Doubling Down on PostgreSQL Compatibility: YugabyteDB Levels Up with PG15 Features

The latest release of YugabyteDB delivers 15 key PostgreSQL 15 features, providing an industry-first zero-downtime PostgreSQL upgrade and downgrade experience, giving customers a truly cloud-native PostgreSQL solution.

Our database experts have worked hard to make YugabyteDB the most PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database on the market. We are excited to build on our commitment to PostgreSQL by announcing that YugabyteDB now supports PG15 as a tech preview.

Watch this video of Yugabyte co-founder Karthik Ranganathan sharing key highlights from the latest release of YugabyteDB.

What The Latest Release Means to YugabyteDB Users

This significant milestone gives our customers a wealth of new features introduced by the PostgreSQL community between versions 11.2 and 15. These include:

• Enhanced PostgreSQL Compatibility: Leverage the latest PostgreSQL advancements, such as generated columns, foreign keys on partitioned tables, and multi-range aggregates for enhanced data modeling and querying.
• Industry First – In-place Online Upgrades and Downgrades Across Major PostgreSQL Versions: Yugabyte’s innovative approach enables you to effortlessly make in-place online downgrades and upgrades to newer PostgreSQL versions in the GA. This eliminates downtime and ensures business continuity, and disaster recovery during the upgrade, without the need to deploy additional hardware.
• Unparalleled Scalability and Resilience: Experience the power of Yugabyte’s distributed architecture which offers unparalleled scalability, high availability, and global data distribution with exceptional performance.
• Enterprise-Grade Features: Offers a host of enterprise-grade features across observability, security, backups and restores with point-in-time-recovery, and disaster recovery, all while maintaining low-latency transactions in geographically distributed environments.

This new release marks another significant step for YugabyteDB. Although PostgreSQL itself doesn’t guarantee backward compatibility across major versions, Yugabyte has developed an innovative and reusable framework for quickly adopting future PostgreSQL versions. This includes seamless fallback/downgrade options, ensuring minimal disruption for our users as they explore and innovate using the latest PostgreSQL versions.

In effect, the heavy lifting on our side has now been done as we have invested time and resources (in a long-term project) that now ensures we are well placed to quickly adopt and deliver parity with future PostgreSQL versions.

Delivering a True Cloud-Native PostgreSQL

Yugabyte folks are onto something good! They just released v2.25 compatible with Postgres15. The top-end is a Postgres fork, compatible with thousands of applications using Postgres, while the storage layer is based on RocksDB. YugabyteDB will both replicate and shard the data over multiple servers or containers.

This should give you both better resilience and scalability. Yugabyte also seems to put a lot of effort into the seamless, no-downtime upgrade-capability. Smooth upgrades to future versions of Yugabyte should allow it to catch up with the “latest” release of Postgres faster. Plus, I really like that YugabyteDB is open source and doesn’t create ‘lock-in’ with any vendor or cloud-provider. I have also received good support for my questions on their Open Source Slack Community. I am quite curious to see how my customers use this system.

Piet de Visser, Database Consultant, PDVBV

Yugabyte stands alone in offering a fully PostgreSQL-compatible, Cloud-Native database that delivers key enterprise-grade features, including zero-downtime upgrades, robust disaster recovery, and unparalleled scalability and availability.

YugabyteDB 2.25 Delivers 15 Key PostgreSQL 15 Features

We are excited about YugabyteDB’s Postgres15 launch and, in particular, looking forward to the many added features which will help as we migrate from SQL Server to YugabyteDB.

Kevin Visscher, Software Engineer, New Black.

This release includes many new features, but the particularly noteworthy ones are detailed below.

Usability Features:

1. Stored Generated Columns: Simplify data manipulation with automatic column generation based on existing data.
2. Foreign key support on partitioned tables: Foreign keys on geo-partitioned tables are now supported
3. CREATE NULLS NOT DISTINCT for unique indexes on partitioned tables.
4. Multi-range and Range Aggregates: Perform complex aggregations on multi-range data sets.
5. Add or REPLACE for CREATE TRIGGER: Simplify trigger management with the ability to replace existing triggers.
6. Supports new function to generate unique id get_random_uuid()

Query Execution Features:

7. Incremental Sort: Optimize query performance through sorting operations by leveraging sorting on smaller chunks of data with merge.
8. Memoized Nested-Loop Joins: Improve performance for joins with a small inner result set.
9. Disk-based Hash Aggregation: Handle larger aggregations efficiently using disk space.

Observability Features:

10. Unique Query Tracking: Enabling compute_query_id lets you uniquely track a query through several PostgreSQL features, including pg_stat_activity, EXPLAIN VERBOSE, and pg_stat_statement.
11. Yugabyte offers enhanced Observability ASH (Active Session History): ASH provides a real-time and historical view of database activity like identity bottleneck performance, slow queries, SQL-based analysis, etc features beyond basic Postgres features.
12. Query planning tracking: Allow pg_stat_statement to gain insights into query planning performance.
13. JSON Logging Format: Leverage a structured JSON format for detailed logging information.

Security:

14. Public Schema Permissions: Enforce stricter access controls for the public schema.
15. New Roles: pg_read-All_data and pg_write_all_data roles to simplify database monitoring.

PLUS: Seamless in-place online upgrades and downgrades across major PostgreSQL versions. Now you can easily update to the latest PostgreSQL versions and then seamlessly revert if needed, ensuring minimal application disruption. This allows you to confidently explore the latest PostgreSQL features and innovations while maintaining business continuity and minimizing risk.

Sign-up now for tomorrow’s (31st Jan) YugabyteDB Friday Tech Talk, which will demonstrate many of the new PG15 features enabled in YugabyteDB 2.25.

Conclusion

Want to know how YugabyteDB delivers high-performance, fully PostgreSQL-compatible, distributed database features?

Stay tuned for our blog series, which will dive deeper into the new PG15 features and reveal how you can achieve more from your database! Check out:

• PostgreSQL 15 Compatibility in YugabyteDB 2.25: Top 15 Features!

Upcoming blogs will also detail our journey to PG15 and the innovative framework we’ve built to allow for seamless upgrades to future PostgreSQL versions.

Want to see for yourself? Sign up for a free trial to experience the power of fully-managed YugabyteDB with YugabyteDB Aeon, or download our fully open source version of the database and start exploring!