PostgreSQL 15 Released!

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of  PostgreSQL 15, the latest version of the world’s  most advanced open source database.

PostgreSQL 15 builds on the performance improvements of recent releases with noticeable gains for managing workloads in both local and distributed deployments, including improved sorting. This release improves the developer experience with the addition of the popular  MERGE command, and adds more 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."

PostgreSQL, an innovative data management system known for its reliability and robustness, benefits from over 25 years of open source development from a  global developer community and has become the preferred open source relational database for organizations of all sizes.

Improved Sort Performance and Compression

In this latest release, PostgreSQL improves on its in-memory and on-disk  sorting algorithms, with benchmarks showing speedups of 25% - 400% based on which data types are sorted. Using row_number(), rank(), dense_rank(), and count() as  window functions also have performance benefits in PostgreSQL 15. Queries using  SELECT DISTINCT can now be  executed in parallel.

Building on work from the  previous PostgreSQL release for allowing async remote queries, the  PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper,  postgres_fdw, now supports  asynchronous commits.

The performance improvements in PostgreSQL 15 extend to its archiving and backup facilities. PostgreSQL 15 adds support for LZ4 and Zstandard (zstd)  compression to write-ahead log (WAL) files, which can have both space and performance benefits for certain workloads. On certain operating systems, PostgreSQL 15 adds support to  prefetch pages referenced in WAL to help speed up recovery times. PostgreSQL's built-in backup command,  pg_basebackup, now supports server-side compression of backup files with a choice of gzip, LZ4, and zstd. PostgreSQL 15 includes the ability to use  custom modules for archiving, which eliminates the overhead of using a shell command.

Expressive Developer Features

PostgreSQL 15 includes the SQL standard  MERGE command. MERGE lets you write conditional SQL statements that can include INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE actions within a single statement.

This latest release adds  new functions for using regular expressions to inspect strings: regexp_count(), regexp_instr(), regexp_like(), and regexp_substr(). PostgreSQL 15 also extends the range_agg function to aggregate  multirange data types, which were introduced in the  previous release.

PostgreSQL 15 lets users  create views that query data using the permissions of the caller, not the view creator. This option, called security_invoker, adds an additional layer of protection to ensure that view callers have the correct permissions for working with the underlying data.

More Options with Logical Replication

PostgreSQL 15 provides more flexibility for managing  logical replication. This release introduces  row filtering and  column lists for  publishers, letting users choose to replicate a subset of data from a table. PostgreSQL 15 adds features to simplify  conflict management, including the ability to skip replaying a conflicting transaction and to automatically disable a subscription if an error is detected. This release also includes support for using two-phase commit (2PC) with logical replication.

Logging and Configuration Enhancements

PostgreSQL 15 introduces a new logging format:  jsonlog. This new format outputs log data using a defined JSON structure, which allows PostgreSQL logs to be processed in structured logging systems.

This release gives database administrators more flexibility in how users can manage PostgreSQL configuration, adding the ability to grant users permission to alter server-level configuration parameters. Additionally, users can now search for information about configuration using the \dconfig command from the  psql command-line tool.

Other Notable Changes

PostgreSQL  server-level statistics are now collected in shared memory, eliminating both the statistics collector process and periodically writing this data to disk.

PostgreSQL 15 makes it possible to make an  ICU collation the default collation for a cluster or an individual database.

This release also adds a new built-in extension,  pg_walinspect, that lets users inspect the contents of write-ahead log files directly from a SQL interface.

PostgreSQL 15 also  revokes the CREATE permission from all users except a database owner from the public (or default) schema.

PostgreSQL 15 removes both the long-deprecated "exclusive backup" mode and support for Python 2 from PL/Python.

PostgreSQL 15 Released!