Recently, The PostgreSQL Global Development Group development team announced the availability of the first beta version of PostgreSQL 12. This version contains previews of all the functions that will be available in the final version of PostgreSQL 12, although some details may change before then.
The group encourages users to try out the new features in PostgreSQL 12 to help eliminate bugs or other issues that may exist in this release.
“Your testing and feedback will help the community ensure that this release of PostgreSQL 12 meets our standards to provide a stable and reliable version of the world's most advanced open source relational database. "Says Global PostgreSQL Development Group.
For those of you still unfamiliar with PostgreSQL, you should know whate is also known as Postgres and this is a relational database management system (RDBMS) free, open source, which aims to offer a database based on extensibility and compliance with technical standards.
It is designed to handle a variety of workloads, from simple machines to data warehouses or web services with many concurrent users.
Features of the new PostgreSQL version 12 Beta 1
With the release of this new beta version, We will find that performance indexing and management features stand out.
As PostgreSQL 12 offers the ability to rebuild indexes simultaneously, allowing you to multitask.
While in operation without blocking writes to the index. According to Postgres, this feature should help rebuild long indexes that could cause downtime when managing a PostgreSQL database in a production environment. In addition, it extends the capabilities of several specialized indexing mechanisms, the ability to create coverage indexes.
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Common table expressions can now be automatically inserted into a query if they are not recursive, they have no side effects and are mentioned only once in one part of the query. This removes an "optimization barrier" that has existed since the introduction of the WITH clause in PostgreSQL 8.4.
Partitioning
This version of PostgreSQL improves performance when processing tables with thousands of partitions for operations that only require the use of a small number of partitions.
As well brings INSERT and COPY performance improvements on partitioned table. ATTACH PARTITION can now be performed without blocking concurrent queries on the partitioned table. Additionally, the ability to use foreign keys to reference partitioned tables is now allowed.
The generated columns
This relational database management system allows the creation of generated columns that calculate their values with an expression using the content of the other columns.
This feature provides stored generated columns, They are calculated in inserts and updates and are saved to disk.
The virtual columns generated, calculated only when a column is read as part of a query, are not yet implemented.
SQL/JSON
This beta version of PostgreSQL 12 now allows the execution of JSON path queries According to the SQL / JSON specification in the SQL: 2016 standard.
Like XPath expressions for XML, JSON path expressions allow you to evaluate a variety of arithmetic expressions and functions, as well as compare values within JSON documents.
Case sensitivity
Finally another of the changes that is worth highlighting de this beta version of PostgreSQL 12 is that it now supports case insensitive comparisons and accent in the comparisons provided by the UCI, also known as »non-deterministic collations«.
When used, these collations can provide convenience for comparisons and rankings, but can also lead to a performance penalty, as a collation may need to do additional checks on a string.
Finally, the group invites the PostgreSQL community to test this version.
“The stability of each version of PostgreSQL is highly dependent on the community, so please give them a try. The quality of user testing will determine when we can make a final version, "he says.
Get and test PostgreSQL 12 beta 1