2018-??-?? (CURRENT AS OF 2018-05-01) Major enhancements in PostgreSQL 11 include: Major improvements to partitioning: Partitioning by a hash key UPDATE statements that change a partition key now move affected rows to the appropriate partitions Improved SELECT query performance due to enhanced partition elimination during query processing and execution Support for PRIMARY KEY, FOREIGN KEY, indexes, and triggers on partitioned tables Improvements to parallelism: Parallelized hash joins Parallelized CREATE INDEX for B-tree indexes Parallelized CREATE TABLE .. AS, CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW, and certain queries using UNION SQL stored procedures, with support for embedded transactions JIT compilation of some SQL code, including support for fast evaluation of expressions Window functions now support all options shown in the SQL:2011 standard, including RANGE distance PRECEDING/FOLLOWING, GROUPS mode, and frame exclusion options Many other useful performance improvements, including making ALTER TABLE .. ADD COLUMN with a non-null column default faster The above items are explained in more detail in the sections below. A dump/restore using , or use of , is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release. Version 11 contains a number of changes that may affect compatibility with previous releases. Observe the following incompatibilities: Have pg_dump dump all aspects of a database (Haribabu Kommi) Previously database attributes like GRANT/REVOKE permissions and ALTER DATABASE SET and ALTER ROLE IN DATABASE SET variable settings were only dumped by pg_dumpall. Now pg_dump --create and pg_restore --create will restore all database aspects. pg_dumpall -g will now only output role and tablespace-related attributes. pg_dumpall's output (without -g) is unchanged. pg_dump and pg_restore, without --create, no longer dump/restore database comments and security labels. pg_dumpall --clean now restores the "postgres" and "template1" databases with the original locale and encoding settings. A restore of pg_dumpall will now create databases with their original locale and encoding, and will fail if the creation fails. Previously CREATE DATABASE would be dumped without such specifications if the database locale and encoding matched the old cluster's defaults. DID I GET EVERYTHING? Correct information schema column tables.table_type to return FOREIGN instead of FOREIGN TABLE (Peter Eisentraut) This new output matches the SQL standard. Change the ps process display labels for background workers to match the pg_stat_activity.backend_type labels (Peter Eisentraut) Prevent to_number() from consuming characters when the template separator does not match (Oliver Ford) Specifically, SELECT to_number('1234', '9,999') used to return 134. It will now return 1234. L and TH now only consume characters that are not digits, positive/negative signs, decimal points, and commas. Fix to_date(), to_number(), and to_timestamp() to skip a character for each template character (Tom Lane) Previously _bytes_ were skipped. Adjust the handling of backslashes inside double-quotes in template strings for to_char(), to_number(), and to_timestamp(). Such a backslash now escapes the character after it, particularly a double-quote or another backslash. Have libpq's PQhost() always return the actual connected host (Haribabu Kommi) Previously PQhost() often returned the supplied host parameters, which could contain several hosts. It will now also return the host's IP address if the host name was not supplied. The same is true of PQport(), which now returns the actual port number, not the multiple supplied port numbers. In the Extended Query Protocol, have statement_timeout apply to each Execute message, not to all commands before Sync (Tatsuo Ishii, Andres Freund) Remove relhaspkey column from system table pg_class (Peter Eisentraut) Applications needing to check for a primary key should consult pg_index. Replace system table pg_proc's proisagg and proiswindow with prokind (Peter Eisentraut) This new column more clearly identifies functions, procedures, aggregates, and window functions. Cause large object permission checks to happen on large object open, lo_open(), not read/write (Tom Lane, Michael Paquier) Remove deprecated contrib/adminpack functions pg_file_read(), pg_file_length(), and pg_logfile_rotate() (Stephen Frost) These functions are now present by default. Old adminpack installs will continue to have access to these functions until they are updated via ALTER EXTENSION ... UPDATE. Honor the capitalization of double-quoted command options (Daniel Gustafsson) Previously index options names like ("FillFactor" = 50) were automatically