQL 15 highlights how, through open software development, we can deliver to our users a database that is great for application development and safe for their critical data.”

This latest release improves on PostgreSQL’s in-memory and on-disk sorting algorithms, with benchmarks showing speedups of 25% – 400% depending on which data types are sorted.

Additionally, using row_number(), rank(), dense_rank(), and count() as window functions also bring performance benefits in PostgreSQL 15.

This release also provides heightened flexibility for managing logical replication with row filtering and column lists. These features allow users to choose to replicate a subset of data from a table.

It also introduces a new logging format: jsonlog which outputs log data using a defined JSON structure, allowing PostgreSQL logs to be processed in structured logging systems.

To read the full list of updates, click here.