Release 14Release date:2021-09-30OverviewPostgreSQL 14 contains many new features and
enhancements, including:
Stored procedures can now return data via OUT
parameters.
The SQL-standard SEARCH
and CYCLE options for common table expressions
have been implemented.
Subscripting can now be applied to any data type for which
it is a useful notation, not only arrays. In this release,
the jsonb and hstore types have gained
subscripting operators.
Range types have been extended by adding multiranges, allowing
representation of noncontiguous data ranges.
Numerous performance improvements have been made for parallel
queries, heavily-concurrent workloads, partitioned tables, logical
replication, and vacuuming.
B-tree index updates are managed more efficiently, reducing index
bloat.
VACUUM automatically becomes more aggressive, and
skips inessential cleanup, if the database starts to approach a
transaction ID wraparound condition.
Extended statistics can now be collected on expressions, allowing
better planning results for complex queries.
libpq now has the ability to pipeline
multiple queries, which can boost throughput over high-latency
connections.
The above items and other new features
of PostgreSQL 14 are explained in more
detail in the sections below.
Migration to Version 14
A dump/restore using or use of or logical replication is required for those
wishing to migrate data from any previous release. See for general information on migrating to new major
releases.
Version 14 contains a number of changes that may affect compatibility
with previous releases. Observe the following incompatibilities:
User-defined objects that reference certain built-in array functions
along with their argument types must be recreated (Tom Lane)
Specifically, array_append(),
array_prepend(),
array_cat(),
array_position(),
array_positions(),
array_remove(),
array_replace(), and width_bucket()
used to take anyarray arguments but now take
anycompatiblearray. Therefore, user-defined objects
like aggregates and operators that reference those array function
signatures must be dropped before upgrading, and recreated once the
upgrade completes.
Remove deprecated containment operators @
and ~ for built-in geometric data types and
contrib modules , ,
, and (Justin Pryzby)
The more consistently named <@
and @> have been recommended for many years.
Fix to_tsquery()
and websearch_to_tsquery() to properly parse
query text containing discarded tokens (Alexander Korotkov)
Certain discarded tokens, like underscore, caused the output of
these functions to produce incorrect tsquery output, e.g., both
websearch_to_tsquery('"pg_class pg"') and to_tsquery('pg_class
<-> pg') used to output ( 'pg' & 'class' ) <-> 'pg',
but now both output 'pg' <-> 'class' <-> 'pg'.
Fix websearch_to_tsquery()
to properly parse multiple adjacent discarded tokens in quotes
(Alexander Korotkov)
Previously, quoted text that contained multiple adjacent discarded
tokens was treated as multiple tokens, causing incorrect tsquery
output, e.g., websearch_to_tsquery('"aaa: bbb"') used to output
'aaa' <2> 'bbb', but now outputs 'aaa' <-> 'bbb'.
Change EXTRACT()
to return type numeric instead of float8
(Peter Eisentraut)
This avoids loss-of-precision issues in some usages. The old
behavior can still be obtained by using the old underlying function
date_part().
Also, EXTRACT(date) now throws an error for units
that are not part of the date data type.
Change var_samp()
and stddev_samp() with numeric parameters to
return NULL when the input is a single NaN value (Tom Lane)
Previously NaN was returned.
Return false for has_column_privilege()
checks on non-existent or dropped columns when using attribute
numbers (Joe Conway)
Previously such attribute numbers returned an invalid-column error.
Fix handling of infinite window function ranges
(Tom Lane)
Previously window frame clauses like 'inf' PRECEDING AND
'inf' FOLLOWING returned incorrect results.
Remove factorial operators ! and
!!, as well as function
numeric_fac() (Mark Dilger)
The factorial()
function is still supported.
Disallow factorial() of negative numbers
(Peter Eisentraut)
Previously such cases returned 1.
Remove support for postfix
(right-unary) operators (Mark Dilger)
pg_dump and
pg_upgrade will warn if postfix operators
are being dumped.
Allow \D and \W shorthands to
match newlines in regular
expression newline-sensitive mode (Tom Lane)
Previously they did not match newlines in this
mode, but that disagrees with the behavior of other common regular
expression engines. [^[:digit:]] or
[^[:word:]] can be used to get the old behavior.
Disregard constraints when matching regular expression back-references (Tom Lane)
For example, in (^\d+).*\1,
the ^ constraint should be applied at the start
of the string, but not when matching \1.
Disallow \w as a range start or end in regular
expression character classes (Tom Lane)
This previously was allowed but produced unexpected results.
Require custom server
parameter names to use only characters that are valid in
unquoted SQL identifiers (Tom Lane)
Change the default of the
server parameter to scram-sha-256 (Peter
Eisentraut)
Previously it was md5. All new passwords will
be stored as SHA256 unless this server setting is changed or
the password is specified in MD5 format. Also, the legacy (and
undocumented) Boolean-like values which were previously synonyms
for md5 are no longer accepted.
Remove server parameter
vacuum_cleanup_index_scale_factor (Peter Geoghegan)
This setting was ignored starting in
PostgreSQL version 13.3.
Remove server parameter operator_precedence_warning
(Tom Lane)
This setting was used for warning applications about
PostgreSQL 9.5 changes.
