There comes a day in every young database’s life that it’s time to move on. I’m sorry 9.4, but the day has come that we must say goodbye. It’s not like we haven’t had our good times. While I truly appreciate everything you’ve done for me, we must part ways. I’m far too needy, and I can’t demand so much of you in good conscience. May your future patches make you and your other suitors happy!
The Postgres developers recently announced the availability of the first public beta for Postgres 9.6. I would be highly remiss to ignore such an opportunity to dig into any interesting functionality listed in the 9.6 release notes. All in all, it’s a pretty exciting series of advancements, and assuming this is a glimpse of what we see when 9.6 drops, I’d say we’re on the right track.
Materialized views are a great improvement to performance in many cases. Introduced in PostgreSQL 9.3, they finally added an easy method for turning a view into a transient table that could be indexed, mined for statistics for better planner performance, and easily rebuilt. Unfortunately, refreshing a materialized view in PostgreSQL 9.3 caused a full exclusive lock, blocking any use until the process was complete. In 9.4, this can finally be done concurrently, though there are still a couple caveats.