In this blog post, we’ll look back at what’s been going on in the world of PostgreSQL in 2018.

Before we start talking about the good things that have happened in the PostgreSQL in  2018, we hope you had a wonderful year and we wish you a happy and prosperous 2019.

PostgreSQL has been a choice for those who are looking for a completely community-driven open source database that is feature-rich and extensible. We have seen tremendously great things happening in PostgreSQL for many years, with 2018 being a prime example. As you could see the following snippet from DB engine rankings, PostgreSQL has topped the chart for growth in popularity in the year 2018 compared to other databases.

PostgreSQL adoption growth has been increasing year over year, and 2018 has again been one such year as we can see.

Let’s start with a recap of some of the great PostgreSQL events, and look at what we should take away from 2018 in the PostgreSQL space.

PostgreSQL 11 Released

PostgreSQL 11 was a release that incorporated a lot of features offered in commercial database software governed by an enterprise license. For example, there are times when you are required to enforce the handling of embedded transactions inside a stored procedure in your application code. There are also times when you wish to partition a table with foreign keys or use hash partitioning. This used to require workarounds. The release of PostgreSQL 11 covers these scenarios.

There were many other add-ons as well, such as Just-In-Time compilation, improved query parallelism, partition elimination, etc. You can find out more in our blog post here, or the PostgreSQL 11 release notes (if you have not seen already). Special thanks to everyone involved in such a vibrant PostgreSQL release.

End of Life for PostgreSQL 9.3

9.3.25 was the last minor release that has happened for PostgreSQL 9.3 (on November 8, 2018). There will be no more minor releases supported by the community for 9.3. If you are still using PostgreSQL 9.3 (or a major earlier release than 9.3), it is the time to start planning to upgrade your database to take advantage of additional features and performance improvements.

Watch out for future Percona webinars (dates will be out soon) on PostgreSQL migrations and upgrades that will help handle situations such as downtime and other complexities involved in migrating your partitions built using table inheritance when you migrate from legacy PostgreSQL versions to the latest versions.

PostgreSQL Minor Releases

For minor PostgreSQL release, there was nothing new in what we saw this year compared to previous years. The PostgreSQL community aims for a minor version release for all the supported versions every quarter. However, we may see more minor releases due to critical bug fixes or security fixes. One of such release was done on March 3rd, 2018 for the CVE-2018-1058 security fix. This proves that you do not necessarily need to wait for specific release dates when a security vulnerability has been identified. You may see the fix released as a minor version as soon as the development, review and testing are completed for the fix.  

There have been five minor releases this year on the following dates.

Security Fixes in All the Supported PostgreSQL Releases This Year

The PostgreSQL Global Development Team and contributors handle security fixes very seriously. There have been several instances where we have received immediate responses after reporting a problem or a bug. Likewise, we have seen many security bug fixes as soon as they have been reported.

Following are a list of security fixes we have seen in the year 2018:

We thank all the Core team, Contributors, Hackers and Users involved in making it another great year for PostgreSQL and a huge WIN for the open source world.

If you would like to participate in sharing your PostgreSQL knowledge to a wider audience, or if you have got a great topic that you would like to talk about, please submit your proposal to one of the world’s biggest open source conferences: Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2019 in Austin, Texas from May 28-30, 2019. The Call for Papers is open until Jan 20, 2019.

You can also submit blog articles to our Open Source Database Community Blog for publishing to a wider open source database audience.

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