While PostgreSQL continues to progress towards its tenth major release in September 2017, EnterpriseDB chief architect and PostgreSQL contributor Robert Hass compiled a list of notable features that will likely make it into PostgreSQL 10 based on its official roadmap.
The PostgreSQL 10 roadmap, published a few months ago, is made of a number of individual roadmaps, each tied to a specific company or individual contributor. This does not make it very easy to get an overall picture of what is being worked on. A few of the features from Hass’ selection are:
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Table partitioning, which can be seen as a simplified version of table inheritance where the parent table is always empty and child tables, the partitions, have an implicit constraint that affect which partition will effectively have a tuple added when this is inserted into the parent. It is hoped that table partitioning will make it easier than it is when using inheritance to reason about a table’s properties and thus enable specific optimizations.
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Logical replication, which PostgreSQL will provide as an alternative to physical replication while being more flexible and easy to configure.
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Improved parallel query, which should provide a 2–4x speedup on many queries.
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Stronger password hashing using SCRAM-SHA–256.
There is a lot more going on about PostgreSQL 10, though, as 2ndQuadrant founder & CEO Simon Riggs explained in a recent talk. Including information from the official PostgreSQL 10 roadmap, work is being done on features such as:
- Autonomous transactions
- Multimaster cluster with sharding to improve scalability and availability
- JIT-compilation of queries
- Pluggable storage engine (columnar, in-memory, etc)
- Page-level data compression, and more
- Improved temporary table performance
The list of features that will go into PostgreSQL 10 is not defined yet however, so the compilation above provides just a general picture. InfoQ will keep reporting on this as new detailed information becomes available.