[nikita]

A number of features stood out to me in this release:

1. Chipping away more at vacuum. Fundamentally Postgres doesn't have undo log and therefore has to have vacuum. It's a trade-off of fast recovery vs well.. having to vacuum. The unfortunate part about vacuum is that it adds load to the system exactly when the system needs all the resources. I hope one day people stop knowing that vacuum exists, we are one step closer, but not there.

2. Performance gets better and not worse. Mark Callaghan blogs about MySQL and Postgres performance changes over time and MySQL keep regressing performance while Postgres keeps improving.

https://x.com/MarkCallaghanDB https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/

3. JSON. Postgres keep improving QOL for the interop with JS and TS.

4. Logical replication is becoming a super robust way of moving data in and out. This is very useful when you move data from one instance to another especially if version numbers don't match. Recently we have been using it to move at the speed of 1Gb/s

5. Optimizer. The better the optimizer the less you think about the optimizer. According to the research community SQL Server has the best optimizer. It's very encouraging that every release PG Optimizer gets better.

[sgarland]

MySQL can be faster in certain circumstances (mostly range selects), but only if your schema and queries are designed to exploit InnoDB’s clustering index.

But even then, in some recent tests I did, Postgres was less than 0.1 msec slower. And if the schema and queries were not designed with InnoDB in mind, Postgres had little to no performance regression, whereas MySQL had a 100x slowdown.

I love MySQL for a variety of reasons, but it’s getting harder for me to continue to defend it.