Postgres 17: The New Features You Need to Know About

Postgres 17 has introduced a game-changing new feature that revolutionizes the way incremental backups are merged offline into full backups. This innovation, spearheaded by Robert Haas, a dedicated employee of EDB and a seasoned Postgres expert, promises to streamline the backup process and reduce the server load, making it a favorite among DBAs managing Postgres deployments on-premises. The feature boasts a versatile range of hooks for storage in various targets, offering support for compression and tarball storage to enhance performance and efficiency.

The in-core backup functionality in Postgres 17 is a game-changer for organizations with large databases or high-availability systems. With faster recovery times, it significantly reduces recovery time objectives (RTO), a critical need for enterprises where downtime can have severe business consequences. This improvement solidifies Postgres as the top choice for businesses dealing with extensive analytics and AI workloads, where minimizing downtime is paramount.

SQL/JSON and JSON Enhancements: Meeting Developers’ Needs

SQL/JSON, a key feature of the SQL:2023 standard, equips database developers with a robust set of functions for seamless interaction with JSON documents in a SQL-like environment. Postgres has been steadily enhancing its SQL/JSON capabilities in recent releases, but Postgres 17 takes it to the next level. This update introduces highly-anticipated functionalities like JSON_TABLE() and query functions such as JSON_EXISTS(), JSON_QUERY(), and JSON_VALUE(). Additionally, a slew of constructors is now available for creating JSON SQL objects effortlessly, catering to developers’ evolving needs and making Postgres a developer-friendly platform.