Half a dozen exciting new features in PostgreSQL 16, 17 and 18
Presented by:
Thomas Munro
I'm based in Wellington, New Zealand where I've been working full time on PostgreSQL for a decade, first for EnterpriseDB and currently for Microsoft. I am an active developer and committer on the project, and frequently speak at the major developer conferences overseas about projects I contribute to. My areas of work have included parallel query execution, I/O, recovery/replication, portability and standards, modernisation and ongoing maintenance.
Before achieving open source escape velocity, I did database, network, application, embedded and systems programming for a couple of decades, mostly in London but also for a few years in Paris, Sydney and Wellington for employers in the finance/trading, electricity, education and advertising sectors.
The other tech-related project I'm involved in is the FreeBSD operating system, where I have made small contributions primarily relating to PostgreSQL performance, and continue to experiment with the database/OS interface layer. For non-tech interests, I'm a failed linguist and student of Western European languages, occasionally a road cyclist, and am currently trying to learn to surf... by Australian standards very poorly, despite which it's always nice to visit NSW and be reminded of that.
No video of the event yet, sorry!
This is a three part talk. The first part gives a very high level overview of the areas of development in recent major releases, including planning, execution, partitioning, replication, backups, monitoring, security, I/O, ongoing modernisation work and more.
In the second part, we'll look more closely at three selected new features that bring everyday benefits in terms of usability and maintenance:
- extended standardised JSON support
- new text collation support, and why it matters to you
- fast and efficient incremental backups
In the third part, we'll talk about three selected major internal changes that improve performance and bring us closer to the state-of-the-art:
- overhaul of the statistics and monitoring system
- btrees with skip scans and related tricks to get more benefit from your existing indexes
- modernised high performance disk I/O and streaming, an ongoing project
This covers work done by a lot of different people and companies in PostgreSQL 16, 17, 18 and beyond. I've personally been involved in developing the I/O layer along with my team at Microsoft and many others in the community, among other projects.
- Date:
- 2025 October 17 09:00 +11
- Duration:
- 40 min
- Room:
- Oxford I + II
- Conference:
- PG Down Under 2025
- Language:
- Track:
- Essentials
- Difficulty:
- Medium