Add predefined roles pg_read_all_data and pg_write_all_data (Stephen Frost)

These non-login roles can be used to give read or write permission to all tables, views, and sequences.

Add predefined role pg_database_owner that contains only the current database's owner (Noah Misch)

This is especially useful in template databases.

Remove temporary files after backend crashes (Euler Taveira)

Previously, such files were retained for debugging purposes. If necessary, deletion can be disabled with the new server parameter remove_temp_files_after_crash.

Allow long-running queries to be canceled if the client disconnects (Sergey Cherkashin, Thomas Munro)

The server parameter client_connection_check_interval allows control over whether loss of connection is checked for intra-query. (This is supported on Linux and a few other operating systems.)

Add an optional timeout parameter to pg_terminate_backend() (Magnus Hagander)

Allow wide tuples to be always added to almost-empty heap pages (John Naylor, Floris van Nee)

Previously tuples whose insertion would have exceeded the page's fill factor were instead added to new pages.

Add Server Name Indication (SNI) in SSL connection packets (Peter Eisentraut)

This can be disabled by turning off client connection option sslsni.

Allow standby servers to be rewound via pg_rewind (Heikki Linnakangas)

Allow the restore_command setting to be changed during a server reload (Sergei Kornilov)

You can also set restore_command to an empty string and reload to force recovery to only read from the pg_wal directory.

Add server parameter log_recovery_conflict_waits to report long recovery conflict wait times (Bertrand Drouvot, Masahiko Sawada)

Pause recovery on a hot standby server if the primary changes its parameters in a way that prevents replay on the standby (Peter Eisentraut)

Previously the standby would shut down immediately.

Add function pg_get_wal_replay_pause_state() to report the recovery state (Dilip Kumar)

It gives more detailed information than pg_is_wal_replay_paused(), which still exists.

Add new read-only server parameter in_hot_standby (Haribabu Kommi, Greg Nancarrow, Tom Lane)

This allows clients to easily detect whether they are connected to a hot standby server.

Speed truncation of small tables during recovery on clusters with a large number of shared buffers (Kirk Jamison)

Allow file system sync at the start of crash recovery on Linux (Thomas Munro)

By default, PostgreSQL opens and fsyncs each data file in the database cluster at the start of crash recovery. A new setting, recovery_init_sync_method=syncfs, instead syncs each filesystem used by the cluster. This allows for faster recovery on systems with many database files.

Add function pg_xact_commit_timestamp_origin() to return the commit timestamp and replication origin of the specified transaction (Movead Li)

Add the replication origin to the record returned by pg_last_committed_xact() (Movead Li)

Allow replication origin functions to be controlled using standard function permission controls (Martín Marqués)

Previously these functions could only be executed by superusers, and this is still the default.

Reduce the number of keywords that can't be used as column labels without AS (Mark Dilger)

There are now 90% fewer restricted keywords.

Allow an alias to be specified for JOIN's USING clause (Peter Eisentraut)

The alias is created by writing AS after the USING clause. It can be used as a table qualification for the merged USING columns.

Allow DISTINCT to be added to GROUP BY to remove duplicate GROUPING SET combinations (Vik Fearing)

For example, GROUP BY CUBE (a,b), CUBE (b,c) will generate duplicate grouping combinations without DISTINCT.

Properly handle DEFAULT entries in multi-row VALUES lists in INSERT (Dean Rasheed)

Such cases used to throw an error.

Add SQL-standard SEARCH and CYCLE clauses for common table expressions (Peter Eisentraut)

The same results could be accomplished using existing syntax, but much less conveniently.

Allow column names in the WHERE clause of ON CONFLICT to be table-qualified (Tom Lane)

Only the target table can be referenced, however.

Allow REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW to use parallelism (Bharath Rupireddy)

Allow REINDEX to change the tablespace of the new index (Alexey Kondratov, Michael Paquier, Justin Pryzby)

This is done by specifying a TABLESPACE clause. A --tablespace option was also added to reindexdb to control this.

Allow REINDEX to process all child tables or indexes of a partitioned relation (Justin Pryzby, Michael Paquier)

Allow index commands using CONCURRENTLY to avoid waiting for the completion of other operations using CONCURRENTLY (Álvaro Herrera)

Improve the performance of COPY FROM in binary mode (Bharath Rupireddy, Amit Langote)

Preserve SQL standard syntax for SQL-defined functions in view definitions (Tom Lane)

Previously, calls to SQL-standard functions such as EXTRACT() were shown in plain function-call syntax. The original syntax is now preserved when displaying a view or rule.

Add the SQL-standard clause GRANTED BY to GRANT and REVOKE (Peter Eisentraut)

Add OR REPLACE option for CREATE TRIGGER (Takamichi Osumi)

This allows pre-existing triggers to be conditionally replaced.

Allow TRUNCATE to operate on foreign tables (Kazutaka Onishi, Kohei KaiGai)

The postgres_fdw module also now supports this.

