Release date: 2022-10-13
PostgreSQL 15 contains many new features and enhancements, including:
      Support for the SQL
      MERGE command.
     
Selective publication of tables' contents within logical replication publications, through the ability to specify column lists and row filter conditions.
More options for compression, including support for Zstandard (zstd) compression. This includes support for performing compression on the server side during pg_basebackup.
Support for structured server log output using the JSON format.
Performance improvements, particularly for in-memory and on-disk sorting.
The above items and other new features of PostgreSQL 15 are explained in more detail in the sections below.
A dump/restore using pg_dumpall or use of pg_upgrade or logical replication is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release. See Section 19.6 for general information on migrating to new major releases.
Version 15 contains a number of changes that may affect compatibility with previous releases. Observe the following incompatibilities:
      Remove PUBLIC creation permission on the public schema
      (Noah Misch)
      §
     
      The new default is one of the secure schema usage patterns that Section 5.9.6 has recommended since the security
      release for CVE-2018-1058.  The change applies to new database
      clusters and to newly-created databases in existing clusters.
      Upgrading a cluster or restoring a database dump will preserve
      public's existing permissions.
     
      For existing databases, especially those having multiple users,
      consider revoking CREATE permission on
      the public schema to adopt this new default.
      For new databases having no need to defend against insider threats,
      granting CREATE permission will yield the behavior
      of prior releases.
     
      Change the owner of the public schema to be the
      new pg_database_owner role (Noah Misch)
      §
     
      This allows each database's owner to have ownership privileges on
      the public schema within their database.
      Previously it was owned by the bootstrap superuser, so that
      non-superuser database owners could not do anything with it.
     
      This change applies to new database clusters and to newly-created
      databases in existing clusters.
      Upgrading a cluster or restoring a database dump will preserve
      public's existing ownership specification.
     
Remove long-deprecated exclusive backup mode (David Steele, Nathan Bossart) §
      If the database server stops abruptly while in this mode, the
      server could fail to start.  The non-exclusive backup mode is
      considered superior for all purposes.  Functions
      pg_start_backup()/pg_stop_backup()
      have been renamed to
      pg_backup_start()/pg_backup_stop(),
      and the functions pg_backup_start_time()
      and pg_is_in_backup() have been removed.
     
      Increase hash_mem_multiplier
      default to 2.0 (Peter Geoghegan)
      §
     
      This allows query hash operations to use more
      work_mem
      memory than other operations.
     
      Remove server-side language plpython2u and generic
      Python language plpythonu (Andres Freund)
      §
     
      Python 2.x is no longer supported.  While the original intent of
      plpythonu was that it could eventually refer
      to plpython3u, changing it now seems more likely
      to cause problems than solve them, so it's just been removed.
     
      Generate an error if array_to_tsvector()
      is passed an empty-string array element (Jean-Christophe Arnu)
      §
     
This is prohibited because lexemes should never be empty. Users of previous Postgres releases should verify that no empty lexemes are stored because they can lead to dump/restore failures and inconsistent results.
      Generate an error when chr()
      is supplied with a negative argument (Peter Eisentraut)
      §
     
      Prevent CREATE OR REPLACE
      VIEW from changing the collation of an output column
      (Tom Lane)
      §
     
      Disallow zero-length Unicode identifiers,
      e.g., U&""
      (Peter Eisentraut)
      §
     
Non-Unicode zero-length identifiers were already disallowed.
Prevent numeric literals from having non-numeric trailing characters (Peter Eisentraut) §
      Previously, query text like 123abc would be
      interpreted as 123 followed
      by a separate token abc.
     
Adjust JSON numeric literal processing to match the SQL/JSON-standard (Peter Eisentraut) §
      This accepts numeric formats like .1 and
      1., and disallows trailing junk after numeric
      literals, like 1.type().
     
      When interval
      input provides a fractional value for a unit greater than months,
      round to the nearest month (Bruce Momjian)
      §
     
      For example, convert 1.99 years to 2
      years, not 1 year 11 months as before.
     
      Improve consistency of interval parsing with trailing
      periods (Tom Lane)
      §
     
Numbers with trailing periods were rejected on some platforms.
      Mark the interval output
      function as stable, not immutable, since it depends on IntervalStyle
      (Tom Lane)
      §
     
      This will, for example, cause creation of indexes relying on the
      text output of interval values to fail.
     
Detect integer overflow in interval justification functions (Joe Koshakow) §
      The affected functions are justify_interval(),
      justify_hours(), and
      justify_days().
     
      Change the I/O format of type "char" for non-ASCII
      characters (Tom Lane)
      §
     
Bytes with the high bit set are now output as a backslash and three octal digits, to avoid encoding issues.
      Remove the default ADMIN
      OPTION privilege a login role has on its own role
      membership (Robert Haas)
      §
     
      Previously, a login role could add/remove members of its own role,
      even without ADMIN OPTION privilege.
     
Allow logical replication to run as the owner of the subscription (Mark Dilger) §
      Because row-level security policies are not checked, only superusers,
      roles with bypassrls, and table owners can
      replicate into tables with row-level security policies.
     
      Prevent UPDATE and DELETE
      logical replication
      operations on tables where the subscription owner does not have
      SELECT permission on the table (Jeff Davis)
      §
     
      UPDATE and DELETE commands
      typically involve reading the table as well, so require the
      subscription owner to have table SELECT
      permission.
     
