PostgreSQL 17 DBMS Released

PostgreSQL 17, the new stable DBMS branch, has been released after a year of development. Updates for this new branch will be available for the next five years until November 2029. Meanwhile, support for PostgreSQL 12.x, the oldest of the supported branches, will be discontinued on November 14.

The main innovations in PostgreSQL 17 include:

• When performing the operation vacuum (garbage assembly, cleaning, and packaging of the disk repository), a new data structure is involved that consumes up to 20 times less memory. This has allowed for accelerated performance of Vacuum operations and reduced consumption of shared resources.
• The optimization of input/output performance continues with improvements to the processing code for WAL (Write-Ahead Logging). This enhancement has increased the throughput of recording operations in systems with a high volume of concurrent requests. A new streaming/output interface has been introduced to speed up consistent data bust in tables and accelerate the update of statistics for query planning after performing the Analyze operation.
• There has been an increase in performance for requests with the “in” expression when using B-tree based indices. Parallel index building for BRIN (Block Range Index) has been implemented. The query scheduler has been optimized for “Not Null” checks and the processing of CTE (Common Table Expression) determined using the SQL command “with.” The use of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) vector processor instructions has been introduced to speed up certain calculations like the bit_count function.
• Support for new features for working with JSON data defined in the SQL/JSON standard has been added. The json-table function has been included for converting JSON data into regular PostgreSQL tables. New jsonpath operators have been introduced to convert JSON data to PostgreSQL Data Types. New functions for creating (json, json_scala, and json_serialize) and querying (json_exists, json_query, and json_value) data in JSON format are also available.