lower-cased. This quoted capitalization will now generate an error. Remove server variable replacement_sort_tuples (Peter Geoghegan) Replacement sorts were determined to be no longer useful. Remove WITH clause in CREATE FUNCTION (Michael Paquier) PostgreSQL has long supported a more standard-compliant syntax for this capability. Consistently return NaN for NaN inputs to power() on older platforms (Tom Lane, Dang Minh Huong) Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between PostgreSQL 11 and the previous major release. Allow faster partition elimination during query processing (Amit Langote, David Rowley, Dilip Kumar) This speeds access to partitioned tables with many partitions. Allow partition elimination during query execution (David Rowley, Beena Emerson) Previously partition elimination could only happen at planning time, meaning many joins and prepared queries could not use partition elimination. Allow the creation of partitions based on hashing a key (Amul Sul) Allow updated rows to automatically move to new partitions based on the new row contents (Amit Khandekar) Allow partitioned tables to have a default partition (Jeevan Ladhe, Beena Emerson, Ashutosh Bapat, Rahila Syed, Robert Haas) The default partition can store rows that don't match any of the other defined partitions, and is searched accordingly. Allow UNIQUE indexes on partitioned tables if the partition key guarantees uniqueness (Álvaro Herrera, Amit Langote) Allow indexes on a partitioned table to be automatically created in any child partitions (Álvaro Herrera) The new command ALTER INDEX ATTACH PARTITION allows indexes to be attached to partitions. This does not behave as a global index since the contents are private to each index. WARN WHEN USING AN EXISTING INDEX? Allow foreign keys on partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera) Allow INSERT, UPDATE, and COPY on partitioned tables to properly route rows to foreign partitions (Etsuro Fujita, Amit Langote) This is supported by postgres_fdw foreign tables. Allow FOR EACH ROW triggers on partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera) Creation of a trigger on partitioned tables automatically creates triggers on all partition tables, and on newly-created ones. This also allows deferred unique constraints on partitioned tables. Allow equality joins between partitioned tables with identically partitioned child tables to join the child tables directly (Ashutosh Bapat) This feature is disabled by default but can be enabled by changing enable_partitionwise_join. Perform aggregation on each partition, and then merge the results (Jeevan Chalke, Ashutosh Bapat, Robert Haas) This feature is disabled by default but can be enabled by changing enable_partitionwise_aggregate. Allow postgres_fdw to push down aggregates to foreign tables that are partitions (Jeevan Chalke) Allow btree indexes to be built in parallel (Peter Geoghegan, Rushabh Lathia, Heikki Linnakangas) Allow hash joins to be performed in parallel using a shared hash table (Thomas Munro) Allow UNION to run each SELECT in parallel if the individual SELECTs cannot be parallelized (Amit Khandekar, Robert Haas, Amul Sul) Allow partition scans to more efficiently use parallel workers (Amit Khandekar, Robert Haas, Amul Sul) Allow LIMIT to be passed to parallel workers (Robert Haas, Tom Lane) This allows workers to reduce returned results and use targeted index scans. Allow single-evaluation queries, e.g. WHERE clause aggregate queries, and functions in the target list to be parallelized (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas) Add server option parallel_leader_participation to control if the leader executes subplans (Thomas Munro) The default is enabled, meaning the leader will execute subplans. Allow parallelization of commands CREATE TABLE .. AS, SELECT INTO, and CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW (Haribabu Kommi) Improve performance of sequential scans with many parallel workers (David Rowley) Add reporting of parallel worker sort activity to EXPLAIN (Robert Haas, Tom Lane) Allow indexes to INCLUDE columns that are not part of the unique constraint but are available for index-only scans (Anastasia Lubennikova, Alexander Korotkov, Teodor Sigaev) This is also useful for including columns that don't have btree support. Remember the highest btree index page to optimize future monotonically increasing index additions (Pavan Deolasee, Peter Geoghegan) Allow entire hash index pages to be scanned (Ashutosh Sharma) Previously for each hash index entry, we need to refind the scan position within the page. This cuts down on lock/unlock traffic. Add predicate locking for hash, GiST and GIN indexes (Shubham Barai) This reduces the likelihood of serialization conflicts. ACCURATE? Allow heap-only-tuple (HOT) updates for expression indexes when the values of the expressions are unchanged (Konstantin Knizhnik) Add TEXT prefix operator ^@ which is supported by SP-GiST (Ildus Kurbangaliev) This is similar to using LIKE 'word%' with btree indexes, but is more efficient. Allow polygons to be indexed with SP-GiST (Nikita Glukhov, Alexander Korotkov) Allow SP-GiST to use lossy representation of leaf keys (Teodor Sigaev, Heikki Linnakangas, Alexander Korotkov, Nikita Glukhov) Improve the selection of the optimizer statistics' most-common-values (Jeff Janes, Dean Rasheed) Previously most-common-values (MCV) were chosen based on their significance compared to all column values. Now, MCV are chosen based on their significance compared to the non-MCV values. This improves the statistics for uniform (fewer) and non-uniform (more) distributions. Improve selectivity estimates for >= and <= when the constants are not common values (Tom Lane) Previously such cases used the same selectivity as > and <, respectively. This change is particularly useful for BETWEEN with small ranges. Optimize var = var to var IS NOT NULL where equivalent (Tom Lane) This leads to better selectivity estimates. Improve row count optimizer estimates for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries (Tom Lane) Add optimizer selectivity costs for HAVING clauses (Tom Lane) Add Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation of some parts of query plans to improve execution speed (Andres Freund) Allow bitmap scans to perform index-only scans when possible (Alexander Kuzmenkov) Update the free space map during vacuum (Claudio Freire) This allows free space to be reused more quickly. Allow vacuum to avoid unnecessary index scans (Masahiko Sawada, Alexander Korotkov) Improve performance of committing multiple concurrent transactions (Amit Kapila) Reduce memory usage for queries using set-returning functions in their target lists (Andres Freund) Allow postgres_fdw to push UPDATEs and DELETEs using joins to foreign servers (Etsuro Fujita) Previously only non-join UPDATEs and DELETEs were pushed. Show memory usage in log_statement_stats, log_parser_stats, log_planner_stats, log_executor_stats (Justin Pryzby, Peter Eisentraut) Add pg_stat_activity.backend_type now shows the type of background worker (Peter Eisentraut) Add bgw_type to the background worker C structure (Peter Eisentraut) This is displayed to the user in pg_stat_activity.backend_type and ps output. Have log_autovacuum_min_duration log skipped tables that are concurrently being dropped (Nathan Bossart) Add information_schema columns related to table constraints and triggers (Peter Eisentraut) Specifically, table_constraints.enforced, triggers.action_order, triggers.action_reference_old_table, and triggers.action_reference_new_table. Allow the server to specify more complex LDAP specifications in search+bind mode (Thomas Munro) Specifically, ldapsearchfilter allows pattern matching using combinations of LDAP attributes. Allow LDAP authentication to use ldaps (Thomas Munro) We already supported LDAP over TLS by using ldaptls=1. This new TLS LDAP method of encrypted LDAP is enabled with ldapscheme=ldaps or ldapurl=ldaps://. Improve LDAP logging of errors (Thomas Munro) Add default roles which control file system access (Stephen Frost) Specifically, the new roles are: pg_read_server_files, pg_write_server_files, pg_execute_server_program. These roles now also control who can use COPY and extension file_fdw. Previously only superusers could use these functions, and that is still the default behavior. Allow access to file system functions to be controlled by GRANT/REVOKE permissions, rather than superuser checks (Stephen Frost) Specifically, these functions were modified: pg_ls_dir(), pg_read_file(), pg_read_binary_file(), pg_stat_file(). Use GRANT/REVOKE to control access to lo_import() and lo_export() (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane) Previously, superusers were exclusively granted access to these functions. Compile-time option ALLOW_DANGEROUS_LO_FUNCTIONS has been removed. Use view owner not session owner when preventing non-password access to postgres_fdw tables (Robert Haas) PostgreSQL only allows superusers to access postgres_fdw tables without passwords, e.g. via peer. Previously the session owner had to be a superuser to allow such access; now the view owner is checked instead. Fix invalid locking permission check in SELECT FOR UPDATE on views (Tom Lane) Add server setting ssl_passphrase_command to allow supplying of the passphrase for SSL key files (Peter