Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault

Over the past decade, the timing of PostgreSQL major releases has become very predictable: no earlier than the middle of September, and no later than the middle of October. This year is going to be different. PostgreSQL 19 most likely won’t be released until November, and it’s not impossible that the project could decide to postpone the release further.

Moreover, this year, several rather large features were reverted quite late in the beta period: UPDATE/DELETE FOR PORTION OF, SQL Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ), and ALTER TABLE … MERGE PARTITION/SPLIT PARTITION were all reverted between August 27 and September 15. While major feature reverts are not especially uncommon immediately after feature freeze, which each year occurs on April 8, it is unusual to see multiple major features get pulled from the release at such a late date. So, what happened?

Hacking Workshop for November 2026

Álvaro Herrera will be joining us in November to discuss, when our monthly hacking workshop will cover Table repacking, done right. If you're interesting in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions.

Hacking Workshop for October 2026

October's hacking workshop will cover my talk, pg_plan_advice: Plan Stability and User Planner Control for PostgreSQL?. If you're interesting in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions.

Hacking Workshop for September 2026

I'm pleased to announce that David Rowley will be joining us in September to discuss his talk Optimizing code in the hot path; with examples from tuple deformation. If you're interesting in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. As always, thanks to David for agreeing to join the sessions.

Hacking Workshop for June/July 2026

I was hoping to usual resume the monthly cadence of hacking workshops in June, but it didn't quite happen, largely due to being a little exhausted after pgconf.dev. But, I'm pleased to announce that Melanie Plageman will be joining us to discuss her talk Additional IO Observability in Postgres with pg_stat_io. If you're interesting in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. As always, thanks to Melanie for joining us.

Hacking Workshop for April/May 2026

I'm planning to hold a single hacking workshop for April and May combined, covering Masahiko Sawada's talk, Breaking away from FREEZE and Wraparound, given at PGCon 2022. If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to Sawada-san for agreeing to join us.

pg_plan_advice: Plan Stability and User Planner Control for PostgreSQL?

I'm proposing a very ambitious patch set for PostgreSQL 19. Only time will tell whether it ends up in the release, but I can't resist using this space to give you a short demonstration of what it can do. The patch set introduces three new contrib modules, currently called pg_plan_advice, pg_collect_advice, and pg_stash_advice.