Pavel Luzanov: PostgreSQL 16: part 5 or CommitFest 2023-03

The end of the March Commitfest concludes the acceptance of patches for PostgreSQL 16. Let’s take a look at some exciting new updates it introduced. I hope that this review together with the previous articles in the series (2022-07, 2022-09, 2022-11, 2023-01) will give you a coherent idea of the new features of PostgreSQL 16. As usual, the March Commitfest introduces a ton of new changes. I’ve split them into several sections for convenience. Monitoring pg_stat_io: input/output statistics Counter for new row versions moved to another page when performing an UPDATE pg_buffercache: new pg_buffercache_usage_counts function Normalization of DDL and service commands, continued EXPLAIN (generic_plan): generic plan of a parameterized query auto_explain: logging the query ID PL/pgSQL: GET DIAGNOSTICS .. PG_ROUTINE_OID Client applications psql: variables SHELL_ERROR and SHELL_EXIT_CODE psql: \watch and the number of repetitions psql:\df+ does not show the source code of functions pg_dump: support for LZ4 and zstd compression methods pg_dump and partitioned tables pg_verifybackup --progress libpq: balancing connections Server administration and maintenance initdb: setting configuration parameters during cluster initialization Autovacuum: balancing I/O impact on the fly Managing the size of shared memory for vacuum and analyze VACUUM for TOAST tables only The vacuum_defer_cleanup_age parameter has been removed pg_walinspect: interpretation of the end_lsn parameter pg_walinspect: pg_get_wal_fpi_info → pg_get_wal_block_info Localization ICU: UNICODE collation ICU: Canonization of locales ICU: custom rules for customizing the sorting algorithm Security libpq: new parameter require_auth scram_iterations: iteration counter for password encryption using SCRAM-SHA-256 SQL functions and commands SQL/JSON standard support New functions pg_input_error_i[...]