Eisentraut) Also add ssl_passphrase_command_supports_reload to specify whether the the SSL configuration should be reloaded and ssl_passphrase_command called during a server configuration reload. Add storage parameter toast_tuple_target to control the minimum length before TOAST storage will be considered for new rows (Simon Riggs) The default TOAST threshold has not been changed. Allow server options related to memory and file sizes to be specified as number of bytes (Beena Emerson) The new unit is "B". This is in addition to "kB", "MB", "GB" and "TB". Allow the WAL file size to be set via initdb (Beena Emerson) Previously the 16MB default could only be changed at compile time. No longer retain WAL that spans two checkpoints (Simon Riggs) The retention of WAL records for only one checkpoint is required. Fill the unused portion of force-switched WAL segment files with zeros for improved compressibility (Chapman Flack) Replicate TRUNCATE activity when using logical replication (Simon Riggs, Marco Nenciarini, Peter Eisentraut) Pass prepared transaction information to logical replication subscribers (Nikhil Sontakke, Stas Kelvich) Exclude unlogged tables, temporary tables, and pg_internal.init files from streaming base backups (David Steele) There is no need to copy such files. Allow heap pages checksums to be checked during streaming base backup (Michael Banck) Allow replication slots to be advanced programmatically, rather than be consumed by subscribers (Petr Jelinek) This allows efficient advancement replication slots when the contents do not need to be consumed. This is performed by pg_replication_slot_advance(). Add timeline information to the backup_label file (Michael Paquier) Also add a check that the WAL timeline matches the backup_label file's timeline. Add host and port connection information to the pg_stat_wal_receiver system view (Haribabu Kommi) Add window function features to complete SQL:2011 compliance (Oliver Ford, Tom Lane) Specifically, allow RANGE mode to use PRECEDING and FOLLOWING to specify peer groups with values plus or minus the specified offset. Add GROUPS mode to include plus or minus the number of peer groups. Frame exclusion syntax was also added. Allow ALTER TABLE to add a column with a non-null default without a table rewrite (Andrew Dunstan, Serge Rielau) Allow views to be locked by locking the underlying tables (Yugo Nagata) Allow ALTER INDEX to set statistics-gathering targets for expression indexes (Alexander Korotkov, Adrien Nayrat) In psql, \d+ now shows the statistics target for indexes. Allow multiple tables to be specified in one VACUUM or ANALYZE command (Nathan Bossart) Also, if any table mentioned in VACUUM uses a column list, then the ANALYZE keyword must be supplied; previously, ANALYZE was implied in such cases. Add parenthesized options syntax to ANALYZE (Nathan Bossart) This is similar to the syntax supported by VACUUM. Add CREATE AGGREGATE option to specify the behavior of the aggregate finalization function (Tom Lane) This is useful for allowing aggregate functions to be optimized and to work as window functions. Allow the creation of arrays of domains (Tom Lane) This also allows array_agg() to be used on domains. Support domains over composite types (Tom Lane) Also allow PL/Perl, PL/Python, and PL/Tcl to handle composite-domain function arguments and results. Also improve PL/Python domain handling. Add casts from jsonb scalars to numeric and boolean data types (Anastasia Lubennikova) Add SHA-2 family of hash functions (Peter Eisentraut) Specifically, sha224(), sha256(), sha384(), sha512() were added. Add support for 64-bit non-cryptographic hash functions (Robert Haas, Amul Sul) Allow to_char() and to_timestamp() to specify the time zone's hours and minutes from UTC (Nikita Glukhov, Andrew Dunstan) This is done with format specifications TZH and TZM. Improve the speed of aggregate computations (Andres Freund) Add text search function websearch_to_tsquery() that supports a query syntax similar to that used by web search engines (Victor Drobny, Dmitry Ivanov) Add function json(b)_to_tsvector() to create a text search query for matching JSON/JSONB values (Dmitry Dolgov) Add SQL procedures, which can start and commit their own transactions (Peter Eisentraut) They are created with the new CREATE PROCEDURE command and invoked via CALL. The new ALTER/DROP ROUTINE commands allows altering/dropping of procedures, functions, and aggregates. Add transaction control to PL/pgSQL, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Tcl, and SPI server-side languages (Peter Eisentraut) Transaction control is only available to top-transaction-level CALLs or in nested PL/pgSQL DO and CALL blocks that