E.1. Release 19 #

E.1.1. Overview
E.1.2. Migration to Version 19
E.1.3. Changes
E.1.4. Acknowledgments

Release date: 2026-??-??, AS OF 2026-06-05

E.1.1. Overview #

PostgreSQL 19 contains many new features and enhancements, including:

  • fill in later

The above items and other new features of PostgreSQL 19 are explained in more detail in the sections below.

E.1.2. Migration to Version 19 #

A dump/restore using pg_dumpall or use of pg_upgrade or logical replication is required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous release. See Section 18.6 for general information on migrating to new major releases.

Version 19 contains a number of changes that may affect compatibility with previous releases. Observe the following incompatibilities:

  • Add server variable password_expiration_warning_threshold to warn about password expiration (Gilles Darold, Nathan Bossart) §

    The default warning period is seven days.

  • Issue a warning after successful MD5 password authentication (Nathan Bossart) §

    The warning can be disabled via server variable md5_password_warnings. MD5 passwords were marked as deprecated in PostgreSQL 18.

  • Remove RADIUS support (Thomas Munro) §

    PostgreSQL only supported RADIUS over UDP, which is unfixably insecure.

  • Force standard_conforming_strings to always be on in the database server (Tom Lane) §

    Server variable escape_string_warning has been removed as unnecessary. Client applications still support escape_string_warning = off for compatibility with old servers.

  • Disallow carriage returns and line feeds in database, role, and tablespace names (Mahendra Singh Thalor) §

    pg_upgrade will also disallow upgrading of clusters that use such names. This was changed to avoid security problems.

  • Change the default index opclasses for inet and cidr data types from btree_gist to GiST (Tom Lane) § §

    The btree_gist inet/cidr opclasses are broken because they can exclude rows that should be returned. pg_upgrade will disallow upgrading of clusters with btree_gist inet/cidr indexes.

  • Stop reordering non-schema objects created by CREATE SCHEMA (Tom Lane, Jian He) § §

    The goal of the reordering was to avoid dependencies, but it was imperfect. PostgreSQL now uses the specified object ordering, except for foreign keys which are created last.

  • Disallow system columns from being used in COPY FROM ... WHERE (Tom Lane) §

    The values of such columns were not well-defined.

  • Change a json_array() call which returns no rows to return an empty JSON array (Richard Guo) §

    This previously returned NULL.

  • Cause transactions to pass their READ ONLY and DEFERRABLE status to postgres_fdw sessions (Etsuro Fujita) §

    This means READ ONLY transactions can no longer modify rows processed by postgres_fdw sessions.

  • Change default of max_locks_per_transaction from 64 to 128 (Heikki Linnakangas) §

    Lock size allocation has changed, so effectively settings must now be doubled to match their capacity in previous releases.

  • Change JIT to be disabled by default (Jelte Fennema-Nio) §

    Previously JIT was enabled by default, and activated based on optimizer costs, but this costing has been determined to be unreliable. This change requires sites that are doing many large analytical queries to manually enable JIT.

  • Rename column sync_error_count to sync_table_error_count in system view pg_stat_subscription_stats (Vignesh C) §

    This is necessary since sequence errors are now tracked separately.

  • Rename wait event type BUFFERPIN to BUFFER (Andres Freund) §

  • Change index access method handlers to use a static IndexAmRoutines structure, rather than dynamically allocated ones (Matthias van de Meent) §

  • Remove optimizer hook get_relation_info_hook and add better-placed hook build_simple_rel_hook (Robert Haas) §

  • Remove MULE_INTERNAL encoding (Thomas Munro) §

    This encoding was complex and rarely used. Databases using it will need to be dumped and restored with a different encoding.

E.1.3. Changes #

Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between PostgreSQL 19 and the previous major release.

E.1.3.1. Server #

E.1.3.1.1. Optimizer #
  • Allow NOT IN clauses to be converted to more efficient ANTI JOINs when NULLs are not present (Richard Guo) §

  • Allow more LEFT JOINs to be converted to ANTI JOINs (Tender Wang, Richard Guo) §

  • Allow use of Memoize for ANTI JOINs with unique inner sides (Richard Guo) §

  • Allow some aggregate processing to be performed before joins (Richard Guo, Antonin Houska) § § §

    This can reduce the number of rows needed to be processed.

