Eight to ten key features have been deferred to PostgreSQL 20. According to committer Peter Eisentraut, LLMs have raised the bar for quality following the writing of the code, regardless of the coding ‘vibe’.
Until the end of September or early October, version 19 of PostgreSQL is expected to be released only around November 19, and without eight to ten significant features, removed from the cycle and returned to PostgreSQL 20. Among them is the support of requests on property graphs (SQL/PGQ), which entered the SQL standard in 2023, whose implementation had unresolved problems.
Forty fault ratios at a time
For Peter Eissraut, a major contributor to the project and vice-president at EDB, this delay is due in part to the code review assisted by LLM. Some features hid architecture defects that could not be quickly corrected during the beta; But the tools have mostly led to a long list of low-risk limit cases, which would have been discovered and corrected over the five years following release. Even if each patch only requires a few lines, their processing has a fixed cost, and the time is running out. The level of requirement was somewhat raised after the code was written, as these tools became much more effective in the months prior to publication.
Eisseraut avoids any responsibility for vibe coding, which did not yet exist when most of these features were written, and believes that the situation will be resolved in future cycles. PostgreSQL 19 will keep in particular REPACK CONCURRENTLY, which recovers disk space without locking the table like VACUUM FULL. PostgreSQL 20, which was to be limited to corrections, will host the postponed features.
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