2ndQuadrant Contributes Major Features to PostgreSQL 12

Enhancements in partitioning, performance and functionality included in the new release

OXFORD, United Kingdom – October 03, 2019 — The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of PostgreSQL 12. This new version presents remarkable performance improvements to its indexing and partitioning capabilities system. Some of the most notable features in this release have been developed by members of the 2ndQuadrant team, which has proudly contributed to the PostgreSQL project consistently for the past 15+ years.

Driven by customer demand, 2ndQuadrant has strongly focused its efforts in strengthening table partitioning, both from a performance perspective as well as from a usability perspective. This focus has become an enabler for many customers to migrate large databases from other database systems into the improved PostgreSQL version.

“PostgreSQL 12 is another leap forward in terms of database performance, standardization, administration and security. Teams of PostgreSQL developers have made huge strides in both partitioning and index performance. I’m happy that we so visibly maintain our leadership in index performance across the wide range of data types that modern application developers demand: relational, JSON, GIS and full text.” states Simon Riggs, founder and CEO of 2ndQuadrant.

Some of the major contributions by 2ndQuadrant are listed below:

• Allow foreign keys to reference partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera)
• Allow CREATE STATISTICS to create most-common-value statistics for multiple columns (Tomas Vondra)
• Pre-evaluate calls of LEAST and GREATEST when their arguments are constants (Vik Fearing)
• Add progress reporting to CREATE INDEX and REINDEX operations (Álvaro Herrera, Peter Eisentraut)
• Add support for generated columns (Peter Eisentraut)
• Allow the creation of collations that report string equality for strings that are not byte-wise equal (Peter Eisentraut)
• Add EXPLAIN option SETTINGS to output non-default optimizer settings (Tomas Vondra)
• Add colorization to the output of command-line utilities (Peter Eisentraut)
• Show the manual page URL in psql’s \help output (Peter Eisentraut)
• Allow pg_upgrade to use the file system cloning feature if there is one (Peter Eisentraut)
• Add –exclude-database option to pg_dumpall (Andrew Dunstan)

2ndQuadrant has also worked actively with fellow members of the PostgreSQL community to contribute the following features:

• Move recovery.conf settings into postgresql.conf (Masao Fujii, Simon Riggs, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Sergei Kornilov)
• Improve performance of many operations on partitioned tables (Amit Langote, David Rowley, Tom Lane, Álvaro Herrera)
• Add partition introspection functions (Michaël Paquier, Álvaro Herrera, Amit Langote)
• Speed up keyword lookup (John Naylor, Joerg Sonnenberger, Tom Lane)
• Add REINDEX CONCURRENTLY option to allow reindexing without locking out writes (Michaël Paquier, Andreas Karlsson, Peter Eisentraut)
• Allow enumerated values to be added more flexibly (Andrew Dunstan, Tom Lane, Thomas Munro)
• Add CREATE ACCESS METHOD command to create new table types (Andres Freund, Haribabu Kommi, Álvaro Herrera, Alexander Korotkov, Dmitry Dolgov)

With 30+ years of development and advancements, PostgreSQL has become the most popular open-source relational database for enterprises across the globe. 2ndQuadrant plans to continue playing an active role in the community and bringing new features and capabilities in the years to come.

To learn more about PostgreSQL and its scalable business benefits, attend the 2ndQuadrant PostgreSQL Conference 2019 being held December 4 – 5 in Chicago.