      When EXPLAIN
      references the session's temporary object schema, refer to it as
      pg_temp (Amul Sul)
      §
     
Previously the actual schema name was reported, leading to inconsistencies across sessions.
      Fix pg_statio_all_tables
      to sum values for the rare case of TOAST tables
      with multiple indexes (Andrei Zubkov)
      §
     
Previously such cases would show one row for each index.
Disallow setting custom options that match the name of an installed extension, but are not one of the extension's declared variables (Florin Irion, Tom Lane) § § §
This change causes any such pre-existing variables to be deleted during extension load, and then prevents new ones from being created later in the session. The intent is to prevent confusion about whether a variable is associated with an extension or not.
      Remove obsolete server variable
      stats_temp_directory (Andres Freund, Kyotaro
      Horiguchi)
      §
     
      Improve the algorithm used to compute random()
      (Fabien Coelho)
      §
      §
     
      This will cause random()'s results to differ
      from what was emitted by prior versions, even for the same seed
      value.
     
      libpq's PQsendQuery()
      function is no longer supported in pipeline mode (Álvaro Herrera)
      §
     
      Applications that are using that combination will need to be
      modified to use PQsendQueryParams() instead.
     
      On non-Windows platforms, consult the HOME environment
      variable to find the user's home directory (Anders Kaseorg)
      §
     
      If HOME is empty or unset, fall back to the previous
      method of checking the <pwd.h> database.
      This change affects libpq (for example,
      while looking up ~/.pgpass) as well as various
      client application programs.
     
      Remove pg_dump's
      --no-synchronized-snapshots option (Tom Lane)
      §
     
All still-supported server versions support synchronized snapshots, so there's no longer a need for this option.
        After an error is detected in psql's
        --single-transaction mode, change the
        final COMMIT command
        to ROLLBACK only
        if ON_ERROR_STOP is set (Michael Paquier)
        §
       
Avoid unnecessary casting of constants in queries sent by postgres_fdw (Dian Fay) §
When column types are intentionally different between local and remote databases, such casts could cause errors.
      Remove xml2's
      xml_is_well_formed() function (Tom Lane)
      §
     
This function has been implemented in the core backend since Postgres 9.1.
Allow custom scan providers to indicate if they support projections (Sven Klemm) §
The default is now that custom scan providers are assumed to not support projections; those that do will need to be updated for this release.
Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between PostgreSQL 15 and the previous major release.
Record and check the collation version of each database (Peter Eisentraut) §
       This feature is designed to detect collation version
       changes to avoid index corruption.  Function
       pg_database_collation_actual_version()
       reports the underlying operating system collation version, and
       ALTER DATABASE ...  REFRESH sets the recorded
       database collation version to match the operating system collation
       version.
      
Allow ICU collations to be set as the default for clusters and databases (Peter Eisentraut) §
       Previously, only libc-based
       collations could be selected at the cluster and database levels.
       ICU collations could only be used via explicit
       COLLATE clauses.
      
       Add system view pg_ident_file_mappings
       to report pg_ident.conf information (Julien
       Rouhaud)
       §
      
Improve planning time for queries referencing partitioned tables (David Rowley) §
This change helps when only a few of many partitions are relevant.
Allow ordered scans of partitions to avoid sorting in more cases (David Rowley) §
        Previously, a partitioned table with a DEFAULT
        partition or a LIST partition containing
        multiple values could not be used for ordered partition scans.
        Now they can be used if such partitions are pruned during planning.
       
Improve foreign key behavior of updates on partitioned tables that move rows between partitions (Amit Langote) §
Previously, such updates ran a delete action on the source partition and an insert action on the target partition. PostgreSQL will now run an update action on the partition root, providing cleaner semantics.
        Fix ALTER TRIGGER
        RENAME on partitioned tables to properly rename
        triggers on all partitions (Arne Roland, Álvaro Herrera)
        §
       
Also prohibit cloned triggers from being renamed.
Allow btree indexes on system and TOAST tables to efficiently store duplicates (Peter Geoghegan) §
Previously de-duplication was disabled for these types of indexes.
Improve lookup performance of GiST indexes that were built using sorting (Aliaksandr Kalenik, Sergei Shoulbakov, Andrey Borodin) §
        Allow unique constraints and indexes to treat
        NULL values as not distinct (Peter Eisentraut)
        §
       
        Previously NULL entries were always treated
        as distinct values, but this can now be changed by creating
        constraints and indexes using UNIQUE NULLS NOT
        DISTINCT.
       
        Allow the ^@
        starts-with operator and the starts_with()
        function to use btree indexes if using the C collation (Tom Lane)
        §
       
Previously these could only use SP-GiST indexes.
Allow extended statistics to record statistics for a parent with all its children (Tomas Vondra, Justin Pryzby) §
Regular statistics already tracked parent and parent-plus-all-children statistics separately.
        Add server variable recursive_worktable_factor
        to allow the user to specify the expected size of the working
        table of a recursive
        query (Simon Riggs)
        §
       
        Allow hash lookup for NOT IN
        clauses with many constants (David Rowley, James Coleman)
        §
       
Previously the code always sequentially scanned the list of values.
       Allow SELECT DISTINCT to be parallelized
       (David Rowley)
       §
      
Speed up encoding validation of UTF-8 text by processing 16 bytes at a time (John Naylor, Heikki Linnakangas) §
        This will improve text-heavy operations like COPY FROM.
       
        Improve performance for sorts that exceed work_mem
        (Heikki Linnakangas)
        §
        §
       
        When the sort data no longer fits in work_mem,
        switch to a batch sorting algorithm that uses more output streams
        than before.
       
Improve performance and reduce memory consumption of in-memory sorts (Ronan Dunklau, David Rowley, Thomas Munro, John Naylor) § § §
Allow WAL full page writes to use LZ4 and Zstandard compression (Andrey Borodin, Justin Pryzby) § §
        This is controlled by the wal_compression
        server setting.
       
