Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

PostgreSQL Community released PostgreSQL 16 on September 14, 2023.  In years past, we’ve released our Distribution for PostgreSQL a few months later.  We wanted to improve in this regard and establish a new release baseline. Improving quality while maintaining the same resilience towards QA was something we aimed for. It looks like we succeeded, and I’m happy to announce that Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 16 is now available!

The rocky road to a faster release

It took efforts across the Build and QA teams at Percona. We’ve improved both the packaging build pipelines and tremendously reworked and improved the automation of our QA pipelines. The effort has definitely paid off, as we can release shortly after upstream.

Why should you care about version 16?

PostgreSQL 16 comes packed with features. The community has been working hard on these, and the list of delivered improvements is really impressive. To highlight some:

• Logical replication from standby servers is now supported natively by PostgreSQL.
• Parallelization for transactions for logical replication subscribers.
• Parallelization of FULL and internal right OUTER hash joins is now allowed.
• pg_stat.io view providing I/O statistics for your monitoring needs,
• New SQL/JSON constructors and identity functions.
• Improved vacuum freezing performance.
• Added support for regular expression matching of user and database names in pg_hba.conf, and user names in pg_ident.conf.

To learn more about these, check out the upstream release notes and the Percona distribution release notes for more details!

What’s next in store?

We’re working hard on closing the gaps for data at rest encryption (DARE), as reported by both our community of users and our customers. While there are proprietary tools out there, as well as limited capabilities thanks to pg_crypto, it is still far from the expectations of enterprise customers who need to comply with regulations and internal policies.

We plan to make Percona images for PostgreSQL available on Docker Hub shortly. The plan is to start with version 16.

We’re hoping to share some good news in this regard and provide an MVP for all of you to try and test by the end of this year. As we are committed to open source, we hope to involve the community in discussing the best approaches for transparent data encryption (TDE) in PostgreSQL.

Learn more about Percona for PostgreSQL

The future of technology adoption belongs to developers.

The future of application deployment belongs in the cloud.

The future of databases belongs to open source.

That’s essentially the summary of Percona’s innovation strategy and that’s the reason I decided to join Percona – I believe the company can provide me with the perfect platform for my vision of the future of PostgreSQL.

So What Does That Mean, Really?

Gone are the days when deals were closed by executives on a golf course. That was Sales-Led Growth. The days of inbound leads based on content are also numbered. That is Marketing-Led Growth.

We are living in an age where tech decision-making is increasingly bottom-up. Where end-users get to decide which technology will suit their needs best. Where the only way to ensure a future for your PostgreSQL offerings is to delight the end users – the developers.

That’s Product-Led Growth.

PostgreSQL has been rapidly gaining in popularity. The Stack Overflow Developer survey ranked it as the most wanted database and DB-Engines declaring it the DBMS of the year 2020. DB-Engines shows steady growth in popularity of PostgreSQL, which outpaces any other database out there. It is ACID compliant, secure, fast, reliable, with a liberal license, and backed by a vibrant community.

PostgreSQL is the World’s Most Advanced Open Source Relational Database.

Being a leader in open source databases, I believe Percona is well-positioned to drive a Product Led Growth strategy for PostgreSQL. We want to offer PostgreSQL that is freely available, fully supported, and certified. We want to offer you the flexibility of using it yourself, using it with our help, or letting us completely handle your database.

Our plan is to focus on the end-users, make it easy for developers to build applications using our technology, delight with our user experience, and deliver value with our expertise to all businesses – large or small.

Data is exciting. Data has the ability to tell stories. Data is here to stay. 

Data is increasingly stored in open source databases. 

PostgreSQL is the most wanted database by developers. 

That is why I believe: Percona and PostgreSQL – Better Together.

In our latest white paper, we explore how customers can optimize their PostgreSQL databases, tune them for performance, and reduce complexity while achieving the functionality and security your business needs to succeed.

Download to Learn Why Percona and PostgreSQL are Better Together

Percona is pleased to announce the release of Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 13. This release is available for immediate download and includes all of the latest features of PostgreSQL 13 Core Distribution.

Reduce Resource Usage

This release includes enhancements to existing features that deliver a more streamlined and optimized environment, helping you to reduce overall resource usage. This includes minimizing bloat with parallel Vacuum, which helps the Vacuum process to run more quickly and efficiently, improving the use of storage and improving performance. Deduplication of B-Tree indexes also helps save storage space by reducing the amount of storage needed for indexes. It also uses resources more efficiently during query with additional opportunities to benefit from partition enhancements. This means that your query processes less data and frees up resources.

Improve Response Times

With enhancements that deliver more efficient use of indexes and smarter sorting capabilities, you can expect better overall performance and improved response times. This includes incremental sort which avoids sorting data that has already been sorted and delivering query results faster.  New partition wise joins break down a join between partitioned tables into joins between their partitions, resulting in smaller data volumes being processed more quickly. Improvements to GiST, SP-GiST, and GIN indexes, provide overall performance improvement and speed up query processing. There are also some new PostgreSQL commands and authentication changes.

Additionally, we are including a technical preview of pg_stat_monitor, a custom extension written by Percona.  This extension gathers and aggregates query performance data, enabling better and faster query analysis. It can be used alone, but its capabilities are best used when combined with the latest release of Percona Monitoring and Management. This enables you to easily analyze your PostgreSQL queries, using the pg_stat_monitor metrics, to quickly identify and remedy issues with scaling, bottlenecks, and potential outages.

Percona is also planning to extend our Managed Services offerings to include PostgreSQL early next year. This means that you will be able to have your MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Maria DB databases all managed by a single source. As always, we continue to provide support for these open-source database products and offer professional consulting and training services.

For more details on PostgreSQL 13, check out the release notes from PostgreSQL. To learn more about Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL, check out our release notes.

To provide feedback on the technical preview of pg_stat_monitor or its integration with Percona Monitoring and Management, visit the Percona Community Forum. Bugs should be submitted through Jira.

Download Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL

Download Percona Monitoring and Management