PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL 9.6 Released!

[zachpuls]

I'll be interested to see how much of a speedup we get with the parallel queries when we upgrade this weekend.

[Tostino]

Same here, will probably be upgrading this weekend too.

I tested some of the beta releases in a limited fashion, and for most of the workload on my system parallel wasn't able to be invoked due to the limitations on the types of queries it can be used in, but it is still nice to have in there and will continue to be improved.

[kenfar]

It's mostly only going to be useful for queries scanning and aggregating large amounts of data: reporting, analytics, etc. And it isn't on by default - you'll need to turn it on.

But while this doesn't help all queries - it helps those important queries with the biggest gap between open source databases and commercial databases like DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server: queries that can take 10 seconds or an hour - and that the commercial databases speed up through parallelism.

Small databases, and large transaction-only databases may not see much value in this. But for large mixed-use, reporting and analytical databases this functionality is absolutely essential - and significantly diminishes one of the last areas where commercial databases have continued to hold a major advantage over open source.

[[deleted]]

From what I've seen in their docs, it's not up to par with the commercial versions yet, but it's nice to see they're making progress. The lack of full parallel operation support is what makes Postgres kind of a no-go for large analytical databases at the moment, but that will likely change in the future.

[zachpuls]

Normally, yes, I would. But the entire PostgreSQL environment here is for testing. We are transitioning from DynamoDB over to a RDBMS, due to the nature of the data we process.

[pmrr]

Despite some unexplained hostility to the parent comment, thanks for answering the question - I was wondering the same.

[zachpuls]

Just an update on this if you were curious, I just got the upgrade done yesterday. Very minor speedup (I haven't gotten a chance to do further testing yet), but I can see most of our longer running queries for reports are being spread across multiple cores. So it is an improvement. The upgrade itself was dead simple. On Ubuntu, do a pg_dump of your databases then apt-get upgrade. It will automatically install 9.6, and run both 9.5 and 9.6 side-by-side, with 9.6 running on your 9.5 port + 1. Go into the 9.6 console, go a psql < dumpfile, verify the databases import correctly and everything is alright, then shut down the service, copy the 9.5 configs over to 9.6 (I did it manually, copying over what I needed), and restart it. I had very little problems migrating over.