In 1994, Postgres95 was released to the world by Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen as an open source descendant of the original POSTGRES Berkeley code; they added a SQL language interpreter to POSTGRES. By 1996, the name "Postgres95" was changed to a new name – PostgreSQL Version 6.0 – combining the original POSTGRES version and recent versions with SQL capability. Recently, DB-Engines and the SD Times 2018 100 have featured PostgreSQL as the "DBMS of the Year 2017."
In October 2019, the first PostgreSQL 12.0 version was released by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. Since then, PostgreSQL has been the most advanced open source database all over the world. Version 12 provides many important improvements, including the following:
- The increased performance of standard B-tree indexes and also the reduction of the index size for B-tree indexes.
- The ability to rebuild indexes concurrently so that a REINDEX operation will not block any index writes; the parallel indexes introduced from PostgreSQL 10 now get more benefits with the new REINDEX CONCURRENTLY statement.
- The efficient capabilities regarding partitioning performance so that developers can now process (that is, query or alter) thousands of partitions simultaneously without blocking, and they can use foreign keys to reference partitioned tables.
- The most common value statistics for the CREATE STATISTICS command, leading to improved query plans.
- The common table expressions using WITH queries can now be inlined for quicker queries.
- The INCLUDE clause for generalized search tree (GiST) indexes is an extensible data structure that allows you to develop indices over any kind of data.
- The reduction of write-ahead log (WAL) overheads generated from a GiST, GIN, or SP-GiST index.
- The checksum control ability via the pg checksums statement (which used to be pg_verify_checksums) so that developers can enable or disable an offline cluster without dumping and reloading data (note that online checksum enablement is still in progress and not yet available in PostgreSQL 12).
Since October 2019, the latest PostgreSQL version 12 has been released with more improvements to the performance of the INSERT and COPY statements for partitioned tables and the attachment of a new table partition without blocking queries. You can read more about the fixes to previous releases at https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/release-12.html.
Finally, PostgreSQL 12 benefits all users with notable improvements to query performance over larger datasets and space utilization; PostgreSQL 12 has quickly received good reviews and evaluations across the database industry. Version 12 of PostgreSQL is obviously the preferred open source database for all developers.
PostgreSQL 12 is now developed on clouds or so-called cloud databases and DBaaS.