Add support for writing WAL using direct I/O on macOS (Thomas Munro) §
        This only works if max_wal_senders = 0
        and wal_level = minimal.
       
Allow vacuum to be more aggressive in setting the oldest frozen and multi transaction id (Peter Geoghegan) §
Allow a query referencing multiple foreign tables to perform parallel foreign table scans in more cases (Andrey Lepikhov, Etsuro Fujita) §
        Improve the performance of window
        functions that use row_number(),
        rank(), dense_rank() and
        count()
        (David Rowley)
        §
       
Improve the performance of spinlocks on high-core-count ARM64 systems (Geoffrey Blake) §
Enable default logging of checkpoints and slow autovacuum operations (Bharath Rupireddy) §
        This changes the default of log_checkpoints
        to on and that of log_autovacuum_min_duration
        to 10 minutes.  This will cause even an idle server to generate
        some log output, which might cause problems on
        resource-constrained servers without log file rotation.  These
        defaults should be changed in such cases.
       
Generate progress messages in the server log during slow server starts (Nitin Jadhav, Robert Haas) § §
        The messages report the cause of the delay.  The time interval for
        notification is controlled by the new server variable log_startup_progress_interval.
       
Store cumulative statistics system data in shared memory (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Andres Freund, Melanie Plageman) § §
Previously this data was sent to a statistics collector process via UDP packets, and could only be read by sessions after transferring it via the file system. There is no longer a separate statistics collector process.
        Add additional information to VACUUM VERBOSE
        and autovacuum logging messages (Peter Geoghegan)
        §
        §
        §
       
        Add EXPLAIN
        (BUFFERS) output for temporary file block I/O
        (Masahiko Sawada)
        §
       
Allow log output in JSON format (Sehrope Sarkuni, Michael Paquier) §
        The new setting is log_destination = jsonlog.
       
        Allow pg_stat_reset_single_table_counters()
        to reset the counters of relations shared across all databases
        (Sadhuprasad Patro)
        §
       
Add wait events for local shell commands (Fujii Masao) §
        The new wait events are used when calling
        archive_command,
        archive_cleanup_command,
        restore_command and
        recovery_end_command.
       
Allow table accesses done by a view to optionally be controlled by privileges of the view's caller (Christoph Heiss) §
Previously, view accesses were always treated as being done by the view's owner. That's still the default.
        Allow members of the pg_write_server_files
        predefined role to perform server-side base backups (Dagfinn
        Ilmari Mannsåker)
        §
       
Previously only superusers could perform such backups.
        Allow GRANT
        to grant permissions to change individual server variables via
        SET and ALTER SYSTEM
        (Mark Dilger)
        §
        §
       
        The new function has_parameter_privilege()
        reports on this privilege.
       
        Add predefined role pg_checkpoint
        that allows members to run CHECKPOINT
        (Jeff Davis)
        §
        §
       
Previously checkpoints could only be run by superusers.
        Allow members of the pg_read_all_stats
        predefined role to access the views pg_backend_memory_contexts
        and pg_shmem_allocations
        (Bharath Rupireddy)
        §
       
Previously these views could only be accessed by superusers.
        Allow GRANT
        to grant permissions on pg_log_backend_memory_contexts()
        (Jeff Davis)
        §
       
Previously this function could only be run by superusers.
        Add server variable shared_memory_size
        to report the size of allocated shared memory (Nathan Bossart)
        §
        §
       
        Add server variable shared_memory_size_in_huge_pages
        to report the number of huge memory pages required (Nathan Bossart)
        §
        §
       
This is only supported on Linux.
        Honor server variable shared_preload_libraries
        in single-user mode (Jeff Davis)
        §
       
        This change supports use
        of shared_preload_libraries to load custom
        access methods and WAL resource managers, which would be essential
        for database access even in single-user mode.
       
        On Solaris, make the default setting of dynamic_shared_memory_type
        be sysv (Thomas Munro)
        §
       
        The previous default choice, posix, can result
        in spurious failures on this platform.
       
        Allow postgres
        -C to properly report runtime-computed values
        (Nathan Bossart)
        §
       
        Previously runtime-computed values data_checksums,
        wal_segment_size,
        and data_directory_mode
        would report values that would not be accurate on the running
        server.  However, this does not work on a running server.
       
Add support for LZ4 and Zstandard compression of server-side base backups (Jeevan Ladhe, Robert Haas) § § §
Run the checkpointer and bgwriter processes during crash recovery (Thomas Munro) §
This helps to speed up long crash recoveries.
Allow WAL processing to pre-fetch needed file contents (Thomas Munro) §
       This is controlled by the server variable recovery_prefetch.
      
Allow archiving via loadable modules (Nathan Bossart) §
       Previously, archiving was only done by calling shell commands.
       The new server variable archive_library
       can be set to specify a library to be called for archiving.
      
       No longer require IDENTIFY_SYSTEM
       to be run before START_REPLICATION (Jeff Davis)
       §
      
Allow publication of all tables in a schema (Vignesh C, Hou Zhijie, Amit Kapila) § § §
        For example, this syntax is now supported: CREATE
        PUBLICATION pub1 FOR TABLES IN SCHEMA s1,s2.
        ALTER PUBLICATION supports a similar syntax.
        Tables added later to the listed schemas will also be replicated.
       
        Allow publication content to be filtered using a
        WHERE clause (Hou Zhijie, Euler Taveira,
        Peter Smith, Ajin Cherian, Tomas Vondra, Amit Kapila)
        §
        §
        §
       
        Rows not satisfying the WHERE clause are not
        published.
       
