PostgreSQL 19's first release candidate ships, GA set for 19 November
RC1 lands with a native REPACK command that can rewrite a table online, plus parallel autovacuum and logical replication that no longer needs a restart to turn on.
PostgreSQL 19 RC1 was released on 15 October. Barring a delay, general availability follows on 19 November, with a second release candidate due on 12 November alongside that month’s regular update release.
The headline feature is a native REPACK command that replaces the old choice between VACUUM FULL and CLUSTER, and it supports an online CONCURRENTLY mode that rewrites a table without blocking reads and writes. PostgreSQL 19 also adds parallel autovacuum, and logical replication can now switch on automatically when wal_level is set to replica, without a server restart. RC1 itself is mostly bug fixes since Beta 4: several fixes to REPACK (CONCURRENTLY), to parallel autovacuum, and to that automatic logical replication enablement, plus a fix so COPY (query) TO ... (FORMAT json) uses the query’s actual column aliases as JSON keys.
Why it matters: REPACK (CONCURRENTLY) closes a real operational gap, reclaiming bloat on a live table has always meant either a blocking VACUUM FULL or a third-party tool like pg_repack. If you maintain Postgres in production, this is worth a test run against a staging copy before GA.
The caveat: RC1 is pre-release software. The PostgreSQL project asks people to test it via its Beta Testing page rather than run it in production.