PostgreSQL 16 released

[Posted September 14, 2023 by corbet]

Version 16 of the PostgreSQL database manager has been released.

PostgreSQL 16 contains many new features and enhancements, including:

Allow parallelization of FULL and internal right OUTER hash joins
Allow logical replication from standby servers
Allow logical replication subscribers to apply large transactions in parallel
Allow monitoring of I/O statistics using the new pg_stat_io view
Add SQL/JSON constructors and identity functions
Improve performance of vacuum freezing
Add support for regular expression matching of user and database names in pg_hba.conf, and user names in pg_ident.conf

PostgreSQL 16 released

Posted Sep 16, 2023 21:23 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (5 responses)

Postgres 16 also introduced a build system based on Meson in addition to the older one that used Autotools. It's not very interesting to the users, but it may be a curiosity of interest to developers.

PostgreSQL 16 released

Posted Sep 18, 2023 12:17 UTC (Mon) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] (4 responses)

Why pick meson over cmake?

PostgreSQL 16 released

Posted Sep 18, 2023 19:35 UTC (Mon) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (3 responses)

I did a lot of the meson conversion.

> Why pick meson over cmake?

For one, I don't really like cmake. Somebody else had done a partial conversion to cmake before, and the result imo wasn't that appealing on it's own. For another, plenty of other open source projects had converted to meson in the last couple years, and there was more meson knowledge in the community than cmake.

PostgreSQL 16 released

Posted Sep 20, 2023 14:08 UTC (Wed) by tome (subscriber, #3171) [Link] (2 responses)

> I did a lot of the meson conversion.

Thank you!

Having just converted my release upgrade workflow to use meson, I'm surprised at how easy it is to build, test, and install with it. And I started out with a sour "don't fix it if it ain't broke" attitude.

PostgreSQL 16 released

Posted Sep 23, 2023 7:16 UTC (Sat) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (1 responses)

> Having just converted my release upgrade workflow to use meson, I'm surprised at how easy it is to build, test, and install with it. And I started out with a sour "don't fix it if it ain't broke" attitude.

What convinced you to do it anyways?

PostgreSQL 16 released

Posted Sep 30, 2023 17:23 UTC (Sat) by tome (subscriber, #3171) [Link]

> What convinced you to do it anyways?

Concerned about eventual deprecation of the auto-tools method, I wanted an early glimpse at how difficult the transition would be. Had no trouble -- jumped on meson.