Allow publication content to be restricted to specific columns (Tomas Vondra, Álvaro Herrera, Rahila Syed) §
        Allow skipping of transactions on a subscriber using ALTER SUBSCRIPTION
        ... SKIP (Masahiko Sawada)
        §
       
Add support for prepared (two-phase) transactions to logical replication (Peter Smith, Ajin Cherian, Amit Kapila, Nikhil Sontakke, Stas Kelvich) § § §
        The new CREATE_REPLICATION_SLOT
        option is called TWO_PHASE.
        pg_recvlogical now supports a new
        --two-phase option during slot creation.
       
Prevent logical replication of empty transactions (Ajin Cherian, Hou Zhijie, Euler Taveira) §
Previously, publishers would send empty transactions to subscribers if subscribed tables were not modified.
Add SQL functions to monitor the directory contents of logical replication slots (Bharath Rupireddy) §
        The new functions are pg_ls_logicalsnapdir(),
        pg_ls_logicalmapdir(), and
        pg_ls_replslotdir().  They can be run by
        members of the predefined pg_monitor role.
       
Allow subscribers to stop the application of logical replication changes on error (Osumi Takamichi, Mark Dilger) §
        This is enabled with the subscriber option disable_on_error
        and avoids possible infinite error loops during stream application.
       
Adjust subscriber server variables to match the publisher so datetime and float8 values are interpreted consistently (Japin Li) §
Some publishers might be relying on inconsistent behavior.
        Add system view pg_stat_subscription_stats
        to report on subscriber activity (Masahiko Sawada)
        §
        §
       
        The new function pg_stat_reset_subscription_stats()
        allows resetting these statistics counters.
       
        Suppress duplicate entries in the pg_publication_tables
        system view (Hou Zhijie)
        §
       
In some cases a partition could appear more than once.
       Add SQL MERGE
       command to adjust one table to match another (Simon Riggs, Pavan
       Deolasee, Álvaro Herrera, Amit Langote)
       §
      
       This is similar to INSERT ... ON CONFLICT
       but more batch-oriented.
      
       Add support for HEADER option in COPY text format
       (Rémi Lapeyre)
       §
       §
      
The new option causes the column names to be output, and optionally verified on input.
Add new WAL-logged method for database creation (Dilip Kumar) §
This is the new default method for copying the template database, as it avoids the need for checkpoints during database creation. However, it might be slow if the template database is large, so the old method is still available.
       Allow CREATE
       DATABASE to set the database OID
       (Shruthi Gowda, Antonin Houska)
       §
      
       Prevent DROP
       DATABASE, DROP
       TABLESPACE, and ALTER DATABASE SET
       TABLESPACE from occasionally failing during
       concurrent use on Windows (Thomas Munro)
       §
      
       Allow foreign key ON
       DELETE SET actions to affect only specified columns
       (Paul Martinez)
       §
      
Previously, all of the columns in the foreign key were always affected.
       Allow ALTER
       TABLE to modify a table's ACCESS
       METHOD (Justin Pryzby, Jeff Davis)
       §
      
       Properly call object access hooks when ALTER TABLE
       causes table rewrites (Michael Paquier)
       §
      
Track dependencies on individual columns in the results of functions returning composite types (Tom Lane) §
Previously, if a view or rule contained a reference to a specific column within the result of a composite-returning function, that was not noted as a dependency; the view or rule was only considered to depend on the composite type as a whole. This meant that dropping the individual column would be allowed, causing problems in later use of the view or rule. The column-level dependency is now also noted, so that dropping such a column will be rejected unless the view is changed or dropped.
       Allow the scale of
       a numeric
       value to be negative, or greater than its precision (Dean Rasheed,
       Tom Lane)
       §
      
       This allows rounding of values to the left of the decimal point,
       e.g., '1234'::numeric(4, -2) returns 1200.
      
Improve overflow detection when casting values to interval (Joe Koshakow) §
      Change the I/O format of type "char" for non-ASCII
      characters (Tom Lane)
      §
     
Update the display width information of modern Unicode characters, like emojis (Jacob Champion) § §
Also update from Unicode 5.0 to 14.0.0. There is now an automated way to keep Postgres updated with Unicode releases.
       Add multirange input to range_agg()
       (Paul Jungwirth)
       §
      
       Add MIN()
       and MAX() aggregates for the xid8 data type (Ken Kato)
       §
      
Add regular expression functions for compatibility with other relational systems (Gilles Darold, Tom Lane) §
       The new functions are regexp_count(),
       regexp_instr(),
       regexp_like(), and
       regexp_substr().  Some new optional arguments
       were also added to regexp_replace().
      
       Add the ability to compute the distance between polygons (Tom Lane)
       §
      
       Add to_char()
       format codes of, tzh, and
       tzm (Nitin Jadhav)
       §
      
The upper-case equivalents of these were already supported.
       When applying AT
       TIME ZONE to a time with time zone
       value, use the transaction start time rather than wall clock time
       to determine whether DST applies (Aleksander Alekseev, Tom Lane)
       §
      
This allows the conversion to be considered stable rather than volatile, and it saves a kernel call per invocation.
       Ignore NULL array elements in ts_delete() and
       setweight() functions with array arguments
       (Jean-Christophe Arnu)
       §
      
These functions effectively ignore empty-string array elements (since those could never match a valid lexeme). It seems consistent to let them ignore NULL elements too, instead of failing.
       Add support for petabyte units to pg_size_pretty()
       and pg_size_bytes() (David Christensen)
       §
      
       Change pg_event_trigger_ddl_commands()
       to output references to other sessions' temporary schemas using the
       actual schema name (Tom Lane)
       §
      
       Previously this function reported all temporary schemas as
       pg_temp, but it's misleading to use that for any
       but the current session's temporary schema.
      
