Webinar: New Features in PostgreSQL 13 [Follow Up]

There are numerous features and enhancements in PostgreSQL 13 that help improve the overall performance of PostgreSQL while making it considerably easier to develop and manage applications.

The PostgreSQL community has been able to release a major revision every year, demonstrating their amazing vitality and creativity — and in order to take a deep dive into what to expect from the PostgreSQL 13 release, 2ndQuadrant arranged the live webinar New Features in PostgreSQL 13.

This webinar was hosted by 2ndQuadrant’s Chief Technology Officer, Peter Eisentraut, who explored the major new features & improvements in PostgreSQL 13. The following features/enhancements were discussed:

• Partitioning enhancements
• B-tree deduplication
• Incremental sort
• Hash aggregation enhancements
• Backup manifests
• Trusted extensions
• Replication slot size limits
• Parallel vacuum
• Security enhancements
• Improvements for large databases

Below is a preview of the webinar. Those who weren’t able to attend the live webinar can now view the recording here.

Due to limited time, some of the questions were not answered during the live webinar, so answers by the host are provided below:

Question: There is a new feature for seeing backup progress. Anything for autovacuum progress?

Answer: Vacuum progress tracking has been available since PostgreSQL 9.6; see view pg_stat_progress_vacuum (which includes autovacuum).

Question: Are VACUUM related processes planed to disappear in future releases… maybe due to engine improvements?

Answer: For new storage engines, some or most of the functions of VACUUM might disappear. This would depend on the specific storage engine.

Question: Oracle has Interval Partitioning. Can we expect something similar from PostgreSQL?

Answer: Something like this is being worked on for one of the next major releases.

Question: Is version 13 stable for production? Or do I just wait for the next minor update?

Answer: PostgreSQL 13 has been through an extensive beta period of about 5 months. The 13.0 release planned for next week will be considered ready for production. You are encouraged to do your own test against your applications and workloads before putting any PostgreSQL version into production.

Question: Are there any enhancements in pl/pgSQL for PG13?

Answer: There are some performance improvements for PL/pgSQL in PostgreSQL 13. Details can be found in the release notes.

Question: Does Btree duplication work for composite indexes?

Answer: Yes, that’s right. B-tree deduplication works for composite indexes.

Question: Any plans to introduce ML-based optimizer instead of cost-based optimizer in future road map?

Answer: There are some research projects in that direction. This would probably first be available as an extension/plugin. There are no concrete plans to integrate this into PostgreSQL core at this point.

To be the first to know about upcoming PostgreSQL webinars by 2ndQuadrant, visit our Webinars page.

For any questions, comments, or feedback, please visit our website or send an email to [email protected].