The new PostgreSQL 17 make dist

Let’s stipulate that PostgreSQL has grown significantly in popularity over the last 20 years. I don’t know by how much, but certainly at least one order of magnitude, probably two or more.

Upgrades between PostgreSQL major versions are famously annoying. You can’t just install the server binaries and restart, because the format of the data directory is incompatible. Why is that? Why can’t we just keep the data format compatible?

I wrote recently about the performance of PostgreSQL when compiled with different compilers and optimization levels. Another dimension in that evaluation is link-time optimization (LTO).

I have tested several times which compiler builds PostgreSQL the fastest. Now let’s look at with which compiler PostgreSQL runs the fastest.

PGConf.dev 2024 is over. What happened while no one was watching the source code?