Allow IP address matching against a server certificate's Subject Alternative Name (Jacob Champion) §
       Allow PQsslAttribute() to report the
       SSL library type without requiring a libpq
       connection (Jacob Champion)
       §
      
Change query cancellations sent by the client to use the same TCP settings as normal client connections (Jelte Fennema) §
This allows configured TCP timeouts to apply to query cancel connections.
Prevent libpq event callback failures from forcing an error result (Tom Lane) § §
        Improve performance
        of psql's \copy
        command, by sending data in larger chunks (Heikki Linnakangas)
        §
       
        Add \dconfig command to report server variables
        (Mark Dilger, Tom Lane)
        §
        §
        §
       
        This is similar to the server-side SHOW
        command, but it can process patterns to show multiple variables
        conveniently.
       
        Add \getenv command
        to assign the value of an environment variable to a
        psql variable (Tom Lane)
        §
       
        Add + option to the
        \lo_list and \dl commands to
        show large-object privileges (Pavel Luzanov)
        §
       
        Add a pager option for the \watch
        command (Pavel Stehule, Thomas Munro)
        §
       
        This is only supported on Unix and is controlled by the
        PSQL_WATCH_PAGER environment variable.
       
Make psql include intra-query double-hyphen comments in queries sent to the server (Tom Lane, Greg Nancarrow) § §
Previously such comments were removed from the query before being sent. Double-hyphen comments that are before any query text are not sent, and are not recorded as separate psql history entries.
        Adjust psql so
        that Readline's
        meta-# command will insert a double-hyphen
        comment marker (Tom Lane)
        §
       
Previously a pound marker was inserted, unless the user had taken the trouble to configure a non-default comment marker.
Make psql output all results when multiple queries are passed to the server at once (Fabien Coelho) §
        Previously, only the last query result was displayed.  The old
        behavior can be restored by setting
        the SHOW_ALL_RESULTS psql
        variable to off.
       
        After an error is detected
        in --single-transaction mode, change the
        final COMMIT command
        to ROLLBACK only
        if ON_ERROR_STOP is set (Michael Paquier)
        §
       
        Previously, detection of an error in a -c command
        or -f script file would lead to
        issuing ROLLBACK at the end, regardless of the
        value of ON_ERROR_STOP.
       
Improve psql's tab completion (Shinya Kato, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Peter Smith, Koyu Tanigawa, Ken Kato, David Fetter, Haiying Tang, Peter Eisentraut, Álvaro Herrera, Tom Lane, Masahiko Sawada) § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § §
Limit support of psql's backslash commands to servers running PostgreSQL 9.2 or later (Tom Lane) §
Remove code that was only used when running with an older server. Commands that do not require any version-specific adjustments compared to 9.2 will still work.
        Make pg_dump dump
        public schema ownership changes and security
        labels (Noah Misch)
        §
        §
       
Improve performance of dumping databases with many objects (Tom Lane) § § §
This will also improve the performance of pg_upgrade.
Improve parallel pg_dump's performance for tables with large TOAST tables (Tom Lane) §
        Add dump/restore option --no-table-access-method
        to force restore to only use the default table access method
        (Justin Pryzby)
        §
       
Limit support of pg_dump and pg_dumpall to servers running PostgreSQL 9.2 or later (Tom Lane) §
       Add new pg_basebackup
       option --target to control the base backup location
       (Robert Haas)
       §
      
       The new options are server to write the
       backup locally and blackhole to discard the
       backup (for testing).
      
Allow pg_basebackup to do server-side gzip, LZ4, and Zstandard compression and client-side LZ4 and Zstandard compression of base backup files (Dipesh Pandit, Jeevan Ladhe) § § §
       Client-side gzip compression was already
       supported.
      
Allow pg_basebackup to compress on the server side and decompress on the client side before storage (Dipesh Pandit) §
This is accomplished by specifying compression on the server side and plain output format.
       Allow pg_basebackup's
       --compress option to control the compression
       location (server or client), compression method, and compression
       options (Michael Paquier, Robert Haas)
       §
       §
       §
      
Add the LZ4 compression method to pg_receivewal (Georgios Kokolatos) § §
       This is enabled via --compress=lz4 and requires
       binaries to be built using --with-lz4.
      
       Add additional capabilities to
       pg_receivewal's
       --compress option (Georgios Kokolatos)
       §
      
Improve pg_receivewal's ability to restart at the proper WAL location (Ronan Dunklau) §
Previously, pg_receivewal would start based on the WAL file stored in the local archive directory, or at the sending server's current WAL flush location. With this change, if the sending server is running Postgres 15 or later, the local archive directory is empty, and a replication slot is specified, the replication slot's restart point will be used.
       Add pg_rewind
       option --config-file to simplify use when server
       configuration files are stored outside the data directory (Gunnar
       Bluth)
       §
      
        Store pg_upgrade's log and
        temporary files in a subdirectory of the new cluster called
        pg_upgrade_output.d (Justin Pryzby)
        §
        §
        §
       
Previously such files were left in the current directory, requiring manual cleanup. Now they are automatically removed on successful completion of pg_upgrade.
Disable default status reporting during pg_upgrade operation if the output is not a terminal (Andres Freund) §
        The status reporting output can be enabled for non-tty usage by
        using --verbose.
       
