PostgreSQL 16 Released!

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of PostgreSQL 16, the latest version of the world's most advanced open source database.

PostgreSQL 16 raises its performance, with notable improvements to query parallelism, bulk data loading, and logical replication. There are many features in this release for developers and administrators alike, including more SQL/JSON syntax, new monitoring stats for your workloads, and greater flexibility in defining access control rules for management of policies across large fleets.

"As relational database patterns evolve, PostgreSQL continues to make performance gains in searching and managing data at scale," said Dave Page, a PostgreSQL Core Team member. "PostgreSQL 16 gives users more methods to scale-up and scale-out their workloads, while giving them new ways to gain insights and optimize how they manage their 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.

PostgreSQL 16 improves the performance of existing PostgreSQL functionality through new query planner optimizations. In this latest release, the query planner can parallelize FULL and RIGHT joins, generate better optimized plans for queries that use aggregate functions with a DISTINCT or ORDER BY clause, utilize incremental sorts for SELECT DISTINCT queries, and optimize window functions so they execute more efficiently. It also improves RIGHT and OUTER "anti-joins", which enables users to identify rows not present in a joined table.

This release includes improvements for bulk loading using COPY in both single and concurrent operations, with tests showing up to a 300% performance improvement in some cases. PostgreSQL 16 adds support for load balancing in clients that use libpq, and improvements to vacuum strategy that reduce the necessity of full-table freezes. Additionally, PostgreSQL 16 introduces CPU acceleration using SIMD in both x86 and ARM architectures, resulting in performance gains when processing ASCII and JSON strings, and performing array and subtransaction searches.

Postgres is becoming a huge player in database land. A recent survey by Stack Overflow among 90,000 Developers showed that PostgreSQL is already being used more often than SQL Server. It is only a matter of time that even MySQL will be surpassed as a relational open source database if the growing trend continues like this.

There is no database platform that evolves and adapts to technical innovations as quickly as PostgreSQL. Not surprising considering the size of the cooperating and evolving community. This is a massive project and is greatly accelerating the growth and evolution of PostgreSQL.

The link below will take you to Postgres' community page with the release notes for PostgreSQL 16.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/release-16.html

Version 16 contains a number of changes that may affect compatibility with previous versions. Please read the release notes carefully to determine the impact for your migration.

If you would prefer assistance with this, please do not hesitate to contact us, we would be happy to help!

The link below will take you to the download page of PostgreSQL. You can choose the appropriate package for your operating system.

https://www.postgresql.org/download/

If you want PostgreSQL 16 support, advice or any other kind of support like database administration or database maintenance, please contact us so we can explore the possibilities together.