Overhaul the specification of clientcert in pg_hba.conf
(Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Values
1/0/no-verify
are no longer supported; only the strings
verify-ca and verify-full
can be used. Also, disallow verify-ca if cert
authentication is enabled since cert requires
verify-full checking.
Remove support for SSL
compression (Daniel Gustafsson, Michael Paquier)
This was already disabled by default in previous
PostgreSQL releases, and most modern
OpenSSL and TLS versions no longer support it.
Remove server and libpq support
for the version 2 wire protocol
(Heikki Linnakangas)
This was last used as the default in
PostgreSQL 7.3 (released in 2002).
Disallow single-quoting of the language name in the
CREATE/DROP
LANGUAGE command (Peter Eisentraut)
Remove the composite
types that were formerly created for sequences and toast
tables (Tom Lane)
Process doubled quote marks in ecpg
SQL command strings correctly (Tom Lane)
Previously 'abc''def' was passed to the server
as 'abc'def', and "abc""def"
was passed as "abc"def", causing syntax errors.
Prevent the containment operators (<@ and
@>) for from using
GiST indexes (Tom Lane)
Previously a full GiST index scan was required, so just avoid
that and scan the heap, which is faster. Indexes created for this
purpose should be removed.
Remove contrib program pg_standby
(Justin Pryzby)
Prevent 's function
normal_rand() from accepting negative values
(Ashutosh Bapat)
Negative values produced undesirable results.
Changes
Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between
PostgreSQL 14 and the previous major
release.
Server
Add predefined roles pg_read_all_data
and pg_write_all_data (Stephen Frost)
These non-login roles can be used to give read or write permission
to all tables, views, and sequences.
Add predefined role pg_database_owner
that contains only the current database's owner (Noah Misch)
This is especially useful in template databases.
Remove temporary files after backend crashes (Euler Taveira)
Previously, such files were retained for debugging purposes. If
necessary, deletion can be disabled with the new server parameter
.
Allow long-running queries to be canceled if the client disconnects
(Sergey Cherkashin, Thomas Munro)
The server parameter allows control
over whether loss of connection is checked for intra-query.
(This is supported on Linux and a few other operating systems.)
Add an optional timeout parameter to pg_terminate_backend()
(Magnus Hagander)
Allow wide tuples to be always added to almost-empty heap pages
(John Naylor, Floris van Nee)
Previously tuples whose insertion would have exceeded the page's
fill factor were instead
added to new pages.
Add Server Name Indication (SNI) in
SSL connection packets (Peter Eisentraut)
This can be disabled by turning off client connection option sslsni.
Vacuuming
Allow vacuum to skip index vacuuming when the number of removable
index entries is insignificant (Masahiko Sawada, Peter Geoghegan)
The vacuum parameter INDEX_CLEANUP has a
new default of auto that enables this optimization.
Allow vacuum to more eagerly add deleted btree pages to the free
space map (Peter Geoghegan)
Previously vacuum could only add pages to the free space map
that were marked as deleted by previous vacuums.
Allow vacuum to reclaim space used by unused trailing heap
line pointers (Matthias van de Meent, Peter Geoghegan)
Allow vacuum to be more aggressive in removing dead rows during
minimal-locking index operations (Álvaro Herrera)
Specifically, CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY and
REINDEX CONCURRENTLY no longer limit the dead
row removal of other relations.
Speed up vacuuming of databases with many relations (Tatsuhito
Kasahara)
Reduce the default value of to better reflect current
hardware capabilities (Peter Geoghegan)
Add ability to skip vacuuming of TOAST tables
(Nathan Bossart)
VACUUM now
has a PROCESS_TOAST option which can be set to
false to disable TOAST processing, and vacuumdb
has a option.
Have COPY FREEZE
appropriately update page visibility bits (Anastasia Lubennikova,
Pavan Deolasee, Jeff Janes)
Cause vacuum operations to be more aggressive if the table is near
xid or multixact wraparound (Masahiko Sawada, Peter Geoghegan)
This is controlled by
and .
Increase warning time and hard limit before transaction id and
multi-transaction wraparound (Noah Misch)
This should reduce the possibility of failures that occur without
having issued warnings about wraparound.
Add per-index information to autovacuum logging
output (Masahiko Sawada)
Partitioning
Improve the performance of updates and deletes on partitioned tables
with many partitions (Amit Langote, Tom Lane)
This change greatly reduces the planner's overhead for such cases,
and also allows updates/deletes on partitioned tables to use
execution-time partition pruning.
Allow partitions to be detached in a non-blocking manner
(Álvaro Herrera)
The syntax is ALTER TABLE ... DETACH PARTITION
... CONCURRENTLY, and FINALIZE.
Ignore COLLATE clauses in partition boundary
values (Tom Lane)
Previously any such clause had to match the collation of the
partition key; but it's more consistent to consider that it's
automatically coerced to the collation of the partition key.
Indexes
Allow btree index additions to remove expired index entries
to prevent page splits (Peter Geoghegan)
This is particularly helpful for reducing index bloat on tables
whose indexed columns are frequently updated.
Allow BRIN indexes
to record multiple min/max values per range (Tomas Vondra)
This is useful if there are groups of values in each page range.
Allow BRIN indexes to use bloom filters
(Tomas Vondra)
This allows BRIN indexes to be used effectively
with data that is not well-localized in the heap.
Allow some GiST indexes to be built
by presorting the data (Andrey Borodin)
Presorting happens automatically and allows for faster index
creation and smaller indexes.
Allow SP-GiST indexes to contain
INCLUDE'd columns (Pavel Borisov)
Optimizer
Allow hash lookup for IN clauses with many
constants (James Coleman, David Rowley)
Previously the code always sequentially scanned the list
of values.
Increase the number of places extended statistics can
be used for OR clause estimation (Tomas Vondra,
Dean Rasheed)
Allow extended statistics on expressions (Tomas Vondra)
This allows statistics on a group of expressions and columns,
rather than only columns like previously. System view pg_stats_ext_exprs
reports such statistics.
Allow efficient heap scanning of a range of TIDs (Edmund
Horner, David Rowley)
Previously a sequential scan was required for non-equality
TID specifications.
Fix EXPLAIN CREATE TABLE
AS and EXPLAIN CREATE MATERIALIZED
VIEW to honor IF NOT EXISTS
(Bharath Rupireddy)
Previously, if the object already existed,
EXPLAIN would fail.
General Performance
Improve the speed of computing MVCC visibility snapshots on systems with many
CPUs and high session counts (Andres Freund)
This also improves performance when there are many idle sessions.
Add executor method to memoize results from the inner side of a
nested-loop join (David Rowley)
This is useful if only a small percentage of rows is checked on
the inner side. It can be disabled via server parameter .
Allow window functions
to perform incremental sorts (David Rowley)
Improve the I/O performance of parallel sequential scans (Thomas
Munro, David Rowley)
This was done by allocating blocks in groups to parallel workers.
Allow a query referencing multiple foreign tables to perform
foreign table scans in parallel (Robert Haas, Kyotaro Horiguchi,
Thomas Munro, Etsuro Fujita)
postgres_fdw
supports this type of scan if async_capable
is set.
Allow analyze to do
page prefetching (Stephen Frost)
This is controlled by .
Improve performance of regular expression
searches (Tom Lane)
Dramatically improve Unicode normalization performance (John Naylor)
This speeds normalize()
and IS NORMALIZED.
Add ability to use LZ4
compression on TOAST data (Dilip Kumar)
This can be set at the column level, or set as a default via server
parameter .
The server must be compiled with
to support this feature. The default setting is still pglz.
Monitoring
If server parameter
is enabled, display the query id in pg_stat_activity,
EXPLAIN
VERBOSE, csvlog, and optionally in
(Julien Rouhaud)
A query id computed by an extension will also be displayed.
Improve logging of auto-vacuum
and auto-analyze (Stephen Frost, Jakub Wartak)
This reports I/O timings for auto-vacuum and auto-analyze if is enabled. Also, report buffer
read and dirty rates for auto-analyze.
Add information about the original user name supplied by the
client to the output of
(Jacob Champion)
System Views
Add system view pg_stat_progress_copy
to report COPY progress (Josef Šimánek,
Matthias van de Meent)
Add system view pg_stat_wal
to report WAL activity (Masahiro Ikeda)
Add system view pg_stat_replication_slots
to report replication slot activity (Masahiko Sawada, Amit Kapila,
Vignesh C)
The function pg_stat_reset_replication_slot()
resets slot statistics.
Add system view pg_backend_memory_contexts
to report session memory usage (Atsushi Torikoshi, Fujii Masao)
Add function pg_log_backend_memory_contexts()
to output the memory contexts of arbitrary backends (Atsushi
Torikoshi)
Add session statistics to the pg_stat_database
system view (Laurenz Albe)
Add columns to pg_prepared_statements
to report generic and custom plan counts (Atsushi Torikoshi,
Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Add lock wait start time to pg_locks
(Atsushi Torikoshi)
Make the archiver process visible in
pg_stat_activity (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Add wait event WalReceiverExit
to report WAL receiver exit wait time (Fujii
Masao)
Implement information schema view routine_column_usage
to track columns referenced by function and procedure default
expressions (Peter Eisentraut)
Authentication
Allow an SSL certificate's distinguished name (DN)
to be matched for client certificate authentication (Andrew
Dunstan)
The new pg_hba.conf
option clientname=DN allows comparison with
certificate attributes beyond the CN and can
be combined with ident maps.
Allow pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf
records to span multiple lines (Fabien Coelho)
A backslash at the end of a line allows record contents to be
continued on the next line.
Allow the specification of a certificate revocation list
(CRL) directory (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
This is controlled by server parameter and libpq connection option
. Previously only
single CRL files could be specified.
Allow passwords of an arbitrary length (Tom Lane, Nathan Bossart)
Server Configuration
Add server parameter
to close idle sessions (Li Japin)
This is similar to .
Change default
to 0.9 (Stephen Frost)
The previous default was 0.5.
Allow %P
in to report the
parallel group leader's PID for a parallel worker (Justin Pryzby)
Allow to specify
paths as individual, comma-separated quoted strings (Ian Lawrence
Barwick)
Previously all the paths had to be in a single quoted string.
Allow startup allocation of dynamic shared memory (Thomas Munro)
This is controlled by . This allows more
use of huge pages.
Add server parameter to
control the size of huge pages used on Linux (Odin Ugedal)
Streaming Replication and Recovery
Allow standby servers to be rewound via pg_rewind
(Heikki Linnakangas)
Allow the setting to be changed
during a server reload (Sergei Kornilov)
You can also set restore_command to an empty
string and reload to force recovery to only read from the pg_wal
directory.