Make pg_upgrade report all databases with invalid connection settings (Jeevan Ladhe) §
Previously only the first database with an invalid connection setting was reported.
Make pg_upgrade preserve tablespace and database OIDs, as well as relation relfilenode numbers (Shruthi Gowda, Antonin Houska) § § §
        Add a --no-sync option to
        pg_upgrade (Michael Paquier)
        §
       
This is recommended only for testing.
Limit support of pg_upgrade to old servers running PostgreSQL 9.2 or later (Tom Lane) §
Allow pg_waldump output to be filtered by relation file node, block number, fork number, and full page images (David Christensen, Thomas Munro) § §
Make pg_waldump report statistics before an interrupted exit (Bharath Rupireddy) §
        For example, issuing a control-C in a terminal running
        pg_waldump --stats --follow will report the
        current statistics before exiting.  This does not work on Windows.
       
Improve descriptions of some transaction WAL records reported by pg_waldump (Masahiko Sawada, Michael Paquier) §
Allow pg_waldump to dump information about multiple resource managers (Heikki Linnakangas) §
        This is enabled by specifying the --rmgr option
        multiple times.
       
       Add documentation for pg_encoding_to_char()
       and pg_char_to_encoding() (Ian Lawrence
       Barwick)
       §
      
Add support for continuous integration testing using cirrus-ci (Andres Freund, Thomas Munro, Melanie Plageman) §
       Add configure option --with-zstd
       to enable Zstandard builds (Jeevan Ladhe, Robert Haas, Michael
       Paquier)
       §
      
Add an ABI identifier field to the magic block in loadable libraries, allowing non-community PostgreSQL distributions to identify libraries that are not compatible with other builds (Peter Eisentraut) §
An ABI field mismatch will generate an error at load time.
       Create a new pg_type.typcategory
       value for "char" (Tom Lane)
       §
      
Some other internal-use-only types have also been assigned to this category.
       Add new protocol message TARGET
       to specify a new COPY method to be used for base
       backups (Robert Haas)
       §
      
pg_basebackup now uses this method.
       Add new protocol message COMPRESSION
       and COMPRESSION_DETAIL to specify the compression
       method and options (Robert Haas)
       §
       §
      
       Remove server support for old BASE_BACKUP
       command syntax and base backup protocol (Robert Haas)
       §
       §
      
Add support for extensions to set custom backup targets (Robert Haas) §
Allow extensions to define custom WAL resource managers (Jeff Davis) §
       Add function pg_settings_get_flags()
       to get the flags of server variables (Justin Pryzby)
       §
      
       On Windows, export all the server's global variables using
       PGDLLIMPORT markers (Robert Haas)
       §
      
Previously, only specific variables were accessible to extensions on Windows.
Require GNU make version 3.81 or later to build PostgreSQL (Tom Lane) §
Require OpenSSL to build the pgcrypto extension (Peter Eisentraut) §
Require Perl version 5.8.3 or later (Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker) §
Require Python version 3.2 or later (Andres Freund) §
Improve amcheck sanity checks for TOAST tables (Mark Dilger) §
Add new module basebackup_to_shell as an example of a custom backup target (Robert Haas) § §
Add new module basic_archive as an example of performing archiving via a library (Nathan Bossart) §
Allow btree_gist indexes on boolean columns (Emre Hasegeli) § § §
These can be used for exclusion constraints.
       Fix pageinspect's
       page_header() to handle 32-kilobyte page sizes
       (Quan Zongliang)
       §
      
Previously, improper negative values could be returned in certain cases.
Add counters for temporary file block I/O to pg_stat_statements (Masahiko Sawada) §
Add JIT counters to pg_stat_statements (Magnus Hagander) §
Add new module pg_walinspect (Bharath Rupireddy) §
This gives SQL-level output similar to pg_waldump.
Indicate the permissive/enforcing state in sepgsql log messages (Dave Page) §
        Allow postgres_fdw to push down CASE expressions
        (Alexander Pyhalov)
        §
       
        Add server variable
        postgres_fdw.application_name to control the
        application name of postgres_fdw connections (Hayato Kuroda)
        §
        §
        §
       
        Previously the remote session's application_name
        could only be set on the remote server or via a
        postgres_fdw connection specification.
        postgres_fdw.application_name supports some
        escape sequences for customization, making it easier to tell such
        connections apart on the remote server.
       
Allow parallel commit on postgres_fdw servers (Etsuro Fujita) §
        This is enabled with the CREATE SERVER option
        parallel_commit.
       
