Issue #664: Postgres 19 loses SQL/PGQ (and its release date)

#664 — September 9, 2026

Together with

The Scary Postgres 19 Patch Contest — It’s not even Halloween yet, but in this fascinating thread on the pgsql-hackers list Robert Haas set out with Claude to “evaluate which v19 patches were the scariest”. One of them, SQL/PGQ property graphs, has since been dropped from v19, but five remain…

Robert Haas et al.

💡 There's some more background to SQL/PGQ's removal in a separate thread on pgsql-hackers too.

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POSTGRES 19: A FOURTH BETA AND SOME HARD CHOICES:

Originally expected later this month, Postgres 19's release date is now officially TBD, with a fourth beta expected on September 24. But the 'scary patch' thread (above) shows that what's going to be in it remains an open question:

Tom Lane was "quite afraid" of SQL/PGQ two weeks before it was pulled, with fixes still under discussion that needed catalog changes: "I'd be willing to bet dinner that if we ship it in v19 there will be post-release bug discoveries that are unfixable until v20."
David Rowley argued for setting "the revert bar a bit lower this year", given a perceived reduction in developer time available. Bruce Momjian noted the volume of security/CVE fixes is having an impact here.
And Joshua Drake suggested moving the release to spring 2027, rather than removing features: "I would rather have a late 19 than all these great features and hard work gutted."

How to Optimize When You Can’t Do Anything — Hettie had a production query on a 750GB, 16 billion row table that suddenly ran slow. Creating the right index wasn’t an option (it’d take over a day) but a close look at the underlying data led to an ingenious fix.

Henrietta Dombrovskaya

IN BRIEF:

🇺🇸 The PostgreSQL@SCaLE CFP is open till November 1. The Postgres track runs April 1-2 at SCaLE 24x in Pasadena.
🇮🇳 PGConf India 2027 is back next March 2-5 in Bengaluru. The CFP is open till October 15.
Postgres's RPM repo now covers Amazon Linux 2023.

Sixteen Locks Ought to Be Enough for Anybody — Did you know that, when planning a query, Postgres takes a (weak) lock on every index on the table whether it uses them or not? This is usually fine, but until Postgres 18 this could sting once a query touched more than 16 tables and indexes combined.

Christophe Pettus

📄 Inserting State Transitions in Postgres – An append-only status table gives you full history, but two concurrent transitions can both insert. Here's how to prevent the conflicts. Thiago Araújo Silva (thoughtbot)

📄 From the Trenches: My Path Through Postgres – Twenty years of Postgres war stories, from a one-time MySQL advocate. Shaun Thomas

📄 Fix Circular Role Dependencies Before Upgrading RDS and Aurora Postgres Ravi Teja Adabala (Amazon)

📄 Postgres Calculations and the Ambiguity of NULL Christopher Winslett (Crunchy Data)

📰 Classifieds

🧊 Paying SSD prices for data nobody reads? ColdFront tiers old Postgres rows to S3 automatically, the open source way.

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RELEASES AND CODE:

Kafgres: A Kafka-Compatible Broker Embedded Inside Postgres — A pgrx-powered extension that serves the Kafka wire protocol from a Postgres background worker, so standard Kafka clients can produce, consume, and rebalance consumer groups against topics stored in your database.

Raynor Elgie

chdb: An Extension for Fast Imports from S3, GCS and Azure — ClickHouse’s chDB engine, wrapped as an extension for bulk imports and exports. COPY (or CREATE TABLE) can pull Parquet, Avro, ORC, Arrow and more from S3, GCS, Azure or over HTTP. Early days, but promising.

David Wheeler (ClickHouse)

pg_hardstorage 1.4 – Featured in issue 654, Cybertec's streaming-first single Go binary backup/recovery tool has continued to mature, and 1.4 is a fix-heavy release, notably for its pgBackRest, Barman and WAL-G compatibility shims.
Ivory 2.0 – A web UI originally for operating HA Postgres clusters running under Patroni, but now with a plugin architecture for supporting systems like MongoDB and Redis too.
Barman 3.20 – EDB's backup/recovery manager adds streaming multipart uploads to Google Cloud Storage, Zstd cloud backups, and faster compressed restores.
pg_cron 1.6.8 – Adding Postgres 19 and native Windows build support.
🌐 PostGIS 3.7.0 RC2

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