Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 14.1 (2021-11-22)

Date:	November 22, 2021
Installation:	Installing Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL
Upgrade:	Upgrading Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL from 13 to 14

We are pleased to announce the launch of Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 14.1 - a collection of tools to assist you in managing PostgreSQL. Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL installs PostgreSQL and complements it by a selection of extensions that enable solving essential practical tasks efficiently.

This release of Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL is based on PostgreSQL 14.1.

Release Highlights

PostgreSQL 14 provides an extensive set of new features and enhancements to security, performance, usability for client applications and more.

Most notable of them include the following:

• Expired B-tree index entries can now be detected and removed between vacuum runs. This results in lesser number of page splits and reduces the index bloat.
• The vacuum process now deletes B-tree pages in a single cycle, without marking them as deleted during the first run. This speeds up free space cleanup.
• Support for subscripts in JSON is added to simplify data retrieval using a commonly recognized syntax.
• Stored procedures can accept OUT parameters.
• The libpq library now supports the pipeline mode. Previously, the client applications waited for a transaction to be completed before sending the next one. The pipeline mode allows the applications to send multiple transactions at the same time thus boosting performance.
• Large transactions are now streamed to subscribers in-progress, thus increasing the performance. This improvement applies to logical replication API as well.
• LZ4 compression is added for TOAST operations. This speeds up large data processing.
• SCRAM is made the default authentication mechanism. This mechanism improves security and simplifies regulatory compliance for data security.

Seealso

• PostgreSQL 14.1 release notes
• Percona Blog: PostgreSQL 14 - Performance, Security, Usability, and Observability
• Using the Range and the New Multirange Data Type in PostgreSQL 14
• Using New JSON Syntax in PostgreSQL 14 - Update

The following is the list of extensions available in Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL.

Extension	Version	Description
Patroni	2.1.1	a HA (High Availability) solution for PostgreSQL
Pgaudit	1.6.0	provides detailed session or object audit logging via the standard logging facility provided by PostgreSQL
pgAudit set user	3.0.0	provides an additional layer of logging and control when unprivileged users must escalate themselves to superuser or object owner roles in order to perform needed maintenance tasks.
pgBackRest	2.36	a backup and restore solution for PostgreSQL
pgBadger	11.6	a fast PostgreSQL Log Analyzer.
pgBouncer	1.16.1	lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL
pg_repack	1.4.7	rebuilds PostgreSQL database objects
pg_stat_monitor	1.0.0 - Beta2	collects and aggregates statistics for PostgreSQL and provides histogram information.
PostgreSQL Common	230	PostgreSQL database-cluster manager. It provides a structure under which multiple versions of PostgreSQL may be installed and/or multiple clusters maintained at one time.
wal2json	2.4	a PostgreSQL logical decoding JSON output plugin.

Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL also includes the following packages:

• llvm 12.0.1 packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 / CentOS 8. This fixes compatibility issues with LLVM from upstream.
• supplemental ETCD packages which can be used for setting up Patroni clusters. These packages are available for the following operating systems:

Operating System	Package	Version	Description
CentOS 7	python3-python-etcd	0.4.3	A Python client for ETCD
CentOS 8	etcd	3.3.11	A consistent, distributed key-value store
	python3-python-etcd	0.4.3	A Python client for ETCD
Debian 9 (‘stretch’)	etcd	3.3.11	A consistent, distributed key-value store
	python3-etcd	0.4.3	A Python client for ETCD

Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL is also shipped with the libpq library. It contains “a set of library functions that allow client programs to pass queries to the PostgreSQL backend server and to receive the results of these queries.”

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