Add server parameter to report long recovery
conflict wait times (Bertrand Drouvot, Masahiko Sawada)
Pause recovery on a hot standby server if the primary changes its
parameters in a way that prevents replay on the standby (Peter
Eisentraut)
Previously the standby would shut down immediately.
Add function pg_get_wal_replay_pause_state()
to report the recovery state (Dilip Kumar)
It gives more detailed information than pg_is_wal_replay_paused(),
which still exists.
Add new read-only server parameter
(Haribabu Kommi, Greg Nancarrow, Tom Lane)
This allows clients to easily detect whether they are connected to
a hot standby server.
Speed truncation of small tables during recovery on clusters with
a large number of shared buffers (Kirk Jamison)
Allow file system sync at the start of crash recovery on Linux
(Thomas Munro)
By default, PostgreSQL
opens and fsyncs each data file in the database cluster at the
start of crash recovery. A new setting, =syncfs,
instead syncs each filesystem used by the cluster.
This allows for faster recovery on systems with many database files.
Add function pg_xact_commit_timestamp_origin()
to return the commit timestamp and replication origin of the
specified transaction (Movead Li)
Add the replication origin to the record returned by pg_last_committed_xact()
(Movead Li)
Allow replication origin
functions to be controlled using standard function permission
controls (Martín Marqués)
Previously these functions could only be executed by superusers,
and this is still the default.
Logical Replication
Allow logical replication to stream long in-progress transactions
to subscribers (Dilip Kumar, Amit Kapila, Ajin
Cherian, Tomas Vondra, Nikhil Sontakke, Stas Kelvich)
Previously transactions that exceeded were written to disk
until the transaction completed.
Enhance the logical replication API to allow
streaming large in-progress transactions (Tomas Vondra, Dilip
Kumar, Amit Kapila)
The output functions begin with stream.
test_decoding also supports these.
Allow multiple transactions during table sync in logical
replication (Peter Smith, Amit Kapila, Takamichi Osumi)
Immediately WAL-log subtransaction and top-level
XID association (Tomas Vondra, Dilip Kumar, Amit
Kapila)
This is useful for logical decoding.
Enhance logical decoding APIs to handle two-phase commits (Ajin
Cherian, Amit Kapila, Nikhil Sontakke, Stas Kelvich)
This is controlled via pg_create_logical_replication_slot().
Add cache invalidation messages to the WAL
during command completion when using logical replication (Dilip
Kumar, Tomas Vondra, Amit Kapila)
This allows logical streaming of in-progress transactions.
When logical replication is disabled, invalidation messages are
generated only at transaction completion.
Allow logical decoding to more efficiently process cache
invalidation messages (Dilip Kumar)
This allows logical decoding
to work efficiently in presence of a large amount of
DDL.
Allow control over whether logical decoding messages are sent to
the replication stream (David Pirotte, Euler Taveira)
Allow logical replication subscriptions to use binary transfer mode
(Dave Cramer)
This is faster than text mode, but slightly less robust.
Allow logical decoding to be filtered by xid (Markus Wanner)
SELECT, INSERT
Reduce the number of keywords that can't be used as column labels
without AS (Mark Dilger)
There are now 90% fewer restricted keywords.
Allow an alias to be specified for JOIN's
USING clause (Peter Eisentraut)
The alias is created by writing AS after the
USING clause. It can be used as a table
qualification for the merged USING columns.
Allow DISTINCT to be added to GROUP
BY to remove duplicate GROUPING SET
combinations (Vik Fearing)
For example, GROUP BY CUBE (a,b), CUBE (b,c)
will generate duplicate grouping combinations without
DISTINCT.
Properly handle DEFAULT entries in multi-row
VALUES lists in INSERT
(Dean Rasheed)
Such cases used to throw an error.
Add SQL-standard SEARCH
and CYCLE clauses for common table expressions (Peter
Eisentraut)
The same results could be accomplished using existing syntax, but
much less conveniently.
Allow column names in the WHERE clause
of ON CONFLICT to be table-qualified (Tom Lane)
Only the target table can be referenced, however.
Utility Commands
Allow REFRESH
MATERIALIZED VIEW to use parallelism (Bharath
Rupireddy)
Allow REINDEX
to change the tablespace of the new index (Alexey Kondratov,
Michael Paquier, Justin Pryzby)
This is done by specifying a TABLESPACE clause.
A option was also added to reindexdb
to control this.
Allow REINDEX to process all child tables or
indexes of a partitioned relation (Justin Pryzby, Michael Paquier)
Allow index commands using CONCURRENTLY to
avoid waiting for the completion of other operations using
CONCURRENTLY (Álvaro Herrera)
Improve the performance of COPY
FROM in binary mode (Bharath Rupireddy, Amit
Langote)
Preserve SQL standard syntax for SQL-defined
functions in view definitions
(Tom Lane)
Previously, calls to SQL-standard functions such as EXTRACT()
were shown in plain function-call syntax. The original syntax
is now preserved when displaying a view or rule.
Add the SQL-standard
clause GRANTED BY to GRANT and REVOKE (Peter
Eisentraut)
Add OR REPLACE option for CREATE TRIGGER
(Takamichi Osumi)
This allows pre-existing triggers to be conditionally replaced.
