Toward PostgreSQL 13

In this final chapter of the book, you will discover the new features that the upcoming PostgreSQL 13 release is going to introduce. You will also learn what the main differences between PostgreSQL 13 and the previous stable 12 version are and how to prepare for a version upgrade. Presenting every new feature in detail is out of the scope of the chapter, and a few changes have been already introduced in the previous chapters and will be reviewed here.

The new features have been organized into categories as follows:

• Replication
• Administration of the cluster
• The command-line interface (psql)
• Performance
• Backup and related tools

As you can imagine, not every feature fits into a single category, and not every category can summarize the new features, but what's presented in this chapter should help you get a clear idea of what is new in PostgreSQL 13.

The...

Introducing PostgreSQL 13's new features

In every release, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group introduces a set of new features that span from performance improvements to configuration management to adherence to the SQL standard and so on. PostgreSQL 13 follows its own path and introduces a rich set of new features; many of them are "under the hood" and so you will not perceive them during day-to-day database usage, but they are really important for the cluster to work more efficiently.

This section provides you with a categorization of the main features introduced with the upcoming PostgreSQL 13 release, which at the time of writing is still in beta 2 release, so it's stable enough for usage and testing but not yet production-ready. As you can imagine, it is not possible to explain (or even worth explaining) every single feature in detail, so you will just get an at-a-glance idea of the main changes. The changes are presented in no particular order.

Replication...

Upgrading to PostgreSQL 13

When upgrading from a previous PostgreSQL version, there are different approaches that you can follow depending on the specific context, the amount of data you need to migrate, and the version you are coming from.

One approach that always works is to dump and restore the databases: you execute pg_dumpall against your previous cluster and pg_restore against the PostgreSQL 13 one. The main advantages of this approach are that it is simple and works with any version of PostgreSQL you are upgrading from and to. The main drawbacks are that it requires an off-line migration, meaning you are going to have a period of time where the two databases are not usable; plus, it can require a lot of time and space depending on how much data you need to migrate.

Another approach is to use pg_upgrade, a tool designed to transfer and migrate data from one cluster to another one side by side. The idea is that pg_upgrade will have access to both the clusters at the same time and...

Summary

PostgreSQL 13 presents a lot of changes: many of them will not be immediately visible to the user, while others will be available to administrators, and others still will be integrated into the command-line tools. Describing all the new features is almost impossible, because every new release includes a lot of human work, and that work goes into making PostgreSQL more stable, usable, and efficient.

Now, thanks to the knowledge you have gained throughout this whole book, you are able to install PostgreSQL 13 or even a higher version and go find the features you like the most and fit your needs best. Use this book as a teammate during your journey of exploring PostgreSQL, and feel free to jump back and forth between chapters depending on what aspect of PostgreSQL 13 you are learning about or faced with.

References

• PostgreSQL 13 beta 2 release notes: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/release-13.html
• The pg_upgrade migration tool – official documentation available at https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/pgupgrade.html