For PostgreSQL users, the next 9.6 release should be particularly exciting as the parallel sequential scan / parallel query support has been committed.

This parallel sequential scan support has the ability to significantly improve the performance of selects on PostgreSQL databases. In one of the examples, a database select query dropped from taking 743 ms to now taking just 213 ms.

This parallel query code is still a work-in-progress, but the initial support will be found in PostgreSQL 9.6. More details via today's blog post by developer Robert Haas.