Allow TRUNCATE to
operate on foreign tables (Kazutaka Onishi, Kohei KaiGai)
The postgres_fdw
module also now supports this.
Allow publications to be more easily added to and removed from a
subscription (Japin Li)
The new syntax is ALTER SUBSCRIPTION
... ADD/DROP PUBLICATION. This avoids having to
specify all publications to add/remove entries.
Add primary keys, unique constraints, and foreign keys to system catalogs (Peter Eisentraut)
These changes help GUI tools analyze the system
catalogs. The existing unique indexes of catalogs now have
associated UNIQUE or PRIMARY
KEY constraints. Foreign key relationships are not
actually stored or implemented as constraints, but can be obtained
for display from the
function pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys().
Allow CURRENT_ROLE
every place CURRENT_USER is accepted (Peter
Eisentraut)
Data Types
Allow extensions and built-in data types to implement subscripting (Dmitry Dolgov)
Previously subscript handling was hard-coded into the server, so
that subscripting could only be applied to array types. This change
allows subscript notation to be used to extract or assign portions
of a value of any type for which the concept makes sense.
Allow subscripting of JSONB (Dmitry Dolgov)
JSONB subscripting can be used to extract and assign
to portions of JSONB documents.
Add support for multirange data
types (Paul Jungwirth, Alexander Korotkov)
These are like range data types, but they allow the specification
of multiple, ordered, non-overlapping ranges. An associated
multirange type is automatically created for every range type.
Add support for the stemming of
languages Armenian, Basque, Catalan, Hindi, Serbian, and Yiddish
(Peter Eisentraut)
Allow tsearch data
files to have unlimited line lengths (Tom Lane)
The previous limit was 4K bytes. Also remove function
t_readline().
Add support for Infinity and
-Infinity values in the numeric data type (Tom Lane)
Floating-point data types already supported these.
Add point operators
<<| and |>>
representing strictly above/below tests (Emre Hasegeli)
Previously these were called >^
and <^, but that naming is inconsistent with
other geometric data types. The old names remain available,
but may someday be removed.
Add operators to add and subtract LSN and numeric
(byte) values (Fujii Masao)
Allow binary data
transfer to be more forgiving of array and record
OID mismatches (Tom Lane)
Create composite array types for system catalogs (Wenjing Zeng)
User-defined relations have long had composite types associated
with them, and also array types over those composite types.
System catalogs now do as well. This change also fixes an
inconsistency that creating a user-defined table in single-user
mode would fail to create a composite array type.
Functions
Allow SQL-language functions and procedures to use
SQL-standard function bodies (Peter Eisentraut)
Previously only string-literal function bodies were supported.
When writing a function or procedure in SQL-standard syntax,
the body is parsed immediately and stored as a parse tree.
This allows better tracking of function dependencies, and can have
security benefits.
Allow procedures to have
OUT parameters (Peter Eisentraut)
Allow some array functions to operate on a mix of compatible data
types (Tom Lane)
The functions array_append(),
array_prepend(),
array_cat(),
array_position(),
array_positions(),
array_remove(),
array_replace(), and width_bucket()
now take anycompatiblearray instead
of anyarray arguments. This makes them less fussy
about exact matches of argument types.
Add SQL-standard trim_array()
function (Vik Fearing)
This could already be done with array slices, but less easily.
Add bytea equivalents of ltrim()
and rtrim() (Joel Jacobson)
Support negative indexes in split_part()
(Nikhil Benesch)
Negative values start from the last field and count backward.
Add string_to_table()
function to split a string on delimiters (Pavel Stehule)
This is similar to the regexp_split_to_table()
function.
Add unistr()
function to allow Unicode characters to be specified as
backslash-hex escapes in strings (Pavel Stehule)
This is similar to how Unicode can be specified in literal strings.
Add bit_xor()
XOR aggregate function (Alexey Bashtanov)
Add function bit_count()
to return the number of bits set in a bit or byte string (David
Fetter)
Add date_bin()
function (John Naylor)
This function bins input timestamps, grouping them
into intervals of a uniform length aligned with a specified origin.
Allow make_timestamp()/make_timestamptz()
to accept negative years (Peter Eisentraut)
Negative values are interpreted as BC years.
Add newer regular expression substring()
syntax (Peter Eisentraut)
The new SQL-standard syntax is SUBSTRING(text SIMILAR
pattern ESCAPE escapechar). The previous standard syntax was
SUBSTRING(text FROM pattern FOR escapechar),
which is still accepted by PostgreSQL.
Allow complemented character class escapes \D, \S,
and \W within regular expression brackets (Tom Lane)
Add [[:word:]]
as a regular expression character class, equivalent
to \w (Tom Lane)
Allow more flexible data types for default values of lead()
and lag() window functions (Vik Fearing)
Make non-zero floating-point values
divided by infinity return zero (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Previously such operations produced underflow errors.
Make floating-point division of NaN by zero return NaN
(Tom Lane)
Previously this returned an error.
Cause exp() and
power() for negative-infinity exponents to
return zero (Tom Lane)
Previously they often returned underflow errors.
Improve the accuracy of geometric computations involving
infinity (Tom Lane)
Mark built-in type coercion functions as leakproof where possible
(Tom Lane)
This allows more use of functions that require type conversion in
security-sensitive situations.
