“PostgreSQL 13” is Rolled Out, with better performance

September 24, The PostgreSQL Global Development Group released the latest major release of its open-source relational database “PostgreSQL 13.0”.

PostgreSQL 13 is the successor of PostgreSQL 12, released in October 2019. This latest release brings significant improvements to the indexing and lookup system. Efficient handling of duplicate data in B-tree indexes led to using less space and better query performance. This release introduces incremental sorting. Now more types of queries can leverage the hash aggregation functionality. All these lead to faster response times for queries that use partitions or aggregates, which especially benefits large databases.

This release has improved the vacuuming process, which is an important function in management, and it introduces parallelized vacuum for indexes. It now allows Replication Slots to specify the maximum number of WAL (log-advanced writes) files to retain, and it helps to avoid out-of-disk errors. PostgreSQL now allows administrators to monitor database activity, including referencing WAL usage statistics from EXPLAIN, the progress of streaming base backups, and the status of ANALYZE commands.

In regards to security, this release adds the “trusted extension” concept. Up until now, only superusers could install new extensions, but now it allows database users to install extensions that are labeled as “trusted” by superusers.

This release includes many other enhancements.

PostgreSQL
https://www.postgresql.org