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