The following individuals (in alphabetical order) have contributed to this release as patch authors, committers, reviewers, testers, or reporters of issues.
| Abhijit Menon-Sen | 
| Adam Brusselback | 
| Adam Mackler | 
| Adrian Ho | 
| Ahsan Hadi | 
| Ajin Cherian | 
| Alastair McKinley | 
| Aleksander Alekseev | 
| Ales Zeleny | 
| Alex Kingsborough | 
| Alex Kozhemyakin | 
| Alexander Korotkov | 
| Alexander Kukushkin | 
| Alexander Lakhin | 
| Alexander Nawratil | 
| Alexander Pyhalov | 
| Alexey Borzov | 
| Alexey Ermakov | 
| Aliaksandr Kalenik | 
| Álvaro Herrera | 
| Amit Kapila | 
| Amit Khandekar | 
| Amit Langote | 
| Amul Sul | 
| Anastasia Lubennikova | 
| Anders Kaseorg | 
| Andreas Dijkman | 
| Andreas Grob | 
| Andreas Seltenreich | 
| Andrei Zubkov | 
| Andres Freund | 
| Andrew Alsup | 
| Andrew Bille | 
| Andrew Dunstan | 
| Andrew Gierth | 
| Andrew Kesper | 
| Andrey Borodin | 
| Andrey Lepikhov | 
| Andrey Sokolov | 
| Andy Fan | 
| Anton Melnikov | 
| Anton Voloshin | 
| Antonin Houska | 
| Arjan van de Ven | 
| Arne Roland | 
| Arthur Zakirov | 
| Ashutosh Bapat | 
| Ashutosh Sharma | 
| Ashwin Agrawal | 
| Asif Rehman | 
| Asim Praveen | 
| Atsushi Torikoshi | 
| Aya Iwata | 
| Bauyrzhan Sakhariyev | 
| Benoit Lobréau | 
| Bernd Dorn | 
| Bertrand Drouvot | 
| Bharath Rupireddy | 
| Björn Harrtell | 
| Boris Kolpackov | 
| Boris Korzun | 
| Brad Nicholson | 
| Brar Piening | 
| Bruce Momjian | 
| Bruno da Silva | 
| Bryn Llewellyn | 
| Carl Sopchak | 
| Cary Huang | 
| Chapman Flack | 
| Chen Jiaoqian | 
| Chris Bandy | 
| Chris Lowder | 
| Christian Quest | 
| Christoph Berg | 
| Christoph Heiss | 
| Christophe Pettus | 
| Christopher Painter-Wakefield | 
| Claudio Freire | 
| Clemens Zeidler | 
| Corey Huinker | 
| Dag Lem | 
| Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker | 
| Dan Kubb | 
| Daniel Cherniy | 
| Daniel Gustafsson | 
| Daniel Polski | 
| Daniel Vérité | 
| Daniel Westermann | 
| Daniele Varrazzo | 
| Daniil Anisimov | 
| Danny Shemesh | 
| Darafei Praliaskouski | 
| Daria Lepikhova | 
| Dave Cramer | 
| Dave Page | 
| David Christensen | 
| David Fetter | 
| David G. Johnston | 
| David Rowley | 
| David Steele | 
| David Zhang | 
| Dean Rasheed | 
| Dian Fay | 
| Dilip Kumar | 
| Dipesh Pandit | 
| Dmitry Dolgov | 
| Dmitry Koval | 
| Dmitry Marakasov | 
| Dominique Devienne | 
| Dong Wook | 
| Drew DeVault | 
| Eduard Català | 
| Egor Chindyaskin | 
| Egor Rogov | 
| Ekaterina Kiryanova | 
| Elena Indrupskaya | 
| Elvis Pranskevichus | 
| Emmanuel Quincerot | 
| Emre Hasegeli | 
| Eric Mutta | 
| Erica Zhang | 
| Erik Rijkers | 
| Erki Eessaar | 
| Etsuro Fujita | 
| Euler Taveira | 
| Fabien Coelho | 
| Fabrice Chapuis | 
| Fabrice Fontaine | 
| Fabrízio de Royes Mello | 
| Feike Steenbergen | 
| Filip Gospodinov | 
| Florin Irion | 
| Floris Van Nee | 
| Frédéric Yhuel | 
| Gabriela Serventi | 
| Gaurab Dey | 
| Geoff Winkless | 
| Geoffrey Blake | 
| Georgios Kokolatos | 
| Gilles Darold | 
| Greg Nancarrow | 
| Greg Rychlewski | 
| Greg Sabino Mullane | 
| Greg Stark | 
| Gregory Smith | 
| Guillaume Lelarge | 
| Gunnar Bluth | 
| Gurjeet Singh | 
| Haiyang Wang | 
| Haiying Tang | 
| Hannu Krosing | 
| Hans Buschmann | 
| Hayato Kuroda | 
| Heath Lord | 
| Heikki Linnakangas | 
| Herwig Goemans | 
| Himanshu Upadhyaya | 
| Holly Roberts | 
| Hou Zhijie | 
| Hubert Lubaczewski | 
| Ian Barwick | 
| Ian Campbell | 
| Ibrar Ahmed | 
| Ildus Kurbangaliev | 
| Ilya Anfimov | 
| Itamar Gafni | 
| Jacob Champion | 
| Jaime Casanova | 
| Jakub Wartak | 
| James Coleman | 
| James Hilliard | 
| James Inform | 
| Jan Piotrowski | 
| Japin Li | 
| Jason Harvey | 
| Jason Kim | 
| Jean-Christophe Arnu | 
| Jeevan Ladhe | 
| Jeff Davis | 
| Jeff Janes | 
| Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais | 
| Jelte Fennema | 
| Jeremy Evans | 
| Jeremy Schneider | 
| Jian Guo | 
| Jian He | 
| Jimmy Yih | 
| Jiri Fejfar | 
| Jitka Plesníková | 
| Joe Conway | 
| Joe Wildish | 
| Joel Jacobson | 
| Joey Bodoia | 
| John Naylor | 
| Jonathan Katz | 
| Josef Simanek | 
| Joseph Koshakow | 
| Josh Soref | 
