Download PostgreSQL 12

Version 12 of PostgreSQL has been released. This popular ‘open source relational database management system’ runs on a large number of operating systems and can therefore be used in various environments. It is a derivative of Ingres, after its lead developer started his own business and this open source database became closed source. Detailed information about the changes in version 12 can be this page are being found. The complete changelog is available herethese are in short the most important improvements:

Major enhancements in PostgreSQL 12 include:

• General performance improvements, including:
  • Optimizations to space utilization and read/write performance for B-tree indexes
  • Partitioning performance enhancements, including improved query performance on tables with thousands of partitions, improved insertion performance with INSERT and COPYand the ability to execute ALTER TABLE ATTACH PARTITION without blocking queries
  • Automatic (but overridable) inlining of common table expressions (CTEs)
  • Reduction of WAL overhead for creation of Yeast, GINand SP-GiST indexes
  • Support for covering Yeast indexes, via the INCLUDE clause
  • Multi-column most-common-value (MCV) statistics can be defined via CREATE STATISTICSto support better plans for queries that test several non-uniformly-distributed columns
• Enhancements to administrative functionality, including:
  • REINDEX COMPETITIVELY can rebuild an index without blocking writes to its table
  • pg_checksums can enable/disable page checksums (used for detecting data corruption) in an offline cluster
  • Progress reporting statistics for CREATE INDEX, REINDEX, CLUSTER, VACUUM FULLand pg_checksums
• Support for the SQL/JSON path language
• Stored generated columns
• nondeterministic ICU collations, enabling case-insensitive and accent-insensitive grouping and ordering
• New authentication features, including:
  • Encryption of TCP/IP connections when using GSSAPIA authentication
  • Discovery of LDAP servers using DNS SRV records
  • Multi-factor authentication, using the clientcert=verify-full option combined with an additional authentication method in pg_hba.conf