Digest news from the world of PostgreSQL. Issue number 6

We continue to introduce you to the most interesting news on PostgreSQL.

Releases

PostgreSQL 11 Beta
The PostgreSQL release team decided on a beta release date: May 24, 2018.

PostgreSQL 10.4 Released
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Unlike version 10.3, which was unscheduled (it was urgent to close important security holes), this version came out on schedule .
In the new version there are a lot of amendments . From the patches that attracted attention: overly liberal access ( ACL ) to the pg_logfile_rotate() function; loosened blocking during the planning of background processes of the auto-vacuum, which strongly interfered with the parallelization of work. Together with 10.4 there were updates 9.6.9, 9.5.13, 9.4.18, 9.3.23.

BDR 3.0
There are some details. Version 3.0 of the 2ndQuadrant is positioning as a new generation of BDRs , a radical technological shift. In a high availability configuration, it is recommended to build a global multi-master (based on logical replication) with locally secured replicas (based on physical replication).
The “Shadow Master” mode has appeared: in case of the lead server crash, you can switch the replica to the master mode with almost no delay.
Clusters can now be upgraded without stopping (rolling updates).
BDR 3.0 is proposed to be used in sharding on a geographical basis.
BDR 3.0, however, does not provide global transactional integrity.

PyGreSQL 5.0.5 , a Python connector to PostgreSQL. The new version officially supports PostgreSQL 10.

pg_chameleon 2.0.6
New version of the utility for replication from MySQL to PostgreSQL, implemented in Python 3.

repmgr 4.0.5
In the new version of this replication utility from 2ndQuadrant , pg_rewind more convenient to use, recovery.conf generation has been improved, and, of course, errors of previous versions have been fixed.

Courses

P.Luzanov and E.Rogov ( Postgres Professional ) on May 21-24, will read the course DEV1 “Development of the server part of PostgreSQL applications. Basic course "in Vladivostok .
Register here .
On May 28-31, the courses move to Khabarovsk . Register here .

Conferences and meetings

DevConf 2018
The web developer conference will be held on May 18 at Digital October. The program has reports on PostgreSQL: Logical replication in PostgreSQL - Ivan Panchenko (Postgres Professional)
There will be a round table on databases .

New PostgreSQL 11 features
This mitap will take place on May 23 at the Raiffeisenbank site in Nagatino. Co-organizer of Postgres Professional.

PGCon 2018
will be held in Ottawa on May 29 - June 1.

Swiss PGDay 2018
will be held in Rapperswil , near Zurich on June 29th. Registration is until May 28th.

PGConf.Brazil 2018
will happen in São Paulo on 3-4 August.

PGDay 2018, Portland
The Portland PostgreSQL Users Group will host PGDay on September 10th in Portland (Oregon). Suggestions to send here .

Awards

One of the key PostgreSQL developers, Magnus Hagander , won the 2018 Nordic Free Software Award . The material expression of the reward is a beautiful glass.

Articles and blogs

PostgreSQL Data Types: ENUM
PostgreSQL Data Types: JSON
Continuation of the series Dimitri Fontaine (Dimitri Fontaine) about the data types in PostgreSQL. In the article about ENUM, Dimitri recalls the reasons for the appearance of this type in PostgreSQL and gives advice on when to use it. In the article about JSON he considers JSON and JSONB, possible use cases with them for PostgreSQL.

What's New in PostgreSQL 11: Improved Casting
Alexander Alekseev (Postgres Professional) continues a series of articles about innovations that will appear in PostgreSQL 11. This time about the patch, which allows casting JSONB directly to numeric types and boolean.

Let's speed things up
In this article, Alexey Lesovsky ( Data Egret ) recalls the parameters that must be configured in order to use the parallelism in PostgreSQL 10.

Near-Zero Downtime Automated Upgrades of PostgreSQL Clusters in Cloud (Part II)
Gulchin Yildirim developed the Ansible based Pglupgrade utility and explains how to use it to upgrade with an unavailability time close to zero. Part I is here .

B-tree Indexes with INCLUDE
Article Hubert 'depesz' Lyubashevsky on INCLUDE-indices. Dispatches examines examples of the use of these indexes, the resulting execution plans, and index sizes. With conclusions not in a hurry.

Tech preview: PostgreSQL 11 - CREATE PROCEDURE
Hans-Jürgen Schönig (Hans-Juergen Schoenig) from CyberTec explains the technological difference between the new procedures and the classic PostgreSQL functions. In his opinion, this one of his most long-awaited and relevant features.

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