  • Improve hash join's handling of tuples with NULL join keys (Tom Lane) §

  • Improve the planning of semijoins (Richard Guo) §

  • Allow Append and MergeAppend to consider explicit incremental sorts (Richard Guo) §

  • Convert IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM NULL to IS [NOT] NULL during constant folding (Richard Guo) §

    The latter form is more easily optimized.

  • Simplify IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM to equality/inequality operators when inputs are proven non-nullable (Richard Guo) §

  • Perform earlier constant folding of var IS [NOT] NULL in the optimizer (Richard Guo) §

    This allows for later optimizations.

  • Simplify COALESCE() and ROW(...) IS [NOT] NULL to avoid evaluating unnecessary arguments (Richard Guo) § §

  • Simplify IS [NOT] TRUE/FALSE/UNKNOWN to plain boolean expressions when the input is proven non-nullable (Richard Guo) §

  • Speed up join selectivity computations for large optimizer statistics targets (Ilia Evdokimov, David Geier) §

  • Enable proper optimizer statistics for functions returning boolean values (Tom Lane) §

  • Allow extended statistics on virtual generated columns (Yugo Nagata) §

  • Allow function pg_restore_extended_stats() to restore optimizer extended statistics (Corey Huinker, Michael Paquier, Chao Li) § § § §

  • Add function pg_clear_extended_stats() to remove extended statistics (Corey Huinker, Michael Paquier) §

  • Adjust the optimizer to consider startup costs of partial paths (Robert Haas, Tomas Vondra) §

  • Allow negative values of pg_aggregate.aggtransspace to indicate unbounded memory usage (Richard Guo) §

    This information is used by the optimizer in planning memory usage.

E.1.3.1.2. General Performance #
  • Improve performance of foreign key constraint checks (Junwang Zhao, Amit Langote, Chao Li) § § § §

  • Improve asynchronous I/O read-ahead scheduling for large requests (Andres Freund) § § §

  • Allow io_method method worker to automatically control needed background workers (Thomas Munro) §

    The new server variables are io_min_workers, io_max_workers, io_worker_idle_timeout, and io_worker_launch_interval.

  • Allow query table scans to mark pages as all-visible in the visibility map (Melanie Plageman) §

    Previously only VACUUM and COPY ... FREEZE could do this.

  • Allow autovacuum to use parallel autovacuum workers (Daniil Davydov) § §

    The maximum number of workers is controlled by server variable autovacuum_max_parallel_workers and per-table storage parameter autovacuum_parallel_workers.

  • Allow TID Range Scans to be parallelized (Cary Huang, David Rowley) §

  • Improve COPY FROM performance for text and CSV input using SIMD CPU instructions (Nazir Bilal Yavuz, Shinya Kato) §

  • Improve NOTIFY to only wake up backends that are listening to specified notifications (Joel Jacobson) §

    Previously most backends were woken by NOTIFY.

  • Allow the addition of columns based on domains containing constraints to usually avoid a table rewrite (Jian He) §

    Previously this always required a table rewrite.

  • Change the default TOAST compression method from pglz to the more efficient lz4 (Euler Taveira) §

    This is done by changing the default for server variable default_toast_compression.

  • Improve performance of internal row deformation (David Rowley) §

  • Improve performance of repeated UTF-8 case-folding operations (Andreas Karlsson) §

  • Improve performance of hash index bulk-deletion and GIN index vacuuming using streaming reads (Xuneng Zhou) § §

  • Improve sort performance using radix sort (John Naylor) §

  • Improve timing performance measurements (Lukas Fittl, Andres Freund, David Geier) § §

    This benefits EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, TIMING) and pg_test_timing, and is controlled via server variable timing_clock_source.

  • Optimize plpgsql syntax SELECT simple-expression INTO var (Tom Lane) §

E.1.3.1.3. System Views #
E.1.3.1.4. Monitoring #
  • Allow log_min_messages log levels to be specified by process type (Euler Taveira) §

    The new format is type:level. A value without a colon controls all process types, allowing backward compatibility.

