PostgreSQL 16 Released With More Performance Improvements, SIMD For x86 & Arm

PostgreSQL 16 released today as a very exciting update for this popular open-source SQL server.

PostgreSQL 16.0 introduces many new features for this widely-used database server. There are more performance improvements with this new release, particularly around query parallelism, bulk data loading, and logical replication. PostgreSQL 16 adds SIMD support on both x86 and ARM architectures which is being used for faster ASCII and JSON string processing as well as array and sub-transaction searches.

The PostgreSQL 16 release announcement also notes that bulk loading using COPY can be up to a 300% performance improvement in some cases. I'll be running some PostgreSQL 15 vs. 16 benchmarks soon.

PostgreSQL 16 also implements more SQL/JSON syntax, pg_stat_io is added as a new source for key I/O metrics, and various other security and access control enhancements.

Downloads and more details on PostgreSQL 16 via PostgreSQL.org.