Naisila Puka: Adding Postgres 16 support to Citus 12.1, plus schema-based sharding improvements

The new PostgreSQL 16 release is out, packed with exciting improvements and features—and Citus 12.1 brings them to you at scale, within just one week of the PG16 release. As many of you likely know, Citus is an open source PostgreSQL extension that turns Postgres into a distributed database. Our team started integrating Citus with the PG16 beta and release candidates early-on, so that you could have a new Citus 12.1 release that is compatible with Postgres 16 as quickly as possible after PG16 came out. There are a lot of good reasons to upgrade to Postgres 16—huge thanks to everyone who contributed into this Postgres release! PG16 highlights include query performance boost with more parallelism; load balancing with multiple hosts in libpq (contributed by my Citus teammate, Jelte Fennema-Nio); I/O monitoring with pg_stat_io; developer experience enhancements; finer-grained options for access control; logical replication from standby servers and other replication improvements, like using btree indexes in the absence of a primary key (contributed by one of my teammates, Onder Kalaci.) The good news for those of you who care about distributed Postgres: Citus 12.1 is now available and adds support for Postgres 16. In addition to Postgres 16 support, Citus 12.1 includes enhancements to schema-based sharding, which was recently added to Citus 12.0—and is super useful for multi-tenant SaaS applications. In 12.1, you can now move tenant tables within a distributed schema to another node using the simple and powerful citus_schema_move() function. And you can manage permissions on creating distributed schemas more easily, too. So if you’re a Citus user and you’re ready to upgrade to Postgres 16, you will also need to upgrade to Citus 12.1. (And if you use the Citus on Azure managed service, the answer is yes, Postgres 16 support is also coming soon to Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. Stay tuned for the next blog post.) Let’s dive in to explore what’s new in 12.1. Postgres 16 support in Cit[...]