  • Add server variable log_autoanalyze_min_duration to log long-running analyze operations by autovacuum operations (Shinya Kato) §

    Server variable log_autovacuum_min_duration now only controls logging of vacuum operations by autovacuum.

  • Enable server variable log_lock_waits by default (Laurenz Albe) §

  • Add server variable debug_print_raw_parse to log raw parse trees (Chao Li) §

    This is also enabled when the server is started with debug level three and higher.

  • Make messages coming from remote servers appear in the server logs in the same format as local server messages (Vignesh C) §

    These include replication, postgres_fdw, and dblink servers.

  • Add reporting of WAL full-page write bytes to VACUUM and ANALYZE logging (Shinya Kato) §

  • Add IO wait events for COPY FROM/TO on a pipe, file, or program (Nikolay Samokhvalov) §

  • Add wait events for WAL write and flush LSNs (Xuneng Zhou) §

  • Have pg_get_sequence_data() return the sequence page LSN (Vignesh C) §

  • Add function pg_get_multixact_stats() to report multixact activity (Naga Appani) §

  • Issue warnings when the wraparound of xid and multi-xids is less than 100 million (Nathan Bossart) §

    The previous warning was 40 million. Warnings are issued to clients and in the server log.

E.1.3.1.5. Server Configuration #
  • Add WAIT FOR command to allow standbys to wait for LSN values to be written, flushed, or replayed (Kartyshov Ivan, Alexander Korotkov, Xuneng Zhou) § §

  • Improve function pg_sync_replication_slots() to wait for replication synchronization completion (Ajin Cherian, Zhijie Hou) §

    Previously, certain synchronization failures would not be reported.

  • Add server variable wal_sender_shutdown_timeout to limit replica synchronization waits during shutdown (Andrey Silitskiy, Hayato Kuroda) §

    By default, senders still wait forever for synchronization.

  • Allow wal_receiver_timeout to be set per-subscription and user (Fujii Masao) § §

    This allows subscribers to use different wal_receiver_timeout values.

  • Add optional pid parameter to pg_replication_origin_session_setup() to allow parallelization of SQL-level replication solutions (Doruk Yilmaz, Hayato Kuroda) §

E.1.3.2. Query Commands #

  • Add support for SQL Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ) (Peter Eisentraut, Ashutosh Bapat) § § §

    Internally these are processed like views so are written as standard relational queries.

  • Add FOR PORTION OF clause to UPDATE and DELETE (Paul A. Jungwirth) § §

    This allows operations on temporal ranges.

  • Add GROUP BY ALL syntax to SELECT to automatically group all non-aggregate and non-window-function target list parameters (David Christensen) §

  • Allow GROUP BY to process target list subqueries that have expressions referencing non-subquery columns (Tom Lane) §

    Also fix a bug in how GROUPING() handles target list subquery aliases.

  • Allow window functions to ignore NULLs with the IGNORE NULLS/RESPECT NULLS clause (Oliver Ford, Tatsuo Ishii) §

    Supported window functions are lead(), lag(), first_value(), last_value(), and nth_value().

  • Add support for INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO SELECT ... RETURNING (Andreas Karlsson, Marko Tiikkaja, Viktor Holmberg) §

    This allows conflicting rows to be returned, and optionally locked with FOR UPDATE/SHARE.

E.1.3.3. Utility Commands #

  • Add REPACK command which replaces VACUUM FULL and CLUSTER (Antonin Houska) §

    The two former commands did similar things, but with confusing names, so unify them as REPACK. The old commands have been retained for compatibility.

  • Allow REPACK to rebuild tables without access-exclusive locking (Antonin Houska, Mihail Nikalayeu, Álvaro Herrera) § § §

    This is enabled via the CONCURRENTLY option. Server variable max_repack_replication_slots was also added.