Change pg_describe_object(),
pg_identify_object(), and
pg_identify_object_as_address() to always report
helpful error messages for non-existent objects (Michael Paquier)
PL/pgSQL
Improve PL/pgSQL's expression and assignment parsing
(Tom Lane)
This change allows assignment to array slices and nested record
fields.
Allow plpgsql's RETURN
QUERY to execute its query using parallelism
(Tom Lane)
Improve performance of repeated CALLs within plpgsql
procedures (Pavel Stehule, Tom Lane)
Client Interfaces
Add pipeline mode
to libpq (Craig Ringer, Matthieu Garrigues, Álvaro Herrera)
This allows multiple queries to be sent, only waiting for completion
when a specific synchronization message is sent.
Enhance libpq's
parameter options (Haribabu Kommi, Greg Nancarrow, Vignesh C,
Tom Lane)
The new options are read-only,
primary, standby, and
prefer-standby.
Improve the output format of libpq's PQtrace()
(Aya Iwata, Álvaro Herrera)
Allow an ECPG SQL identifier to be linked to
a specific connection (Hayato Kuroda)
This is done via DECLARE
... STATEMENT.
Client Applications
Allow vacuumdb
to skip index cleanup and truncation (Nathan Bossart)
The options are and
.
Allow pg_dump
to dump only certain extensions (Guillaume Lelarge)
This is controlled by option .
Add pgbenchpermute() function to randomly shuffle values
(Fabien Coelho, Hironobu Suzuki, Dean Rasheed)
Include disconnection times in the reconnection overhead measured
by pgbench with
(Yugo Nagata)
Allow multiple verbose option specifications ()
to increase the logging verbosity (Tom Lane)
This behavior is supported by pg_dump,
pg_dumpall,
and pg_restore.
Allow psql's \df
and \do commands to specify function and
operator argument types (Greg Sabino Mullane, Tom Lane)
This helps reduce the number of matches printed for overloaded names.
Add an access method column to psql's
\d[i|m|t]+ output (Georgios Kokolatos)
Allow psql's \dt
and \di to show TOAST
tables and their indexes (Justin Pryzby)
Add psql command \dX
to list extended statistics objects (Tatsuro Yamada)
Fix psql's \dT to
understand array syntax and backend grammar aliases,
like int for integer
(Greg Sabino Mullane, Tom Lane)
When editing the previous query or a file with
psql's \e, or using
\ef and \ev, ignore the
results if the editor exits without saving (Laurenz Albe)
Previously, such edits would load the previous query into
the query buffer, and typically execute it immediately. This was
deemed to be probably not what the user wants.
Improve tab completion (Vignesh C, Michael Paquier, Justin Pryzby,
Georgios Kokolatos, Julien Rouhaud)
Server Applications
Add command-line utility pg_amcheck
to simplify running contrib/amcheck
tests on many relations
(Mark Dilger)
Add option to initdb
(Magnus Hagander)
This suppresses the server startup instructions that are normally
printed.
Stop pg_upgrade
from creating analyze_new_cluster script
(Magnus Hagander)
Instead, give comparable vacuumdb
instructions.
Remove support for the postmaster
option (Magnus Hagander)
This option was unnecessary since all passed options could already
be specified directly.
Documentation
Rename "Default Roles" to "Predefined Roles" (Bruce Momjian,
Stephen Frost)
Add documentation for the factorial()
function (Peter Eisentraut)
With the removal of the ! operator in this release,
factorial() is the only built-in way to compute
a factorial.
Source Code
Add configure option --with-ssl={openssl}
to allow future choice of the SSL library to use (Daniel Gustafsson,
Michael Paquier)
The spelling is kept for
compatibility.
Add support for abstract
Unix-domain sockets (Peter Eisentraut)
This is currently supported on Linux
and Windows.
Allow Windows to properly handle files larger than four gigabytes
(Juan José Santamaría Flecha)
For example this allows COPY, WAL
files, and relation segment files to be larger than four gigabytes.
Add server parameter
to control cache flushing for test purposes (Craig Ringer)
Previously this behavior could only be set at compile time.
To invoke it during initdb, use the new
option .
Various improvements in valgrind
error detection ability (Álvaro Herrera, Peter Geoghegan)
Add a test module for the regular expression package (Tom Lane)
Add support for LLVM version 12
(Andres Freund)
Change SHA1, SHA2, and MD5 hash computations to use the
OpenSSL EVP API
(Michael Paquier)
This is more modern and supports FIPS mode.
Remove separate build-time control over the choice of random number
generator (Daniel Gustafsson)
This is now always determined by the choice of SSL library.
Add direct conversion routines between EUC_TW and Big5 encodings
(Heikki Linnakangas)
Add collation version support for FreeBSD
(Thomas Munro)
Add amadjustmembers
to the index access method API (Tom Lane)
This allows an index access method to provide validity checking
during creation of a new operator class or family.
Provide feature-test macros in libpq-fe.h
for recently-added libpq features
(Tom Lane, Álvaro Herrera)
Historically, applications have usually used compile-time checks
of PG_VERSION_NUM to test whether a feature is
available. But that's normally the server version, which might
not be a good guide to libpq's
version. libpq-fe.h now
offers #define symbols denoting
application-visible features added in v14; the intent is to keep
adding symbols for such features in future versions.
