Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 15.0 (2022-10-24)

Release date:	October 24, 2022
Installation:	Installing Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL
Upgrade	Upgrading Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL from 14 to 15

We are pleased to announce the launch of Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 15.0 - a solution with the collection of tools from PostgreSQL community that are tested to work together and serve to assist you in deploying and managing PostgreSQL. The aim of Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL is to address the operational issues like High-Availability, Disaster Recovery, Security, Performance and Scalability and others that enterprises are facing.

This release of Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL is based on PostgreSQL 15.

Release Highlights

Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 15 features a lot of new functionalities and enhancements to performance, replication, statistics collection, logging and more. Among them are the following:

• Added the MERGE command, which allows your developers to write conditional SQL statements that can include INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE actions within a single statement.
• A view can now be created with the permissions of the caller, instead of the view creator. This adds an additional layer of protection to ensure that view callers have the correct permissions for working with the underlying data.

• Enhanced logical replication management:

  • Row filtering and column lists for publishers lets users choose to replicate a subset of data from a table
  • The ability to skip replaying a conflicting transaction and to automatically disable a subscription if an error is detected simplifies the conflict management.
  • The ability to use two-phase commit (2PC) with logical replication.

• A new logging format jsonlog outputs log data using a defined JSON structure, which allows PostgreSQL logs to be processed in structured logging systems

• Now DBAs can manage the PostgreSQL configuration by granting users permission to alter server-level configuration parameters. Users can also browse the configuration from psql using the \dconfig command.
• Server-level statistics are now collected in shared memory, eliminating both the statistics collector process and periodically writing this data to disk
• A new built-in extension, pg_walinspect, lets users inspect the contents of write-ahead log files directly from a SQL interface.

• Performance optimizations:

  • Improved performance of window functions such as rank(), row_number() and count(). Read more about performance and benchmarking results in Introducing Performance Improvement of Window Functions in PostgreSQL 15.
  • Parallel execution of queries using the SELECT DISTINCT command.
  • The support for LZ4 and zstd compression methods to write-ahead logs (WAL) and backup files improves performance and storage capabilities of your database.

See also

• PostgreSQL 15 release notes

• Percona Blog:

  • A Quick Peek at the PostgreSQL 15 Beta 1
  • PostgreSQL 15 – New Features to Be Excited About
  • PostgreSQL 15: Stats Collector Gone? What’s New?

• Highly Available PostgreSQL From Percona

The following is the list of extensions available in Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL.

Extension	Version	Description
Patroni	2.1.4	a HA (High Availability) solution for PostgreSQL
pgaudit	1.7.0	provides detailed session or object audit logging via the standard logging facility provided by PostgreSQL
pgAudit set user	3.0.0	provides an additional layer of logging and control when unprivileged users must escalate themselves to superuser or object owner roles in order to perform needed maintenance tasks.
pgBackRest	2.41	a backup and restore solution for PostgreSQL
pgBadger	12.0	a fast PostgreSQL Log Analyzer.
pgBouncer	1.17.0	lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL
pg_repack	1.4.8	rebuilds PostgreSQL database objects
pg_stat_monitor	1.1.1	collects and aggregates statistics for PostgreSQL and provides histogram information.
PostgreSQL Common	241	PostgreSQL database-cluster manager. It provides a structure under which multiple versions of PostgreSQL may be installed and/or multiple clusters maintained at one time.
wal2json	2.5	a PostgreSQL logical decoding JSON output plugin.
HAProxy	2.5.9	The high-availability and load balancing solution for PostgreSQL

Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL also includes the following packages:

• llvm 12.0.1 packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 / CentOS 8. This fixes compatibility issues with LLVM from upstream.
• supplemental etcd packages which can be used for setting up Patroni clusters. These packages are available for the following operating systems:

Operating System	Package	Version	Description
CentOS 8	etcd	3.3.11	A consistent, distributed key-value store
	python3-python-etcd	0.4.3	A Python client for etcd

Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL is also shipped with the libpq library. It contains “a set of library functions that allow client programs to pass queries to the PostgreSQL backend server and to receive the results of these queries.”