  • Allow partitions to be merged and split using ALTER TABLE ... MERGE/SPLIT PARTITIONS (Dmitry Koval, Alexander Korotkov, Tender Wang, Richard Guo, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Fujii Masao, Jian He) § §

  • Allow GRANT/REVOKE to specify the effective role performing the privileges adjustment (Nathan Bossart, Tom Lane) §

    The GRANTED BY clause controls this.

  • Allow CREATE SCHEMA to create more types of objects in newly-created schemas (Kirill Reshke, Jian He, Tom Lane) §

  • Allow CHECKPOINT to accept a list of options (Christoph Berg) § § §

    Supported options are MODE and FLUSH_UNLOGGED.

  • Add CONNECTION clause to CREATE FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER to specify a function to be called for subscription connection parameters (Jeff Davis, Noriyoshi Shinoda) § §

  • Add memory usage and parallelism reporting to VACUUM (VERBOSE) and autovacuum logs (Tatsuya Kawata, Daniil Davydov) § §

E.1.3.3.1. Constraints #
E.1.3.3.2. COPY #
  • Allow multiple headers lines to be skipped by COPY FROM (Shinya Kato, Fujii Masao) §

    Previously only a single header line could be skipped.

  • Allow COPY FROM to set invalid input values to NULL (Jian He, Kirill Reshke) §

    This is done using the COPY option ON_ERROR SET_NULL.

  • Allow COPY TO to output JSON format (Joe Conway, Jian He, Andrew Dunstan) § §

    JSON output can also be a single JSON array using the COPY option FORCE_ARRAY.

  • Allow COPY TO to process partitioned tables (Jian He, Ajin Cherian) § §

    Previously COPY (SELECT ...) had to be used to output partitioned tables. This also improves logical replication table synchronization.

E.1.3.3.3. EXPLAIN #

E.1.3.4. Data Types #

E.1.3.5. Functions #

  • Add date, timestamp, and timestamptz versions of random(min, max) (Damien Clochard, Dean Rasheed) § §

  • Allow encode() and decode() to process data in base64url and base32hex formats (Andrey Borodin, Aleksander Alekseev, Florents Tselai) § § §

    This format retains ordering, unlike base32.

  • Add functions to return a set of ranges resulting from range subtraction (Paul A. Jungwirth) §

    The functions are range_minus_multi() and multirange_minus_multi(). This is useful to represent range subtraction results with gaps.

  • Add function error_on_null() to return the supplied parameter, or error on NULL input (Joel Jacobson) §

  • Allow IS JSON to work on domains defined over supported base types (Jian He) §

    The supported base types are TEXT, JSON, JSONB, and BYTEA.

  • Add full text stemmers for Polish and Esperanto (Tom Lane) §

    The Dutch stemmer has also been updated. The old Dutch stemmer is available via dutch_porter.

  • Add function pg_get_role_ddl() to output role creation commands (Mario Gonzalez, Bryan Green, Andrew Dunstan, Euler Taveira) §

  • Add function pg_get_tablespace_ddl() to output tablespace creation commands (Nishant Sharma, Manni Wood, Andrew Dunstan, Euler Taveira) §

  • Add function pg_get_database_ddl() to output database creation commands (Akshay Joshi, Andrew Dunstan, Euler Taveira) §

  • Allow event triggers to be written using PL/Python (Euler Taveira, Dimitri Fontaine) §

E.1.3.6. Libpq #

  • Allow libpq connections to specify a service file via servicefile (Torsten Förtsch, Ryo Kanbayashi) §

  • Add special libpq protocol version 3.9999 for version testing (Jelte Fennema-Nio) §

  • Add libpq function PQgetThreadLock() to retrieve the current locking callback (Jacob Champion) §

  • Add libpq connection parameter oauth_ca_file to specify the OAUTH certificate authority file (Jonathan Gonzalez V., Jacob Champion) §

    This can also be set via the PGOAUTHCAFILE environment variable. The default is to use curl's built-in certificates.

  • Allow custom OAUTH validators to register custom pg_hba.conf authentication options (Jacob Champion) §

  • Allow OAUTH validators to supply failure details (Jacob Champion) §

    This is done by setting the ValidatorModuleResult structure member error_detail.

