PGSQL Phriday #012: What Excites You About PostgreSQL 16

We’ve done it! 🎉🎉🎉

One full year of monthly blogs hosted by the community and made possible through community submissions!

It’s an exciting time to be celebrating this milestone with the PostgreSQL community, because in reality, the best of PostgreSQL in 2023 is still to come.

• In October, PGConf.NYC will take place in New York City.
• PostgreSQL 16 will likely be released.
• In December, PGConf.EU will take place in Prague!

What an exciting time to be a part of this global PostgreSQL community!

Therefore, to celebrate our final event of year one, I’d like to invite everyone to tell the world what you’re most excited about in the upcoming PostgreSQL 16 release!

Change is Constant… and Fun

There are so many competing voices for our attention in the PostgreSQL space right now. That’s often a good thing because it demonstrates how active and vibrant the project and community is. But it can also pull our attention away from all the amazing work that’s being done month after month to improve and mature PostgreSQL the database. Just the good, old, reliable (and exciting!) open-source PostgreSQL database.

Therefore, as we enter the last quarter of 2023, I think it would be good to ask each of you to spend a little time with the PostgreSQL 16 release notes, possibly comb through the mailing lists a little bit, and even take in new feature details that have been shared by others, and think about how your usage of PostgreSQL will improve and change when PostgreSQL 16 is officially released.

• Have you been fighting for years with logical replication and the improvements in logical decoding (among other things) may finally provide a way forward?
• Do you struggle to get more detailed query and IO statistics and the new stats_io view will solve some of that problem?
• Are you really excited about the new numeric formatting option?
• What about the myriad of updates to privileges and permissions?

Your Mission

On Friday, September 1, 2023, publish a post on your blog about something (or a group of things) that you’re excited about using when PostgreSQL 16 is released.

Try to give some background on why this feature or improvement is important to you. Maybe reference the `pgsql-hackers` mailing list and look at the discussion that led to this feature being merged into the next release.

What have done before this feature was available that you’ll do differently now? If possible, consider giving a brief example or code sample to help illustrate how it’s used. Get your reading audience excited to try this feature or improvement once they start using PostgreSQL 16!

I know these kinds of posts have already started to show up on various blogs. After all, we’re currently in beta 3 of PostgreSQL 16. But there are so many features and improvements, I think collectively we can shine some light on the value we get from the consistent cadence of PostgreSQL releases.

In other words, I’m hoping we don’t end up with only posts about Logical Replication and the new (awesome) pg_stat_io view. 😉

Remember the Rules

Taking part in PGSQL Phriday should require as little effort as possible. Just remember these couple of rules to contribute your post.

• Link back to this invitation at the beginning of your post. No link, no inclusion in the roundup of posts
• Once the post is published, announce it somewhere I will see it (PostgreSQL Community Slack, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, pgsql-general mailing list)
• Use the #pgsqlphriday hashtag anywhere you post it on social media
• Publish it as close to Friday, September 1, 2023 as possible

And above all… have fun!