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PostgreSQL 9.6 Beta Released (DRAFT)

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces today that the first beta release of PostgreSQL 9.6 is available for download. This release contains previews of all of the features which will be available in the final release of version 9.5, although some details will change before then. Users are encouraged to begin testing their applications against this latest release.

Major Features of 9.6

Version 9.6 includes significant changes and exciting enhancements including:

• Parallel sequential scans, joins and aggregates
• Support for consistent, read-scaling clusters through multiple synchronous standbys and "remote_apply" synchronous commit.
• Full text search on phrases
• postgres_fdw pushes down sorts, joins, UPDATEs and DELETEs, enhancing federated database support
• Decreased autovacuum impact on big tables by avoiding "refreezing" old data.

In particular, the the parallelism feature should bring a noticeable increase in performance to supported queries.

Help Test for Bugs

As with other major releases, the improvements in PostgreSQL include changes to large amounts of code. We count on you to test the altered version with your workloads and testing tools in order to find bugs and regressions before the release of PostgreSQL 9.6.0. In addition to testing that the new features work as documented, consider testing the following:

• Do parallel queries actually improve performance for you?
• Can you make parallel queries crash or lose data?
• Do our code changes cause PostgreSQL to not function on your platform?
• Does improved vacuum freezing safely reduce autovacuum of large tables?
• Does phrase search return the results you expect?

Version 9.6 Beta 1 also makes changes to the binary backup API. Users should test version 9.6 with PostgreSQL backup tools, including pgBackRest, Barman, WAL-E, and other packaged and in-house software.

As this is an Beta, minor changes to database behaviors, feature details, and APIs are still possible. Your feedback and testing will help determine the final tweaks on the new features, so test soon. The quality of user testing helps determine when we can make a final release.

Beta Schedule

This is first beta release of version 9.6. The PostgreSQL Project will release additional betas as required for testing, followed by one or more release candidates, until the final release in late 2016. For further information please see the Beta Testing page.