What’s New in PostgreSQL 10? Key Features and Improvements Explained

PostgreSQL 10 Release Overview

After a six‑month beta period, PostgreSQL 10 was officially released. The release focuses on scalability, security, and performance enhancements.

Key Technical Features

Logical replication – a publish/subscribe mechanism that allows individual tables or subsets of data to be replicated from a publisher to one or more subscribers without requiring physical streaming of the whole database.

Declarative table partitioning – native syntax for defining partitioned tables (e.g., CREATE TABLE ... PARTITION BY RANGE (col)) and for attaching/detaching partitions, simplifying management compared with earlier inheritance‑based approaches.

Improved query concurrency – the planner and executor have been tuned to make better use of multi‑core CPUs, allowing more concurrent queries to run with reduced lock contention.

Performance improvements – various internal optimizations (e.g., faster index builds, reduced WAL generation) that yield faster query execution across typical OLTP and OLAP workloads.

SCRAM‑SHA‑256 authentication – support for the Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism, providing stronger password hashing than the previous MD5 method.

Enhanced monitoring and control – new views and functions (e.g., pg_stat_progress_create_index) give administrators finer‑grained insight into long‑running operations and system activity.

For the complete list of changes and detailed release notes, see the official documentation: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/release-10.html?x=1