PostgreSQL 16: Where enhanced security meets high performance

PostgreSQL is an open-source object-relational database platform with a track record of over 25 years of ongoing development. Its reputation is solid for its reliability, extensive features, and high performance. PostgreSQL 16 enhances its performance through significant upgrades in query parallelism, bulk data loading, and logical replication.

This release has many features for developers and administrators, including more SQL/JSON syntax, new monitoring stats for your workloads, and greater flexibility in defining access control rules for managing policies across large fleets.

“As relational database patterns evolve, PostgreSQL continues to make performance gains in searching and managing data at scale,” said Dave Page, a PostgreSQL Core Team member. “PostgreSQL 16 gives users more methods to scale up and scale out their workloads while giving them new ways to gain insights and optimize how they manage their data.”

PostgreSQL 16 access control and security

PostgreSQL 16 provides finer-grained options for access control and enhances other security features. The release improves the management of pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf files, including allowing regular expression matching for user and database names and including directives for external configuration files.

This release adds several security-oriented client connection parameters, including require_auth, which allows clients to specify which authentication parameters they are willing to accept from a server, and sslrootcert="system", which indicates that PostgreSQL should use the trusted certificate authority (CA) store provided by the client’s operating system.

Additionally, the release adds support for Kerberos credential delegation, allowing extensions such as postgres_fdw and dblink to use authenticated credentials to connect to trusted services.

Download PostgreSQL 16

PostgreSQL 16 can be downloaded in pre-packaged or installer formats for different operating systems. Additionally, a source code archive is available for those who prefer to compile the database system themselves.