Additional Modules
Allow subscripting of hstore values
(Tom Lane, Dmitry Dolgov)
Allow GiST/GIN pg_trgm indexes
to do equality lookups (Julien Rouhaud)
This is similar to LIKE except no wildcards
are honored.
Allow the cube data type
to be transferred in binary mode (KaiGai Kohei)
Allow pgstattuple_approx()
to report on TOAST tables (Peter Eisentraut)
Add contrib module pg_surgery
which allows changes to row visibility (Ashutosh Sharma)
This is useful for correcting database corruption.
Add contrib module old_snapshot
to report the XID/time mapping used by an active
(Robert Haas)
Allow amcheck to
also check heap pages (Mark Dilger)
Previously it only checked B-Tree index pages.
Allow pageinspect
to inspect GiST indexes (Andrey Borodin, Heikki Linnakangas)
Change pageinspect block numbers
to be bigints
(Peter Eisentraut)
Mark btree_gist
functions as parallel safe (Steven Winfield)
pg_stat_statements
Move query hash computation from
pg_stat_statements to the core server
(Julien Rouhaud)
The new server parameter 's
default of auto will automatically enable query
id computation when this extension is loaded.
Cause pg_stat_statements to track top
and nested statements separately (Julien Rohaud)
Previously, when tracking all statements, identical top and nested
statements were tracked as a single entry; but it seems more useful
to separate such usages.
Add row counts for utility commands to
pg_stat_statements (Fujii Masao, Katsuragi
Yuta, Seino Yuki)
Add pg_stat_statements_info system view
to show pg_stat_statements activity
(Katsuragi Yuta, Yuki Seino, Naoki Nakamichi)
postgres_fdw
Allow postgres_fdw to
INSERT rows in bulk (Takayuki Tsunakawa, Tomas
Vondra, Amit Langote)
Allow postgres_fdw
to import table partitions if specified by IMPORT FOREIGN SCHEMA
... LIMIT TO (Matthias van de Meent)
By default, only the root of a partitioned table is imported.
Add postgres_fdw function
postgres_fdw_get_connections() to report open
foreign server connections (Bharath Rupireddy)
Allow control over whether foreign servers keep connections open
after transaction completion (Bharath Rupireddy)
This is controlled by keep_connections and
defaults to on.
Allow postgres_fdw to reestablish
foreign server connections if necessary (Bharath Rupireddy)
Previously foreign server restarts could cause foreign table
access errors.
Add postgres_fdw functions to discard
cached connections (Bharath Rupireddy)
Acknowledgments
The following individuals (in alphabetical order) have contributed
to this release as patch authors, committers, reviewers, testers,
or reporters of issues.
Abhijit Menon-SenÁdám BaloghAdrian HoAhsan HadiAjin CherianAleksander AlekseevAlessandro GherardiAlex KozhemyakinAlexander KorotkovAlexander LakhinAlexander NawratilAlexander PyhalovAlexandra WangAlexey BashtanovAlexey BulgakovAlexey KondratovÁlvaro HerreraAmit KapilaAmit KhandekarAmit LangoteAmul SulAnastasia LubennikovaAndreas GrobAndreas KretschmerAndreas SeltenreichAndreas WichtAndres FreundAndrew BilleAndrew DunstanAndrew GierthAndrey BorodinAndrey LepikhovAndy FanAnton VoloshinAntonin HouskaArne RolandArseny SherArthur NascimentoArthur ZakirovAshutosh BapatAshutosh SharmaAshwin AgrawalAsif RehmanAsim PraveenAtsushi TorikoshiAya IwataBarry PedersonBas PootBauyrzhan SakhariyevBeena EmersonBenoît LobréauBernd HelmleBernhard M. WiedemannBertrand DrouvotBharath RupireddyBoris KolpackovBrar PieningBrian YeBruce MomjianBryn LlewellynCameron DanielChapman FlackCharles SamborskiCharlie HornsbyChen JiaoqianChris WilsonChristian QuestChristoph BergChristophe CourtoisCorey HuinkerCraig RingerDagfinn Ilmari MannsåkerDana BurdDaniel CherniyDaniel GustafssonDaniel VéritéDaniel WestermannDaniele VarrazzoDar Alathar-YemenDarafei PraliaskouskiDave CramerDavid ChristensenDavid FetterDavid G. JohnstonDavid GeierDavid GilmanDavid PirotteDavid RowleyDavid SteeleDavid TuronDavid ZhangDean RasheedDenis PatronDian FayDilip KumarDimitri NüschelerDmitriy KuzminDmitry DolgovDmitry MarakasovDomagoj SmoljanovicDong WookDouglas DooleDuncan SandsEdmund HornerEdson RichterEgor RogovEkaterina KiryanovaElena IndrupskayaEmil IgglandEmre HasegeliEric ThinnesErik RijkersErwin BrandstetterEtienne StalmansEtsuro FujitaEugen KonkovEuler TaveiraFabien CoelhoFabrízio de Royes MelloFederico CaselliFelix LechnerFilip GospodinovFloris Van NeeFrank GagnepainFrits JalvinghGeorgios KokolatosGreg NancarrowGreg RychlewskiGreg Sabino MullaneGregory SmithGrigory SmolkinGuillaume LelargeGuy BurgessGuyren HoweHaiying TangHamid AkhtarHans BuschmannHao WuHaribabu KommiHarisai HariHayato KurodaHeath LordHeikki LinnakangasHenry HinzeHerwig GoemansHimanshu UpadhyayaHironobu SuzukiHiroshi InoueHisanori KobayashiHonza HorakHou ZhijieHubert LubaczewskiHubert ZhangIan BarwickIbrar AhmedIldus KurbangalievIsaac MorlandIsrael BarthItamar GafniJacob ChampionJaime CasanovaJaime SolerJakub WartakJames ColemanJames HilliardJames HunterJames InformJan MusslerJapin LiJasen BettsJason HarveyJason KimJeevan LadheJeff DavisJeff JanesJelte FennemaJeremy EvansJeremy FinzelJeremy SmithJesse KinkeadJesse ZhangJie ZhangJim DotyJim NasbyJimmy AngelakosJimmy YihJiri FejfarJoe ConwayJoel JacobsonJohn NaylorJohn ThompsonJonathan KatzJosef ŠimánekJoseph NahmiasJosh BerkusJuan José Santamaría FlechaJulien RouhaudJunfeng YangJürgen PurtzJustin PryzbyKazutaka OnishiKeisuke KurodaKelly MinKensuke OkamuraKevin SweetKevin YeapKirk JamisonKohei KaiGaiKonstantin KnizhnikKota MiyakeKrzysztof GradekKuntal GhoshKyle KingsburyKyotaro HoriguchiLaurent HassonLaurenz AlbeLee Dong WookLi JapinLiu HuailingLuc VlamingLudovic KutyLuis RobertoLukas EderMa LiangzhuMaciek SakrejdaMadan KumarMagnus HaganderMahendra Singh ThalorMaksim MilyutinMarc BoerenMarcin KrupowiczMarco AtzeriMarek SzubaMarina PolyakovaMario EmmenlauerMark DilgerMark WongMark ZhaoMarkus WannerMartín MarquésMartin VisserMasahiko SawadaMasahiro IkedaMasao FujiiMathis RudolfMatthias van de MeentMatthieu GarriguesMatthijs van der VleutenMaxim OrlovMelanie PlagemanMerlin MoncureMichael BanckMichael BrownMichael MeskesMichael PaquierMichael Paul KillianMichael PowersMichael VastolaMichail NikolaevMichal AlbrychtMikael GustavssonMovead LiMuhammad UsamaNagaraj RajNaoki NakamichiNathan BossartNathan LongNazli Ugur KoyluogluNeha SharmaNeil ChenNick CleatonNico WilliamsNikhil BeneschNikhil SontakkeNikita GlukhovNikita KonevNikolai BerkoffNikolay SamokhvalovNikolay ShaplovNitin JadhavNoah MischNoriyoshi ShinodaOdin UgedalOleg BartunovOleg SamoilovÖnder KalaciPascal LegrandPaul FörsterPaul GuoPaul JungwirthPaul MartinezPaul SivashPavan DeolaseePavel BoevPavel BorisovPavel LuzanovPavel StehulePengcheng LiuPeter EisentrautPeter GeogheganPeter SmithPeter VandivierPetr FedorovPetr JelínekPhil KrylovPhilipp GramzowPhilippe BeaudoinPhillip MenkePierre GiraudPrabhat SahuQuan ZongliangRafi ShamimRahila SyedRajkumar RaghuwanshiRanier VilelaRegina ObeRémi LapeyreRobert FoggiaRobert GrangeRobert HaasRobert KahlertRobert SosinskiRobert TreatRobin AbbiRobins TharakanRoger MasonRohit BhogateRoman ZharkovRon L. JohnsonRonan DunklauRyan LambertRyo MatsumuraSaeed HubaishanSait Talha NisanciSandro ManiSantosh UdupiScott RibeSehrope SarkuniSergei KornilovSergey BernikovSergey CherkashinSergey KoposovSergey ShinderukSergey ZubkovskyShawn WangShay RojanskyShi YuShinya KatoShinya OkanoSigrid EhrenreichSimon NorrisSimon RiggsSofoklis PapasofokliSoumyadeep ChakrabortyStas KelvichStephan SpringlStéphane LorekStephen FrostSteven WinfieldSurafel TemesgenSuraj KharageSven KlemmTakamichi OsumiTakashi MenjoTakayuki TsunakawaTang HaiyingTatsuhito KasaharaTatsuo IshiiTatsuro YamadaTheodor Arsenij Larionov-TrichkinThomas KellererThomas MunroThomas TrenzTijs van DamTom EllisTom GottfriedTom LaneTom VijlbriefTomas BartonTomas VondraTomohiro HiramitsuTony ReixVaishnavi PrabakaranValentin Gatien-BaronVictor WagnerVictor YegorovVignesh CVik FearingVitaly UstinovVladimir SitnikovVyacheslav ShablistyyWang ShenhaoWei WangWells OliverWenjing ZengWolfgang WaltherYang LinYanliang LeiYaoguang ChenYaroslav PashinskyYaroslav SchekinYasushi YamashitaYoran HelingYoungHwan JooYugo NagataYuki SeinoYukun WangYulin PeiYura SokolovYuta KatsuragiYuta KondoYuzuko HosoyaZhihong YuZhiyong WuZsolt Ero