PostgreSQL 15 Performance Improving With Faster Sorting, Many New Features

The PostgreSQL 15 database server will be releasing in a few months and is yet another major release to this open-source relational database system when it comes to performance.

An engineer from Microsoft is the latest one talking up PostgreSQL 15 performance. David Rowley of Microsoft talked up Postgres' sort performance work achieved by he and other developers for this current cycle. Due to the many PostgreSQL queries depending upon sorting, this performance uplift can translate to many meaningful, real-world performance benefits.

There has been work on single column sorting, reducing the memory consumption, adding specialized sort routines for common data types, changing merge algorithms, and more.

Rowley concluded his Microsoft Tech Community blog post with, "The first test I ran while working on reducing the memory consumption of sort improved performance by 371%. This was due to the reduction in memory consumption required for storing the records to sort no longer exceeding my work_mem setting. Previously the sort was spilling to disk and after the change the entire sort was done in memory. Many SQL queries running on PostgreSQL require records to be sorted. Making sort go faster in PostgreSQL 15 is likely to make many of your queries go faster than on PG 14."

The PostgreSQL 15 release notes also go through many other improvements to find in this major update. PostgreSQL 15 is also the release with Zstd compression support, enhancing the performance for AArch64 servers, direct I/O support on macOS, and many other changes. Currently this open-source relational database system update is in beta form while the stable debut should come around Q4.

The PG 15 Beta 1 release from this past week talks up the improved developer experience, significant performance improvements, better backups / archiving, logical replication enhancements, better security, and much more.