EDB Contributions to PostgreSQL 17 Help Enterprises Unlock Greater Performance for Complex Workloads

BEDFORD, Mass., Sept. 26, 2024 — EnterpriseDB (EDB), a leading Postgres data and AI company, has announced significant contributions to PostgreSQL 17, solidifying its position as the world’s most popular database and making it an even more compelling option for large-scale data analytics and AI workloads.

This landmark release, driven by over 200 developers worldwide, including 19 EDB employees contributing to 24 features, highlights EDB’s long-standing commitment to the PostgreSQL community and significant performance, reliability, and versatility improvements for modern workloads.

Postgres Meets the Demands of Modern Workloads

A recent EDB study revealed a telling trend: over one-third of large enterprises (150+ employees) are considering Postgres for their next project, with a notable 56% of this group believing AI is going mainstream in their organization–a rate significantly higher than the overall market. This growing interest in Postgres is no surprise, as developers have long loved its flexibility and extensibility.

“Our work on PostgreSQL 17 underscores a belief that Postgres isn’t just a database—it’s a data platform supporting your most critical business systems,” says Jozef de Vries, Chief Product Engineering Officer, EDB. “By introducing features like incremental backups and advancing features like JSON functionality and performance, EDB is doubling down on our commitment to the open source project while enabling enterprises to ‘just use Postgres’ to solve their most pressing data challenges.”

Advancements in Backup, Sub-Transactions, and JSON Support

Key highlights of PostgreSQL 17 include built-in incremental backup capabilities, a game-changer for enterprises managing high-update workloads. Previously, users had to rely on third-party tools and complex processes for incremental backups. Now, thanks to the contributions from EDB’s Chief Database Scientist, Robert Haas, and a host of others from EDB and the community, PostgreSQL 17 simplifies backup and recovery, reducing storage costs and downtime while improving reliability.

The new release also brings substantial performance enhancements. “Building on customer feedback, EDB collaborated with the community to overhaul portions of the transaction subsystem, implementing new locking techniques that deliver performance boosts of up to 100x,” says Tom Kincaid, Senior Vice President, Database Servers and Tools, EDB. “This breakthrough enables an entirely new class of applications to be migrated to Postgres with minimal changes, greatly expanding the database’s applicability.”

Improvements in subtransaction handling and reduced memory requirements for partition-wise JOINs enable better scalability and faster query processing, even in the most complex environments. Additionally, PostgreSQL 17 introduces the pg_createsubscriber tool, making logical replication a more viable option for large databases by significantly speeding up the initial data copy process.

PostgreSQL 17 also advances SQL:JSON functionality, including the introduction of JSON_TABLE and expanded SQL/JSON methods. These features streamline data processing by reducing the need for complex application logic, allowing developers to have queries and transactions that span relational and non-relational data.

EDB’s impact on Postgres extends beyond the technical improvements to this release. Earlier this year, EDB announced EDB Postgres AI, an intelligent platform for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads. Later this year, EDB will be sharing early release chapters for an O’Reilly Animal book, Building Intelligent Applications with PostgreSQL and AI, that will explore how Postgres not only meets but exceeds the demands of modern AI applications.

For more information about EDB’s contributions to Postgres 17, please visit: www.enterprisedb.com.

About EDB

EDB provides a data and AI platform that enables organizations to harness the full power of Postgres for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads across any cloud, anywhere. EDB empowers enterprises to control risk, manage costs and scale efficiently for a data and AI led world. Serving more than 1,500 customers globally and as the leading contributor to the vibrant and fast-growing PostgreSQL community, EDB supports major government organizations, financial services, media and information technology companies. EDB’s data-driven solutions enable customers to modernize legacy systems and break data silos while leveraging enterprise-grade open source technologies. EDB delivers the confidence of up to 99.999% high availability with mission critical capabilities built in such as security, compliance controls, and observability. For more information, visit www.enterprisedb.com.

Source: EDB