Another amazing release, congrats to all the contributors. There are simply too many things to call out - just a few highlights:

Massive improvements to vacuum operations:

    "PostgreSQL 17 introduces a new internal memory structure for vacuum that consumes up to 20x less memory."

Much needed features for backups:

    "pg_basebackup, the backup utility included in PostgreSQL, now supports incremental backups and adds the pg_combinebackup utility to reconstruct a full backup"

I'm a huge fan of FDW's and think they are an untapped-gem in Postgres, so I love seeing these improvements:

    "The PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper (postgres_fdw), used to execute queries on remote PostgreSQL instances, can now push EXISTS and IN subqueries to the remote server for more efficient processing."

I remember when the json stuff started coming out, I thought it was interesting but nothing I would ever want to rely on - boy was I wrong!

It is so nice having json functionality in a relational db - even if you never actually store json in your database, its useful in so many situations.

Being able to generate json in a query from your data is a big deal too.

Looking forward to really learning json_table

Very cool with the JSON_TABLE. The style of putting json response (from API, created from scraping, ect.) into jsonb column and then writing a view on top to parse / flatten is something I've been doing for a few years now. I've found it really great to put the json into a table, somewhere safe, and then do the parsing rather than dealing with possible errors on the scripting language side. I haven't seen this style been used in other places before, and to see it in the docs as a feature from new postgres makes me feel a bit more sane. Will be cool to try this out and see the differences from what I was doing before!

Very impressive changelog.

Bit sad the UUIDv7 PR didn't make the cut just yet:

https://commitfest.postgresql.org/49/4388/

A number of features stood out to me in this release:

1. Chipping away more at vacuum. Fundamentally Postgres doesn't have undo log and therefore has to have vacuum. It's a trade-off of fast recovery vs well.. having to vacuum. The unfortunate part about vacuum is that it adds load to the system exactly when the system needs all the resources. I hope one day people stop knowing that vacuum exists, we are one step closer, but not there.

2. Performance gets better and not worse. Mark Callaghan blogs about MySQL and Postgres performance changes over time and MySQL keep regressing performance while Postgres keeps improving.

https://x.com/MarkCallaghanDB https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/

3. JSON. Postgres keep improving QOL for the interop with JS and TS.

4. Logical replication is becoming a super robust way of moving data in and out. This is very useful when you move data from one instance to another especially if version numbers don't match. Recently we have been using it to move at the speed of 1Gb/s

5. Optimizer. The better the optimizer the less you think about the optimizer. According to the research community SQL Server has the best optimizer. It's very encouraging that every release PG Optimizer gets better.

Wow, yea, the performance gains and new UX features (JSON_TABLE, MERGE improvements, etc) are huge here, but these really stand out to me:

> PostgreSQL 17 supports using identity columns and exclusion constraints on partitioned tables.

> PostgreSQL 17 also includes a built-in, platform independent, immutable collation provider that's guaranteed to be immutable and provides similar sorting semantics to the C collation except with UTF-8 encoding rather than SQL_ASCII. Using this new collation provider guarantees that your text-based queries will return the same sorted results regardless of where you run PostgreSQL.

My boss insisted on the switch from oracle to mssql. Because "you can't trust open source for business software". Oh the pain

Would be awesome if PostgreSQL would finally add support for seamless major version upgrade…

Amazing release, Postgres is a gift that keeps on giving.

I hope to one day see Incremental View Maintenance extension (IVM) be turned into a first class feature, it's the only thing I need regularly which isn't immediately there!

Oh how I wish for Postgres to introduce system-versioned (bi-temporal) tables.

MERGE support for updating views is huge. So looking forward to this

Some awesome quality-of-life improvements here as well. The random function now takes min, max parameters

SELECT random(1, 10) AS random_number;

There was LAMP and then MERN and MEAN etc. and then there was Postgres.

Its not quite visible yet, but all this progres by postgres (excuse the pun) on making JSON more deeply integrated with relational principles will surely at some point enable a new paradigm, at least for full stack web frameworks?

Props to all the people (and companies) behind Postgres https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/

Loving the continued push for JSON features. I'm going to get a lot of use out of JSON_TABLE. And json_scalar & json_serialize are going to be helpful at times too. JSON_QUERY with OMIT QUOTES is awesome too for some things.

I hope SQLite3 can implement SQL/JSON soon too. I have a library of compatability functions to generate the appropriate JSON operations depending on if it's SQLite3 or PostgreSQL. And it'd be nice to reduce the number of incompatibilities over time.

But, there's a ton of stuff in the release notes that jumped out at me too:

"COPY .. ON_ERROR" ignore is going to be nice for loading data anywhere that you don't care if you get all of it. Like a dev environment or for just exploring something. [1]

Improvements to CTE plans are always welcome. [2]

"transaction_timeout" is an amazing addition to the existing "statement_timeout" as someone who has to keep an eye on less experienced people running SQL for analytics / intelligence. [3]

There's a function to get the timestamp out of a UUID easily now, too: uuid_extract_timestamp(). This previously required a user defined function. So it's another streamlining thing that's nice. [4]

I'll use the new "--exclude-extension" option for pg_dump, too. I just got bitten by that when moving a database. [5]

"Allow unaccent character translation rules to contain whitespace and quotes". Wow. I needed this! [6]

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/release-17.html#RELEASE-1...

[2] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/release-17.html#RELEASE-1...

[3] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/release-17.html#RELEASE-1...

[4] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/release-17.html#RELEASE-1...

[5] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/release-17.html#RELEASE-1...

[6] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/release-17.html#RELEASE-1...

Looking forward to AWS DMS supporting this nice software release. They were super quick about supporting PG16 so this should be easy, right?

https://repost.aws/questions/QUbIn2WmXgTbiVu_4wua9tUw/dms-wi...

Wow, it finally has failover support for logical replication slots. That was biggest reason why I couldn't depend on logical replication, since the master DB failover handling was too complex for me to deal with.

With 17, is Vacuum largely a solved issue?

This release is good on so many levels. Just the performance optimisations and the JSON TABLE feature could be entirely separated release, but we got so much more.

I'm looking forward to trying out incremental backups as well as JSON_TABLE.

Thank you contributors!

PG just continues to impress!

I wish postgres supports parquet file imports and exports. COPY command with csv is really slooooooooow. Even BINARY is quite slow and bandwidth heavy.

I wonder how open postgres is and what kind of pull requests postgres team considers? I'd like to learn how to contribute to PG in baby steps and eventually get to a place where I could contribute substantial features.

The titan keeps rocking.

Amazing, it's been a long time since I have been that much excited by a software release!