Timescale/timescaledb: Release 2.17.0

Name: timescaledb

Owner: Timescale

Release: 2.17.0 (2024-10-08)

Released: 2024-10-08

License: NOASSERTION

Release Assets:

• timescaledb-postgresql-14-windows-amd64.zip

• timescaledb-postgresql-15-windows-amd64.zip

• timescaledb-postgresql-16-windows-amd64.zip

• timescaledb-postgresql-17-windows-amd64.zip

This release adds support for PostgreSQL 17, significantly improves the performance of continuous aggregate refreshes, and contains performance improvements for analytical queries and delete operations over compressed hypertables. We recommend that you upgrade at the next available opportunity.

Highlighted features in TimescaleDB v2.17.0

• Full PostgreSQL 17 support for all existing features. TimescaleDB v2.17 is available for PostgreSQL 14, 15, 16, and 17.

• Significant performance improvements for continuous aggregate policies: Continuous aggregate refresh is now using merge instead of deleting old materialized data and re-inserting. This update can decrease dramatically the amount of data that must be written on the continuous aggregate in the presence of a small number of changes, reduce the i/o cost of refreshing a continuous aggregate, and generate fewer Write-Ahead Logs (WAL). Overall, continuous aggregate policies will be more lightweight, use less system resources, and complete faster.

• Increased performance for real-time analytical queries over compressed hypertables: We are excited to introduce additional Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) vectorization optimization to our engine by supporting vectorized execution for queries that group by using the segment_by column(s) and aggregate using the basic aggregate functions (sum, count, avg, min, max). Stay tuned for more to come in follow-up releases! Support for grouping on additional columns, filtered aggregation, vectorized expressions, and time_bucket is coming soon.

• Improved performance of deletes on compressed hypertables when a large amount of data is affected. This improvement speeds up operations that delete whole segments by skipping the decompression step. It is enabled for all deletes that filter by the segment_by column(s).

PostgreSQL 14 deprecation announcement

We will continue supporting PostgreSQL 14 until April 2025. Closer to that time, we will announce the specific version of TimescaleDB in which PostgreSQL 14 support will not be included going forward.

Features

• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/6882: Allow delete of full segments on compressed chunks without decompression.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7033: Use merge statement on continuous aggregates refresh.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7126: Add functions to show the compression information.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7147: Vectorize partial aggregation for sum(int4) with grouping on segment by columns.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7204: Track additional extensions in telemetry.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7207: Refactor the decompress_batches_scan functions for easier maintenance.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7209: Add a function to drop the osm chunk.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7275: Add support for the returning clause for merge.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7200: Vectorize common aggregate functions like min, max, sum, avg, stddev, variance for compressed columns of arithmetic types, when there is grouping on segment by columns or no grouping.

Bug fixes

• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7187: Fix the string literal length for the compressed_data_info function.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7191: Fix creating default indexes on chunks when migrating the data.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7195: Fix the segment by and order by checks when dropping a column from a compressed hypertable.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7201: Use the generic extension description when building apt and rpm loader packages.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7227: Add an index to the compression_chunk_size catalog table.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7229: Fix the foreign key constraints where the index and the constraint column order are different.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7230: Do not propagate the foreign key constraints to the osm chunk.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7234: Release the cache after accessing the cache entry.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7258: Force English in the pg_config command executed by cmake to avoid the unexpected building errors.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7270: Fix the memory leak in compressed DML batch filtering.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7286: Fix the index column check while searching for the index.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7290: Add check for null offset for continuous aggregates built on top of continuous aggregates.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7301: Make foreign key behavior for hypertables consistent.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7318: Fix chunk skipping range filtering.
• https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/pull/7320: Set the license specific extension comment in the install script.

Thanks

• @MiguelTubio for reporting and fixing the Windows build error.
• @posuch for reporting the misleading extension description in the generic loader packages.
• @snyrkill for discovering and reporting the issue with continuous aggregates built on top of continuous aggregates.