  • Allow libpq environment variable PGOAUTHDEBUG to specify particular debug options (Zsolt Parragi, Jacob Champion) §

    The UNSAFE option still generates all debugging output.

E.1.3.7. psql #

  • Allow the search path to appear in the psql prompt via %S (Florents Tselai) §

    This works when psql is connected to PostgreSQL 18 or later.

  • Allow the hot standby status to appear in the psql prompt via %i (Jim Jones) §

  • Modify psql backslash commands to show comments for publications, subscriptions, and extended statistics (Fujii Masao, Jim Jones) §

    The modified commands are \dRp+, \dRs+, and \dX+.

  • Allow control over how booleans are displayed in psql (David G. Johnston) §

    The \pset variables are display_true and display_false.

  • Add psql variable SERVICEFILE to reference the service file location (Ryo Kanbayashi) §

  • Allow psql to more accurately determine if the pagerl is needed (Erik Wienhold) §

  • Add or improve psql tab completion (Yamaguchi Atsuo, Yugo Nagata, Haruna Miwa, Xuneng Zhou, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Fujii Masao, Álvaro Herrera, Jian He, Tatsuya Kawata, Ian Lawrence Barwick, Vasuki M) § § § § § § § § § § § § § §

E.1.3.8. Server Applications #

  • Change vacuumdb's --analyze-only and --analyze-in-stages options to analyze partitioned tables when no targets are specified (Laurenz Albe, Mircea Cadariu, Chao Li) § §

    Previously it skipped partitioned tables. This now matches the behavior of ANALYZE.

  • Allow vacuumdb to report its commands without running them using option --dry-run (Corey Huinker) §

  • Allow pg_verifybackup to read WAL files stored in tar archives (Amul Sul) §

    Add option --wal-path as an alias for the existing and deprecated --wal-directory option.

  • Allow pg_waldump to read WAL files stored in tar archives (Amul Sul) §

  • Improve performance of pg_upgrade copying large object metadata (Nathan Bossart) § § § §

    Various methods are used, depending on the PostgreSQL version of the old cluster.

  • Allow pg_upgrade to process non-default tablespaces stored in the PGDATA directory (Nathan Bossart) §

    Previously such tablespaces generated an error.

  • Add pgbench option --continue-on-error to continue after SQL errors (Rintaro Ikeda, Yugo Nagata, Fujii Masao) §

  • Improve the usability of pg_test_timing (Hannu Krosing, Tom Lane) § §

    Report nanoseconds instead of microseconds. In addition to histogram output, output a second table that reports exact timings, with an optional cutoff set by --cutoff.

  • Allow pg_dumpall to produce output in non-text formats (Mahendra Singh Thalor, Andrew Dunstan) § §

    The new output formats are custom, directory, or tar.

  • Allow pg_dump to include restorable extended statistics (Corey Huinker) §

  • Allow pg_createsubscriber to ignore specified publications that already exist (Shubham Khanna) §

    Previously this generated an error.

  • Change the way pg_createsubscriber stores recovery parameters (Alyona Vinter) §

    Changes are stored in optionally-included pg_createsubscriber.conf rather than directly in postgresql.auto.conf.

  • Add pg_createsubscriber option -l/--logdir to redirect output to files (Gyan Sreejith, Hayato Kuroda) §

E.1.3.9. Source Code #

  • Restore support for AIX (Aditya Kamath, Srirama Kucherlapati, Peter Eisentraut) § §

    This uses gcc and only supports 64-bit builds.

  • Change Solaris to use unnamed POSIX semaphores (Tom Lane) §

    Previously it used System V semaphores.

  • Require Visual Studio 2019 or later (Peter Eisentraut) §

  • Allow MSVC to create PL/Python using the Python Limited API (Bryan Green) §

  • Allow building on AArch64 using MSVC (Niyas Sait, Greg Burd, Dave Cramer) §

  • Allow execution stack backtraces on Windows using DbgHelp (Bryan Green) §

  • Change the supported C language version to C11 (Peter Eisentraut) § §

    Previously C99 was used.

