PostgreSQL 10 is out and we’re the first to support it, not too bad for a small start-up from Finland. Find out what you get with the latest release here.
Hannu Valtonen
|RSS FeedCo-founder at Aiven
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We've got great news: PostgreSQL 10 is now available at Aiven on all major clouds!
That means that you can now access it on AWS, Google, Azure, UpCloud, and DigitalOcean clouds. Worldwide.
As with every PostgreSQL release, many of your older queries will simply run faster because of the many performance enhancements. But, why is PostgreSQL 10 significant?
As the 28th major update of the past 30 years, its primary focus is on improving the distribution of massive amounts of data across many nodes...let's look at some specifics.
Improved support for parallel queries
Now, many more scan types are supported and can benefit from parallelization.
Depending on your query, newly added scan types such as parallel index scan and bitmap heap scan can speed it up immensely.
Also, merge joins are now a supported parallel join type in addition to other join types already supported in the previous release, such as hash joins and nested loop joins.
Declarative partitioning support.
While you could create partitioning schemes by directly using constraints, inheritance and triggers in past versions of PostgreSQL...
...you can now use simple definitions to create your partitioning setup with Aiven for PostgreSQL 10.
Even better, the performance of the new partitioning code is vastly improved over older methods.
Hash indexes
PostgreSQL 10 brings crash-safe hash index support that also performs far better than before.
Now, you can consider using hash indexes when your queries just need to check for equivalence to increase performance.
Native logical replication
PostgreSQL 10 now brings proper support for logical replication in PostgreSQL itself.
Logical replication allows replication between different PostgreSQL versions, finally allowing for zero downtime upgrades to future versions.
You can also migrate data to and from environments where you don't have access to streaming replication.
With Aiven, you can create a full copy of the data within your existing PostgreSQL service as a new separate PostgreSQL 10 service.
By forking, you can keep your existing PostgreSQL services as-is while testing the latest version for compatibility with your applications.
And don't worry, it won't negatively affect the performance of your source service; it just provides an easy and efficient way to test PostgreSQL 10. So, let's get started.
P.S. For a full list of features please see the full PostgreSQL release notes.