only contain other PL/pgSQL DO and CALL blocks. ACCURATE? Add the ability to define PL/pgSQL record types as not null, constant, or with initial values (Tom Lane) Allow PL/pgSQL to handle changes to composite types (e.g. record, row) that happen between the first and later function executions in the same session (Tom Lane) Previously such circumstances generated errors. Add extension jsonb_plpython to transform JSONB to/from PL/Python types (Anthony Bykov) Add extension jsonb_plperl to transform JSONB to/from PL/Perl types (Anthony Bykov) Change libpq to disable compression by default (Peter Eisentraut) Compression is already disabled in modern OpenSSL versions and the libpq setting had no effect in that case. Add DO CONTINUE action to the ECPG WHENEVER statement (Vinayak Pokale) This generates a C 'continue' statement, causing a return to the top of the contained loop when the specified condition occurs. Add ecpg mode to enable Oracle Pro*C handling of char arrays. This mode is enabled with -C. Add psql command \gdesc to display the column names and types of the query output (Pavel Stehule) Add psql variables to report query activity and errors (Fabien Coelho) Specifically, the new variables are ERROR, SQLSTATE, ROW_COUNT, LAST_ERROR_MESSAGE, and LAST_ERROR_SQLSTATE. Allow psql to test for the existence of a variable (Fabien Coelho) Specifically , the syntax :{?variable_name} allows a variable's existence to be tested in an \if statement. Add PSQL_PAGER to control psql's pager (Pavel Stehule) This allows psql's default pager to be specified as a separate environment variable from the pager for other applications. PAGER is still honored if PSQL_PAGER is not set. Have psql \d+ always show the partition information (Amit Langote, Ashutosh Bapat) Previously partition information would not be displayed for a partitioned table if it had no partitions. Also indicate which partitions are themselves partitioned. Have psql report the proper user name before the password prompt (Tom Lane) Previously, combinations of -U and a user name embedded in a URI caused incorrect reporting. Also suppress the user name before the password prompt when --password is specified. Allow quit and exit to exit psql when used in an empty buffer (Bruce Momjian) Also add hints of how to exit when quit and exit are used alone on a line in a non-empty buffer. Add a similar hint for help. Have psql hint at using control-D when \q is entered alone on a line but ignored (Bruce Momjian) For example, \q does not exit when supplied in character strings. Improve tab-completion for ALTER INDEX RESET/SET (Masahiko Sawada) Add infrastructure to allow psql to customize tab completion queries based on the server version (Tom Lane) Previously tab completion queries could fail. Add pgbench expressions support for NULLs, booleans, and some functions and operators (Fabien Coelho) Add \if conditional support to pgbench (Fabien Coelho) Allow the use of non-ASCII characters in pgbench variable names (Fabien Coelho) Add pgbench option --init-steps to control the initialization steps performed (Masahiko Sawada) Add an approximated Zipfian-distributed random generator to pgbench (Alik Khilazhev) Allow the random seed to be set in pgbench (Fabien Coelho) Allow pgbench to do exponentiation with pow() and power() (Raúl Marín Rodríguez) Add hashing functions to pgbench (Ildar Musin) Make pgbench statistics more accurate when using --latency-limit and --rate (Fabien Coelho) Add an option to pg_basebackup that creates a named replication slot (Michael Banck) The option --create-slot creates the named replication slot (--slot) when the WAL streaming method (--wal-method=stream) is used. IS IT CLEAR FROM THE DOCS THAT THE REPLICATION SLOT IS NOT TEMPORARY? Allow initdb to set group read access to the data directory (David Steele) This is accomplished with the initdb --allow-group-access flag. Administrators can also set group permissions on the empty data directory before running initdb. Server variable data_directory_mode allows reading of data directory group permissions. Add pg_verify_checksums tool to verify database checksums while offline (Magnus Hagander) Allow pg_resetwal to change the WAL segment size via --wal-segsize (Nathan Bossart) Add long options to pg_resetwal and pg_controldata (Nathan Bossart, Peter Eisentraut) Add pg_receivewal option --no-sync to prevent synchronous WAL writes, for testing (Michael Paquier) Add pg_receivewal option --endpos to specify when WAL receiving should stop (Michael Paquier) Allow pg_ctl to send the SIGKILL signal to processes (Andres Freund) This was originally unsupported due to concerns over its misuse. Reduce the number of files copied by