| Joshua Brindle | 
| Juan José Santamaría Flecha | 
| Julien Rouhaud | 
| Julien Roze | 
| Junwang Zhao | 
| Jürgen Purtz | 
| Justin Pryzby | 
| Ken Kato | 
| Kevin Burke | 
| Kevin Grittner | 
| Kevin Humphreys | 
| Kevin McKibbin | 
| Kevin Sweet | 
| Kevin Zheng | 
| Klaudie Willis | 
| Konstantin Knizhnik | 
| Konstantina Skovola | 
| Kosei Masumura | 
| Kotaro Kawamoto | 
| Koyu Tanigawa | 
| Kuntal Ghosh | 
| Kyotaro Horiguchi | 
| Lars Kanis | 
| Lauren Fliksteen | 
| Laurent Hasson | 
| Laurenz Albe | 
| Leslie Lemaire | 
| Liam Bowen | 
| Lingjie Qiang | 
| Liu Huailing | 
| Louis Jachiet | 
| Lukas Fittl | 
| Ma Liangzhu | 
| Maciek Sakrejda | 
| Magnus Hagander | 
| Mahendra Singh Thalor | 
| Maksim Milyutin | 
| Marc Bachmann | 
| Marcin Krupowicz | 
| Marcus Gartner | 
| Marek Szuba | 
| Marina Polyakova | 
| Mario Emmenlauer | 
| Mark Dilger | 
| Mark Murawski | 
| Mark Wong | 
| Markus Wanner | 
| Markus Winand | 
| Martijn van Oosterhout | 
| Martin Jurca | 
| Martin Kalcher | 
| Martín Marqués | 
| Masahiko Sawada | 
| Masahiro Ikeda | 
| Masao Fujii | 
| Masaya Kawamoto | 
| Masayuki Hirose | 
| Matthias van de Meent | 
| Matthijs van der Vleuten | 
| Maxim Orlov | 
| Maxim Yablokov | 
| Melanie Plageman | 
| Michael Banck | 
| Michael Harris | 
| Michael J. Sullivan | 
| Michael Meskes | 
| Michael Mühlbeyer | 
| Michael Paquier | 
| Michael Powers | 
| Mike Fiedler | 
| Mike Oh | 
| Mikhail Kulagin | 
| Miles Delahunty | 
| Naoki Okano | 
| Nathan Bossart | 
| Nathan Long | 
| Nazir Bilal Yavuz | 
| Neha Sharma | 
| Neil Chen | 
| Nicola Contu | 
| Nicolas Lutic | 
| Nikhil Benesch | 
| Nikhil Shetty | 
| Nikhil Sontakke | 
| Nikita Glukhov | 
| Nikolai Berkoff | 
| Nikolay Samokhvalov | 
| Nikolay Shaplov | 
| Nitin Jadhav | 
| Noah Misch | 
| Noboru Saito | 
| Noriyoshi Shinoda | 
| Olaf Bohlen | 
| Olly Betts | 
| Onder Kalaci | 
| Oskar Stenberg | 
| Otto Kekalainen | 
| Paul Guo | 
| Paul Jungwirth | 
| Paul Martinez | 
| Pavan Deolasee | 
| Pavel Borisov | 
| Pavel Luzanov | 
| Pavel Stehule | 
| Peter Eisentraut | 
| Peter Geoghegan | 
| Peter Slavov | 
| Peter Smith | 
| Petr Jelínek | 
| Phil Florent | 
| Phil Krylov | 
| Pierre-Aurélien Georges | 
| Prabhat Sahu | 
| Quan Zongliang | 
| Rachel Heaton | 
| Rahila Syed | 
| Rajakavitha Kodhandapani | 
| Rajkumar Raghuwanshi | 
| Ranier Vilela | 
| Rei Kamigishi | 
| Reid Thompson | 
| Rémi Lapeyre | 
| Renan Soares Lopes | 
| Richard Guo | 
| Richard Wesley | 
| RKN Sai Krishna | 
| Robert Haas | 
| Robert Treat | 
| Roberto Mello | 
| Robins Tharakan | 
| Roger Mason | 
| Roman Zharkov | 
| Ronan Dunklau | 
| Rui Zhao | 
| Ryan Kelly | 
| Ryo Matsumura | 
| Ryohei Takahashi | 
| Sadhuprasad Patro | 
| Sait Talha Nisanci | 
| Sami Imseih | 
| Sandeep Thakkar | 
| Sebastian Kemper | 
| Sehrope Sarkuni | 
| Sergei Kornilov | 
| Sergei Shoulbakov | 
| Sergey Shinderuk | 
| Shay Rojansky | 
| Shenhao Wang | 
| Shi Yu | 
| Shinya Kato | 
| Shruthi Gowda | 
| Simon Perepelitsa | 
| Simon Riggs | 
| Sirisha Chamarthi | 
| Soumyadeep Chakraborty | 
| Stan Hu | 
| Stas Kelvich | 
| Stefen Hillman | 
| Stephen Frost | 
| Steve Chavez | 
| Sumanta Mukherjee | 
| Suraj Khamkar | 
| Suraj Kharage | 
| Sven Klemm | 
| Takamichi Osumi | 
| Takayuki Tsunakawa | 
| Takeshi Ideriha | 
| Tatsuhiro Nakamori | 
| Tatsuhito Kasahara | 
| Tatsuo Ishii | 
| Tatsuro Yamada | 
| Teja Mupparti | 
| Teodor Sigaev | 
| Thibaud Walkowiak | 
| Thom Brown | 
| Thomas McKay | 
| Thomas Munro | 
| Tim McNamara | 
| Timo Stolz | 
| Timur Khanjanov | 
| Tom Lane | 
| Tomas Barton | 
| Tomas Vondra | 
| Tony Reix | 
| Troy Frericks | 
| Tushar Ahuja | 
| Victor Wagner | 
| Victor Yegorov | 
| Vignesh C | 
| Vik Fearing | 
| Vincas Dargis | 
| Vitaly Burovoy | 
| Vitaly Voronov | 
| Vladimir Sitnikov | 
| Wang Ke | 
| Wei Sun | 
| Wei Wang | 
| Whale Song | 
| Will Mortensen | 
| Wolfgang Walther | 
| Yanliang Lei | 
| Yaoguang Chen | 
| Yogendra Suralkar | 
| YoungHwan Joo | 
| Yugo Nagata | 
| Yukun Wang | 
| Yura Sokolov | 
| Yusuke Egashira | 
| Yuzuko Hosoya | 
| Zhang Mingli | 
| Zhang Wenjie | 
| Zhihong Yu | 
| Zhiyong Wu |