EnterpriseDB Improves Database Integration, Scalability, and Data Analytics Productivity with PostgreSQL 9.5
EnterpriseDB, a provider of enterprise Postgres products and database compatibility solutions, has announced the general availability of PostgreSQL 9.5, released by the Postgres community. The new 9.5 version boosts performance and scalability, enhances productivity with data analytics, and improves integration with other database solutions, laying the groundwork for supporting horizontal scaling across multiple servers.
"EDB's contributions to the Postgres Community during this development cycle have focused heavily on performance and scalability. PostgreSQL 9.5 provides significant scalability enhancements that benefit our large enterprise and government customers, since they run on high core count servers that support large numbers of concurrent users and mission-critical applications," said Marc Linster, senior vice president of products and services at EnterpriseDB.
According to EDB, benchmark tests show that PostgreSQL 9.5 achieves strong performance improvements for high concurrency workloads. For example, 64 concurrent connections on a 24 core/496GB RAM system showed a 96% improvement over PostgreSQL 9.4.
Performance and Scalability
In terms of performance and scalability, EDB says PostgreSQL 9.5 can support greater data volume, thereby increasing performance as a result of higher optimization of the locking regime in shared buffers. And, with a reduced number of page locks and pins holding indexes during scans, PostgreSQL 9.5 can support more concurrent users in high-transactional systems, which also increases performance, while enhanced shared buffer management enables PostgreSQL 9.5 to support a greater number of shared buffer partitions. Moreover, using an abbreviated sorting optimization, PostgreSQL 9.5 can sort large text and numeric fields 20% to 30% faster than PostgreSQL 9.4, according to benchmark tests.
Supporting horizontal scalability and integration, Foreign Data Wrappers (FDWs) set the groundwork for accessing data across multiple servers, which will be the foundation for future developments in horizontal sharding. A new FDW feature in PostgreSQL 9.5, IMPORT FOREIGN SCHEMA, automates importing of schemas from external databases connected to PostgreSQL through FDWs, reducing the potential for errors and replaces a manual process when accessing data from outside sources. In addition, FDWs enable PostgreSQL to read and write data from other databases and access it as PostgreSQL tables where developers can query it with SQL, as if it were native PostgreSQL. The development of these enhancements is being led by EDB and Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT).
Productivity, Security, and Analytics
Key advances in PostgreSQL 9.5 for improving productivity and security, as well as accelerating data analytics, include a new indexing type called BRIN (Block Range Index), which provides for very small indexes that use metadata (e.g., minimum and maximum values) to describe a range of information to improve the performance of queries. For tables that store data in a sequential manner (i.e., by numeric sequence or data/time fields), this allows queries to skip the majority of the table when looking for data within a certain range.
A trio of new analytic features (GROUPING SETS/CUBE/ROLLUP) quickly summarizes large amounts of data across various dimensions, enabling higher performance for complex queries, and allows businesses to produce more tailored results.
In addition, UPSERT is one of the most commonly requested features to be added to Postgres. Syntactically, the new "ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING" (or "ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE") gives database developers a more effective and efficient way to insert data, while managing potential insert conflicts without writing any custom code.
Improvements to the document data type JSONB furthers Postgres' ability to manage unstructured and semi-structured data, and row level security allows DBAs to implement policies to limit what can be seen or updated depending on any number of properties, such as user name, clearance level, or organizational membership.
For more information, go to the EnterpriseDB website, and visit the PostgreSQL community download page here. In addition, training, professional services and certification solutions are available from EDB and EDB's partners.