pg_rewind (Michael Paquier) Prevent pg_rewind from running as root (Michael Paquier) Add pg_dumpall option --encoding to control encoding (Michael Paquier) pg_dump already had this option. Add pg_dump option --load-via-partition-root to force loading of data into the partition's root table, rather than the original partitions (Rushabh Lathia) This is useful if the system to be loaded has different collation definitions or endianness, requiring the rows to be stored in different partitions. Add an option to suppress dumping and restoring comments (Robins Tharakan) The new pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and pg_restore option is --no-comments. Add support for large pages on Windows (Takayuki Tsunakawa, Thomas Munro) This is controlled by the huge_pages configuration parameter. Add support for ARMv8 hardware CRC calculations (Yuqi Gu, Heikki Linnakangas, Thomas Munro) Convert documentation to DocBook XML (Peter Eisentraut, Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz) The file names still use an sgml extension for compatibility with back branches. Add ability to use channel binding when using SCRAM authentication (Michael Paquier) While SCRAM always prevents the replay of transmitted hashed passwords in a later session, SCRAM with channel binding can also prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. However, since there is no way to force channel binding in libpq, the feature currently does not prevent man-in-the-middle attacks when using libpq and interfaces built using it. It is expected that future versions of libpq and interfaces not built using libpq, e.g. JDBC, will allow this capability. The libpq options to control the optional channel binding type are scram_channel_binding=tls-unique and scram_channel_binding=tls-server-end-point. Overhaul the way system tables are defined for bootstrap use (John Naylor) Allow background workers to attach to databases that normally disallow connections (Magnus Hagander) Speed up lookups of built-in function names matching OIDs (Andres Freund) The previous binary search now uses a lookup array. Speed up construction of query results (Andres Freund) Improve access speed to system caches (Andres Freund) Add a generational memory allocator which is optimized for serial allocation/deallocation (Tomas Vondra) This reduces memory usage for logical decoding. Make the computation of system column pg_class.reltuples consistent (Tomas Vondra) Update to use perltidy version 20170521 (Tom Lane) Allow extension pg_prewarm to restore the previous shared buffer contents on startup (Mithun Cy, Robert Haas) This is accomplished by having pg_prewarm store the shared buffer relation/offset values to disk occasionally during server operation and shutdown. Add pgtrgm function strict_word_similarity() to compute the similarity of whole words (Alexander Korotkov) The function word_similarity() already existed for this purpose, but it was designed to find similar parts of words, while strict_word_similarity() computes the similarity to whole words. Allow creation of indexes on citext extension columns that can be used by LIKE comparisons (Alexey Chernyshov) Specifically, indexes must be created using the citext_pattern_ops operator class. Allow btree_gin to index bool, bpchar, name and uuid data types (Matheus Oliveira) Allow cube and seg extensions using GiST indexes to perform index-only scans (Andrey Borodin) Allow retrieval of negative cube coordinates using the ~> operator (Alexander Korotkov) This is useful for KNN-GiST searches. HOW? Add Vietnamese letter detection to the unaccent extension (Dang Minh Huong, Michael Paquier) Enhance amcheck to check that each heap tuple has an index entry (Peter Geoghegan) Have adminpack use the new default file system access roles (Stephen Frost) Previously only superusers could call adminpack functions; now role permissions are checked. Increase pg_stat_statement's query id to 64 bits (Robert Haas) This greatly reduces the chance of query id hash collisions. The query id can now potentially display as a negative value. Install errcodes.txt to provide access to the error codes reported by PostgreSQL (Thomas Munro) Prevent extensions from creating custom server variables that take a quoted list of values (Tom Lane) This was never intended to be supported. Remove contrib/start-scripts/osx since they are no longer recommended (Tom Lane) Remove extension chkpass (Peter Eisentraut) This extension no longer served as a usable security tool or example of how to write an extension. The following individuals (in alphabetical order) have contributed to this release as patch authors, committers, reviewers, testers, or reporters of issues. XXX