The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has delayed PostgreSQL 19 and removed eight to 10 significant features from the release. General availability, previously planned for late September or early October, is now expected around November 19.
Peter Eisentraut, a leading PostgreSQL committer and vice president at support and consultancy firm EDB, said LLM-assisted code review may partly explain the unusually high number of reverts. Some features had significant architectural defects that would have been difficult to fix during beta, he wrote in a blog post.
Code reviews found more edge cases
AI-assisted reviews also found many relatively harmless edge cases. Eisentraut said developers might previously have discovered those issues after launch and addressed them through bug fixes over the following five years. Finding them before release left developers with more reports to assess and too little time to handle each one, even where a fix was small.
The review tools became more effective in the months before launch, after much of the PostgreSQL 19 work had been written and committed. Eisentraut said that raised the effective quality bar late in the cycle. He also said the reverts were not caused by “vibe coding,” which was not available when most of the features were written.
SQL graph queries move out of this release
One removed feature is support for SQL Property Graph Queries, or SQL/PGQ. Added to the SQL standard in 2023, it provides syntax for exploring relationships between nodes linked by edges. PostgreSQL's implementation was pulled over unresolved issues. Contributor Tom Lane warned that shipping it in version 19 could lead to bugs that could not be fixed until version 20.
Postgres was proposed by Michael Stonebraker in 1986. Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen replaced its POSTQUEL query language with SQL in 1994. In 1995, they made the database freely available and modifiable under a more permissive license and renamed it PostgreSQL.
Read nextGitHub makes AI Scan for pull requests generally availablePostgreSQL 19 is still set to include REPACK CONCURRENTLY, which avoids the table-locking VACUUM FULL operation used to reclaim disk space. Eisentraut said the reverted features will likely move to PostgreSQL 20. A few months ago, developers had expected that release to contain bug fixes but no new features.
The next scheduled milestone is PostgreSQL 19's expected general availability around November 19.