  • Use standard C23 and C++ attributes if available (Peter Eisentraut) §

  • Use AVX2 CPU instructions for calculating page checksums (Matthew Sterrett, Andrew Kim) §

  • Use ARM Crypto Extension to Compute CRC32C (John Naylor) §

  • Change hex_encode() and hex_decode() to use SIMD CPU instructions (Nathan Bossart, Chiranmoy Bhattacharya) §

  • Require Meson version 0.57.2 or later (Peter Eisentraut) §

  • Add Meson option to build both shared and static libraries, or only shared (Peter Eisentraut) §

  • Update Unicode data to version 17.0.0 (Peter Eisentraut) §

  • Add hooks planner_setup_hook, planner_shutdown_hook, joinrel_setup_hook, and join_path_setup_hook (Robert Haas) § §

  • Allow extensions to replace set-returning functions in the FROM clause with SQL queries (Paul A. Jungwirth) §

  • Make multixid members 64-bit (Maxim Orlov) §

  • Change function prototypes to use uint* instead of bit* typedefs (Nathan Bossart) §

  • Allow logical decoding plugins to specify if they do not access shared catalogs (Antonin Houska) §

  • Add simplified and improved shared memory registration function ShmemRequestStruct() (Heikki Linnakangas, Ashutosh Bapat) §

    Functions ShmemInitStruct() and ShmemInitHash() remain for backward compatibility.

  • Add server variable debug_exec_backend to report how parameters are passed to new backends (Daniel Gustafsson) §

  • Add documentation section about temporal tables (Paul A. Jungwirth) §

  • Document the environment variables that control the regression tests (Michael Paquier) §

  • Update documented systemd example to include a restart setting (Andrew Jackson) §

E.1.3.10. Additional Modules #

  • Add pg_plan_advice module to stabilize and control planner decisions (Robert Haas) § §

  • Add extension pg_stash_advice to allow per-query-id advice to be specified (Robert Haas, Lukas Fittl) § §

  • Show sizes of FETCH queries as constants in pg_stat_statements (Sami Imseih) §

    Fetches of different sizes will now be grouped together in pg_stat_statements output.

  • Add generic and custom plan counts to pg_stat_statements (Sami Imseih) §

  • Refactor pg_buffercache reporting of shared memory mapping (Bertrand Drouvot) §

    New function pg_buffercache_os_pages() and system view pg_buffercache_os_pages allow reporting of shared memory mapping; the function optionally includes NUMA details. Function pg_buffercache_numa_pages() remains for backward compatibility.

  • Add functions to pg_buffercache to mark buffers as dirty (Nazir Bilal Yavuz) §

    The functions are pg_buffercache_mark_dirty(), pg_buffercache_mark_dirty_relation(), and pg_buffercache_mark_dirty_all().

  • Allow pushdown of array comparisons in prepared statements to postgres_fdw foreign servers (Alexander Pyhalov) §

  • Allow the retrieval of statistics from foreign data wrapper servers (Corey Huinker, Etsuro Fujita) §

    This is enabled for postgres_fdw by using the option restore_stats. The default is for ANALYZE to retrieve rows from the remote server to locally generate statistics.

  • Allow file_fdw to read files or program output that uses multi-line headers (Shinya Kato) §

  • Add server variable auto_explain.log_io to add IO reporting to auto_explain (Tomas Vondra) §

  • Allow auto_explain to add extension-specific EXPLAIN options via server variable auto_explain.log_extension_options (Robert Haas) §

  • Change btree_gin to support all btree-supported cross-type comparisons (Tom Lane) § §

  • Improve performance of bloom indexes by using streaming reads (Xuneng Zhou) § §

  • Improve performance of pgstattuple by using streaming reads (Xuneng Zhou) § §

  • Allow fuzzystrmatch's dmetaphone() to use single-byte encodings beyond ASCII (Peter Eisentraut) §

  • Modify oid2name --extended to report the relation file path (David Bidoc) §

E.1.4. Acknowledgments #

The following individuals (in alphabetical order) have contributed to this release as patch authors, committers, reviewers, testers, or reporters of issues.

fill in later