Allow publications to be more easily added to and removed from a subscription (Japin Li)

The new syntax is ALTER SUBSCRIPTION ... ADD/DROP PUBLICATION. This avoids having to specify all publications to add/remove entries.

Add primary keys, unique constraints, and foreign keys to system catalogs (Peter Eisentraut)

These changes help GUI tools analyze the system catalogs. The existing unique indexes of catalogs now have associated UNIQUE or PRIMARY KEY constraints. Foreign key relationships are not actually stored or implemented as constraints, but can be obtained for display from the function pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys().

Allow CURRENT_ROLE every place CURRENT_USER is accepted (Peter Eisentraut)

Allow extensions and built-in data types to implement subscripting (Dmitry Dolgov)

Previously subscript handling was hard-coded into the server, so that subscripting could only be applied to array types. This change allows subscript notation to be used to extract or assign portions of a value of any type for which the concept makes sense.

Allow subscripting of JSONB (Dmitry Dolgov)

JSONB subscripting can be used to extract and assign to portions of JSONB documents.

Add support for multirange data types (Paul Jungwirth, Alexander Korotkov)

These are like range data types, but they allow the specification of multiple, ordered, non-overlapping ranges. An associated multirange type is automatically created for every range type.

Add support for the stemming of languages Armenian, Basque, Catalan, Hindi, Serbian, and Yiddish (Peter Eisentraut)

Allow tsearch data files to have unlimited line lengths (Tom Lane)

The previous limit was 4K bytes. Also remove function t_readline().

Add support for Infinity and -Infinity values in the numeric data type (Tom Lane)

Floating-point data types already supported these.

Add point operators <<| and |>> representing strictly above/below tests (Emre Hasegeli)

Previously these were called >^ and <^, but that naming is inconsistent with other geometric data types. The old names remain available, but may someday be removed.

Add operators to add and subtract LSN and numeric (byte) values (Fujii Masao)

Allow binary data transfer to be more forgiving of array and record OID mismatches (Tom Lane)

Create composite array types for system catalogs (Wenjing Zeng)

User-defined relations have long had composite types associated with them, and also array types over those composite types. System catalogs now do as well. This change also fixes an inconsistency that creating a user-defined table in single-user mode would fail to create a composite array type.

Allow SQL-language functions and procedures to use SQL-standard function bodies (Peter Eisentraut)

Previously only string-literal function bodies were supported. When writing a function or procedure in SQL-standard syntax, the body is parsed immediately and stored as a parse tree. This allows better tracking of function dependencies, and can have security benefits.

Allow procedures to have OUT parameters (Peter Eisentraut)

Allow some array functions to operate on a mix of compatible data types (Tom Lane)

The functions array_append(), array_prepend(), array_cat(), array_position(), array_positions(), array_remove(), array_replace(), and width_bucket() now take anycompatiblearray instead of anyarray arguments. This makes them less fussy about exact matches of argument types.

Add SQL-standard trim_array() function (Vik Fearing)

This could already be done with array slices, but less easily.

Add bytea equivalents of ltrim() and rtrim() (Joel Jacobson)

Support negative indexes in split_part() (Nikhil Benesch)

Negative values start from the last field and count backward.

Add string_to_table() function to split a string on delimiters (Pavel Stehule)

This is similar to the regexp_split_to_table() function.

Add unistr() function to allow Unicode characters to be specified as backslash-hex escapes in strings (Pavel Stehule)

This is similar to how Unicode can be specified in literal strings.

Add bit_xor() XOR aggregate function (Alexey Bashtanov)

Add function bit_count() to return the number of bits set in a bit or byte string (David Fetter)

Add date_bin() function (John Naylor)

This function “bins” input timestamps, grouping them into intervals of a uniform length aligned with a specified origin.

Allow make_timestamp()/make_timestamptz() to accept negative years (Peter Eisentraut)

Negative values are interpreted as BC years.

Add newer regular expression substring() syntax (Peter Eisentraut)

The new SQL-standard syntax is SUBSTRING(text SIMILAR pattern ESCAPE escapechar). The previous standard syntax was SUBSTRING(text FROM pattern FOR escapechar), which is still accepted by PostgreSQL.

Allow complemented character class escapes \D, \S, and \W within regular expression brackets (Tom Lane)

Add [[:word:]] as a regular expression character class, equivalent to \w (Tom Lane)

Allow more flexible data types for default values of lead() and lag() window functions (Vik Fearing)

Make non-zero floating-point values divided by infinity return zero (Kyotaro Horiguchi)

Previously such operations produced underflow errors.

Make floating-point division of NaN by zero return NaN (Tom Lane)

Previously this returned an error.

Cause exp() and power() for negative-infinity exponents to return zero (Tom Lane)

Previously they often returned underflow errors.

Improve the accuracy of geometric computations involving infinity (Tom Lane)

Mark built-in type coercion functions as leakproof where possible (Tom Lane)

This allows more use of functions that require type conversion in security-sensitive situations.

