The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has delayed the release of PostgreSQL 19, the latest version of the popular open source database. Generally available is now expected around November 19, rather than late September or early October. Developers have also reverted between eight and 10 significant features, which will now be pushed to next year's PostgreSQL 20.
Peter Eisentraut, veep at EDB, a PostgreSQL support and consultancy, said the number of reverts is at least partly due to LLM-assisted code reviews. In a blog post, Eisentraut, a leading PostgreSQL committer, said some reverted features had significant architectural defects that would have been hard to fix quickly and during beta. The AI reviews also uncovered a long tail of "relatively harmless issues involving various edge cases," which developers might once have missed until years after launch. As Eisentraut put it, forty defect reports can quickly exhaust the time available, even when each fix is small. He added that the AI review tools improved in the months before launch, raising the effective quality bar after many features had already been written and committed. He also stressed that the reverts were not caused by "vibe coding," since the technique was not available when most of the features were written.
Among the features pulled is support for SQL Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ), added to the SQL standard in 2023. Contributor Tom Lane had warned that shipping it in v19 would likely lead to post-release bugs that could not be fixed until v20. Despite the delay, Eisentraut promised that PostgreSQL 19 will still be "a great release," including REPACK CONCURRENTLY, which avoids the table-lock VACUUM FULL operation used to reclaim disk space.
PostgreSQL 20 was previously expected to contain only bug fixes. It is now likely to include the features carried over from the delayed release, Eisentraut said.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing