The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has pushed back the release of PostgreSQL 19, the latest version of the popular open source database, and pulled an unusually large number of features from it. The launch, once slated for late September or early October, is now expected around November 19. Developers have dropped between eight and 10 significant features.
The main culprit, according to Peter Eisentraut, is the large language model code reviews developers have been running on the code. Eisentraut, vice president at EDB, a PostgreSQL support and consultancy firm, is also a leading PostgreSQL committer. In a blog post, he said some of the reverted features had significant architectural defects that would have been hard to fix "quickly and during beta."
The AI-assisted reviews also turned up a long tail of "relatively harmless issues involving various edge cases." In the past, developers might not have spotted those problems until long after launch, most likely through bug fixes in the five years that followed. Now they surface much sooner, and that creates a different problem.
"With LLM-assisted code review, these kinds of things can get found much faster, and then you're staring at a list of forty defect reports," Eisentraut said. "Even if each of them requires only a three-line fix on average, there is a fixed overhead to dealing with each of these, and then you run out of time."
Eisentraut said the review tools were not as useful when much of the new code was written. They became more effective in the months before the launch, and the reviews have been better understood since then. "The effective quality bar has been raised after the time the feature was written and committed," he said. "Unless the capabilities of LLM-assisted code review keep improving at the current rate, this situation should sort itself out for future development cycles."
He also pushed back on the idea that the reverts were caused by "vibe coding," the informal practice of generating code with AI and accepting it with little review. Eisentraut said the technique was not available when most of the new features were written.
PostgreSQL has a long history. Michael Stonebraker first proposed it in 1986. In 1994, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen replaced the POSTQUEL query language with SQL. A year later they made the database freely available and modifiable under a more permissive license, and renamed it PostgreSQL. It has since become the most popular database among professional developers, owing in part to the services the big three hyperscalers built on it and to the range of wire-compatible distributed systems available.
One of the features pulled from the release is support for SQL Property Graph Queries, known as SQL/PGQ. That capability became part of the SQL standard in 2023. It provides syntax for exploring relationships between nodes connected by edges. PostgreSQL's implementation was removed because of unresolved issues.
Tom Lane, another PostgreSQL contributor, had warned earlier about the feature. "At this point 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."
Despite the delay, Eisentraut says PostgreSQL 19 will still be "a great release." It includes REPACK CONCURRENTLY, which avoids the table-lock VACUUM FULL operation used to reclaim disk space. "And it will be very robust, after all the additional scrutiny," he said.
The features reverted from PostgreSQL 19 will likely land in PostgreSQL 20. Only a few months ago, developers expected PostgreSQL 20 to include no new features, just bug fixes. Now, Eisentraut said, it is likely to carry the features left over from the earlier release.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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