Change pg_describe_object(), pg_identify_object(), and pg_identify_object_as_address() to always report helpful error messages for non-existent objects (Michael Paquier)

Improve PL/pgSQL's expression and assignment parsing (Tom Lane)

This change allows assignment to array slices and nested record fields.

Allow plpgsql's RETURN QUERY to execute its query using parallelism (Tom Lane)

Improve performance of repeated CALLs within plpgsql procedures (Pavel Stehule, Tom Lane)

Add pipeline mode to libpq (Craig Ringer, Matthieu Garrigues, Álvaro Herrera)

This allows multiple queries to be sent, only waiting for completion when a specific synchronization message is sent.

Enhance libpq's target_session_attrs parameter options (Haribabu Kommi, Greg Nancarrow, Vignesh C, Tom Lane)

The new options are read-only, primary, standby, and prefer-standby.

Improve the output format of libpq's PQtrace() (Aya Iwata, Álvaro Herrera)

Allow an ECPG SQL identifier to be linked to a specific connection (Hayato Kuroda)

This is done via DECLARE ... STATEMENT.

Allow vacuumdb to skip index cleanup and truncation (Nathan Bossart)

The options are --no-index-cleanup and --no-truncate.

Allow pg_dump to dump only certain extensions (Guillaume Lelarge)

This is controlled by option --extension.

Add pgbench permute() function to randomly shuffle values (Fabien Coelho, Hironobu Suzuki, Dean Rasheed)

Include disconnection times in the reconnection overhead measured by pgbench with -C (Yugo Nagata)

Allow multiple verbose option specifications (-v) to increase the logging verbosity (Tom Lane)

This behavior is supported by pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and pg_restore.

Add command-line utility pg_amcheck to simplify running contrib/amcheck tests on many relations (Mark Dilger)

Add --no-instructions option to initdb (Magnus Hagander)

This suppresses the server startup instructions that are normally printed.

Stop pg_upgrade from creating analyze_new_cluster script (Magnus Hagander)

Instead, give comparable vacuumdb instructions.

Remove support for the postmaster -o option (Magnus Hagander)

This option was unnecessary since all passed options could already be specified directly.

Rename "Default Roles" to "Predefined Roles" (Bruce Momjian, Stephen Frost)

Add documentation for the factorial() function (Peter Eisentraut)

With the removal of the ! operator in this release, factorial() is the only built-in way to compute a factorial.

Add configure option --with-ssl={openssl} to allow future choice of the SSL library to use (Daniel Gustafsson, Michael Paquier)

The spelling --with-openssl is kept for compatibility.

Add support for abstract Unix-domain sockets (Peter Eisentraut)

This is currently supported on Linux and Windows.

Allow Windows to properly handle files larger than four gigabytes (Juan José Santamaría Flecha)

For example this allows COPY, WAL files, and relation segment files to be larger than four gigabytes.

Add server parameter debug_discard_caches to control cache flushing for test purposes (Craig Ringer)

Previously this behavior could only be set at compile time. To invoke it during initdb, use the new option --discard-caches.

Various improvements in valgrind error detection ability (Álvaro Herrera, Peter Geoghegan)

Add a test module for the regular expression package (Tom Lane)

Add support for LLVM version 12 (Andres Freund)

Change SHA1, SHA2, and MD5 hash computations to use the OpenSSL EVP API (Michael Paquier)

This is more modern and supports FIPS mode.

Remove separate build-time control over the choice of random number generator (Daniel Gustafsson)

This is now always determined by the choice of SSL library.

Add direct conversion routines between EUC_TW and Big5 encodings (Heikki Linnakangas)

Add collation version support for FreeBSD (Thomas Munro)

Add amadjustmembers to the index access method API (Tom Lane)

This allows an index access method to provide validity checking during creation of a new operator class or family.

Provide feature-test macros in libpq-fe.h for recently-added libpq features (Tom Lane, Álvaro Herrera)

Historically, applications have usually used compile-time checks of PG_VERSION_NUM to test whether a feature is available. But that's normally the server version, which might not be a good guide to libpq's version. libpq-fe.h now offers #define symbols denoting application-visible features added in v14; the intent is to keep adding symbols for such features in future versions.

Allow subscripting of hstore values (Tom Lane, Dmitry Dolgov)

Allow GiST/GIN pg_trgm indexes to do equality lookups (Julien Rouhaud)

This is similar to LIKE except no wildcards are honored.

Allow the cube data type to be transferred in binary mode (KaiGai Kohei)

Allow pgstattuple_approx() to report on TOAST tables (Peter Eisentraut)

Add contrib module pg_surgery which allows changes to row visibility (Ashutosh Sharma)

This is useful for correcting database corruption.

Add contrib module old_snapshot to report the XID/time mapping used by an active old_snapshot_threshold (Robert Haas)

Allow amcheck to also check heap pages (Mark Dilger)

Previously it only checked B-Tree index pages.

Allow pageinspect to inspect GiST indexes (Andrey Borodin, Heikki Linnakangas)

Change pageinspect block numbers to be bigints (Peter Eisentraut)

Mark btree_gist functions as parallel safe (Steven Winfield)