Top New Features in PostgreSQL 13/Postgres 12 database

Postgres 13 new features

PostgreSQL 13 has many improvements and new features.

• B-Tree index de-duplication, which will save space and improve performance
• Parallelized vacuuming of indexes - PARALLEL option has been added
• Incremental sorting - will use existing sorted data. New parameter enable_incremental_sort
• In PostgreSQL13, explain command can track wal_usage
• Significant improvements in indexing and lookup system, those benefit databases
• Improved performance of queries that use aggregates or partitioned tables
• PostgreSQL 13 has improvements in partition pruning
• Trusted extensions - can install extensions without superuser privileges
• New tool pg_verifybackup to verify backups
• Renamed parameter wal_keep_segments to wal_keep_size
• Can forcefully drop the database, even when sessions are connected
• DROP DATABASE db33 with (force);
• dropdb ... -f

New System Views in Postgres 13:

• pg_stat_progress_basebackup
• pg_stat_progress_analyze

New Parameters in PostgreSQL 13:

• autovacuum_vacuum_insert_threshold
• autovacuum_vacuum_insert_scale_factor
• enable_incremental_sort
• maintenance_io_concurrency
• max_parallel_maintenance_workers
• min_parallel_index_scan_size

Postgres 12 new features

• New datatype JSONPATH was introduced, for binary representation of the parsed SQL/JSON path expression.
  
• PostgreSQL 12 provides several functions to use JSONPath to query your JSONB data.
• PostgreSQL 12 introduced the ability to add partitions without the need to take an exclusive lock on the parent table and changed the planning algorithm.

Related PostgreSQL Articles:  pg_restore PostgreSQL tool    New Features in PostgreSQL 14 database