2. Difference between Postgres Pro Standard and PostgreSQL #
Postgres Pro provides the most actual PostgreSQL version with some additional patches applied and extensions added. It includes new features developed by Postgres Professional, as well as third-party patches already accepted by the PostgreSQL community for the upcoming PostgreSQL versions. Postgres Pro Standard users thus have early access to important features and fixes.
Note
Postgres Pro Standard is provided under the following license: https://postgrespro.com/products/postgrespro/eula. Make sure to review the license terms before downloading Postgres Pro Standard.
Postgres Pro Standard provides the following enhancements over PostgreSQL:
- Improved deadlock detection mechanism that does not cause performance degradation.
- Better planning speed and accuracy for various query types.
- Reduced memory consumption in complex queries that involve multiple tables.
- Displaying planning time in the output of the auto_explain module.
NUL byte replacement with the specified ASCII code while loading data using the
COPY FROMcommand. (See nul_byte_replacement_on_import parameter description.)'\u0000'character replacement with the specified unicode character when calling a function processing JSONB (See unicode_nul_character_replacement_in_jsonb parameter description.)- PTRACK implementation, which enables pg_probackup to track page changes on the fly when creating incremental backups.
- Support for reading
pg_controlof previous PostgreSQL/Postgres Pro major versions by pgpro_controldata. - Cluster compatibility verification, which allows you to determine whether the current Postgres Pro version is compatible with the specified cluster and identify all parameters that can affect the compatibility without starting the cluster. (See pgpro_controldata and
-Zoption of postgres.) - Changing the
restore_commandparameter without restarting the server. - Unified structure of binary installation packages across all Linux distributions, which facilitates migration between them and allows installing PostgreSQL-based products side by side, without any conflicts. (See Chapter 16.)
- Operation log, which stores information about system events such as an upgrade, execution of pg_resetwal and so on, which is highly useful for vendor's technical support. Recording to the operation log is only done at the system level, and SQL functions are used to read it. (See Section 9.27.11.)
- Advanced authentication policies that provide effective password management and access control. (See CREATE PROFILE and ALTER ROLE).
- Built-in data security mechanisms that enable sanitizing an object by filling it with zeroes before deletion. Zeroing can be done before purging files in external memory and removing outdated row versions (page vacuum), freeing RAM, and deleting or overwriting WAL files. (Certified edition only.)
- Statistics about vacuuming tables, indexes and databases in system views.
- Predefined roles, which allow creating tablespaces and managing profiles without superuser rights.
- Getting information on crashes of a backend, which is enabled by the crash_info configuration parameter and controlled by more of them.
- Optimized memory consumption during selectivity estimation for each array element.
Postgres Pro Standard also includes the following additional modules and applications:
- aqo extension for adaptive query optimization.
- dump_stat module that allows to save and restore database statistics when dumping/restoring the database.
- fasttrun module that provides transaction-unsafe function to truncate temporary tables without growing
pg_classsize. - fulleq module that provides additional equivalence operator for compatibility with Microsoft SQL Server.
- hunspell-dict module that provides dictionaries for several languages.
- hypopg extension, which provides support for hypothetical indexes in Postgres Pro.
- jsquery module that provides a specific language for effective index-supported querying of JSONB data.
- mamonsu monitoring service, which is implemented as a Zabbix agent.
- mchar module that provides additional data type for compatibility with Microsoft SQL Server.
- online_analyze module that provides a set of changes to immediately update statistics after
INSERT,UPDATE,DELETEorSELECT INTOoperations applied for affected tables. - pgbadger application that rapidly analyzes Postgres Pro logs, producing detailed reports and graphs.
- pgbouncer connection pooler.
- pg_integrity_check module that calculates and validates checksums for controlled files. (Certified edition only.)
- pg_pathman module that provides optimized partitioning mechanism and functions to manage partitions. Starting from Postgres Pro 12, using pg_pathman is not recommended. Use vanilla declarative partitioning instead, as described in Section 5.11.
- pg_proaudit extension that enables detailed logging of various security events.
- pg_probackup, a backup and recovery manager.
- pgpro_controldata, an application to display control information of a PostgreSQL/Postgres Pro database cluster and compatibility information for a cluster and/or server.
- pgpro_pwr extension that enables you to generate workload reports, which help to discover most resource-intensive activities in your database.
- pgpro_stats extension that tracks execution statistics of SQL statements, calculates wait event statistics and provides other useful metrics that are not collected elsewhere in PostgreSQL. It also provides tracing of application sessions and can create views that emulate other statistic collecting extensions.
- pg_query_state module that enables you to get the current state of query execution for a backend.
- pg_repack utility for reorganizing tables.
- pg_tsparser module, which is an alternative text search parser.
- pg_variables module that provides functions for working with variables of various types. To facilitate migration of Oracle code that processes collections, these functions include those that allow working with general collection variables, whose elements can be accessed by a key that can have either integer or text type, and those that provide iterator functionality for any collections.
- pgvector extension that provides vector similarity search for Postgres Pro.
- pg_wait_sampling extension for sampling-based statistics of wait events. With this extension, you can get an insight into the server activity, including the current wait events for all processes and background workers.
- plantuner module that provides hints for the planner to disable or enable indexes for query execution.
- rum module that provides RUM index based on GIN.
- shared_ispell module that enables storing dictionaries in shared memory.
To provide the advanced functionalities and features, Postgres Pro imposes more stringent requirements on operating systems supported.
Important
Postgres Pro Standard runs on all major Linux operating systems. Any reference to Windows or another operating system different from Linux in this documentation is inapplicable for Postgres Pro.
Postgres Pro Standard releases follow PostgreSQL releases, though sometimes occur more frequently. The Postgres Pro Standard versioning scheme is based on the PostgreSQL one and has an additional decimal place.