PostgreSQL 17 has been released. It enhances performance and scalability while responding to changing data access and storage patterns. The update features major overall performance enhancements, such as an overhauled memory management system for vacuum, storage access optimizations, improvements for high concurrency workloads, bulk loading and export speedups, and index query execution improvements.

PostgreSQL 17 Released!

The  PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of  PostgreSQL 17, the latest version of the world's most advanced open source database.

PostgreSQL 17 builds on decades of open source development, improving its performance and scalability while adapting to emergent data access and storage patterns. This release of  PostgreSQL adds significant overall performance gains, including an overhauled memory management implementation for vacuum, optimizations to storage access and improvements for high concurrency workloads, speedups in bulk loading and exports, and query execution improvements for indexes. PostgreSQL 17 has features that benefit brand new workloads and critical systems alike, such as additions to the developer experience with the SQL/JSON JSON_TABLE command, and enhancements to logical replication that simplify management of high availability workloads and major version upgrades.

"PostgreSQL 17 highlights how the global open source community, which drives the development of PostgreSQL, builds enhancements that help users at all stages of their database journey," said Jonathan Katz, a member of the PostgreSQL core team. "Whether it's improvements for operating databases at scale or new features that build on a delightful developer experience, PostgreSQL 17 will enhance your data management experience."

PostgreSQL, an innovative data management system known for its reliability, robustness, and extensibility, 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.

System-wide performance gains

The PostgreSQL  vacuum process is critical for healthy operations, requiring server instance resources to operate. PostgreSQL 17 introduces a new internal memory structure for vacuum that consumes up to 20x less memory. This improves vacuum speed and also reduces the use of shared resources, making more available for your workload.

PostgreSQL 17 continues to improve performance of its I/O layer. High concurrency workloads may see up to 2x better write throughput due to improvements with  write-ahead log ( WAL) processing. Additionally, the new streaming I/O interface speeds up sequential scans (reading all the data from a table) and how quickly  ANALYZE can update planner statistics.

PostgreSQL 17 also extends its performance gains to query execution. PostgreSQL 17 improves the performance of queries with IN clauses that use  B-tree indexes, the default index method in PostgreSQL. Additionally,  BRIN indexes now support parallel builds. PostgreSQL 17 includes several improvements for query planning, including optimizations for NOT NULL constraints, and improvements in processing  common table expressions ( WITH queries). This release adds more SIMD (Single Instruction/Multiple Data) support for accelerating computations, including using AVX-512 for the  bit_count function.

Further expansion of a robust developer experience

PostgreSQL was the  first relational database to add JSON support (2012), and PostgreSQL 17 adds to its implementation of the SQL/JSON standard.  JSON_TABLE is now available in PostgreSQL 17, letting developers convert JSON data into a standard PostgreSQL table. PostgreSQL 17 now supports  SQL/JSON constructors (JSON, JSON_SCALAR, JSON_SERIALIZE) and  query functions (JSON_EXISTS, JSON_QUERY, JSON_VALUE), giving developers other ways of interfacing with their JSON data. This release adds more  jsonpath expressions, with an emphasis of converting JSON data to a native PostgreSQL data type, including numeric, boolean, string, and date/time types.

PostgreSQL 17 adds more features to  MERGE, which is used for conditional updates, including a RETURNING clause and the ability to update  views. Additionally, PostgreSQL 17 has new capabilities for bulk loading and data exporting, including up to a 2x performance improvement when exporting large rows using the  COPY command. COPY performance also has improvements when the source and destination encodings match, and includes a new option, ON_ERROR, that allows an import to continue even if there is an insert error.

This release expands on functionality both for managing data in partitions and data distributed across remote PostgreSQL instances. PostgreSQL 17 supports using identity columns and exclusion constraints on  partitioned tables. The  PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper ( postgres_fdw), used to execute queries on remote PostgreSQL instances, can now push EXISTS and IN subqueries to the remote server for more efficient processing.

PostgreSQL 17 also includes a built-in, platform independent, immutable collation provider that's guaranteed to be immutable and provides similar sorting semantics to the C collation except with UTF-8 encoding rather than SQL_ASCII. Using this new collation provider guarantees that your text-based queries will return the same sorted results regardless of where you run PostgreSQL.

Logical replication enhancements for high availability and major version upgrades

Logical replication is used to stream data in real-time across many use cases. However, prior to this release, users who wanted to perform a major version upgrade would have to drop  logical replication slots, which requires resynchronizing data to subscribers after an upgrade. Starting with upgrades from PostgreSQL 17, users don't have to drop logical replication slots, simplifying the upgrade process when using logical replication.

PostgreSQL 17 now includes failover control for logical replication, making it more resilient when deployed in high availability environments. Additionally, PostgreSQL 17 introduces the  pg_createsubscriber command-line tool for converting a physical replica into a new logical replica.

More options for managing security and operations

PostgreSQL 17 further extends how users can manage the overall lifecycle of their database systems. PostgreSQL has a new TLS option, sslnegotiation, that lets users perform a direct TLS handshakes when using  ALPN (registered as postgresql in the ALPN directory). PostgreSQL 17 also adds the pg_maintain  predefined role, which gives users permission to perform maintenance operations.

pg_basebackup, the backup utility included in PostgreSQL, now supports incremental backups and adds the  pg_combinebackup utility to reconstruct a full backup. Additionally,  pg_dump includes a new option called --filter that lets you select what objects to include when generating a dump file.

PostgreSQL 17 also includes enhancements to monitoring and analysis features.  EXPLAIN now shows the time spent for local I/O block reads and writes, and includes two new options: SERIALIZE and MEMORY, useful for seeing the time spent in data conversion for network transmission, and how much memory was used. PostgreSQL 17 now reports the  progress of vacuuming indexes, and adds the  pg_wait_events system view that, when combined with  pg_stat_activity, gives more insight into why an active session is waiting.

Additional Features

Many other new features and improvements have been added to PostgreSQL 17 that may also be helpful for your use cases. Please see the  release notes for a complete list of new and changed features.

PostgreSQL 17 Released!