PostgreSQL 19 now due on 19 November after late feature reverts

PostgreSQL 19 now due on 19 November after late feature reverts

15 October 2026: The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has set 19 November 2026 as the planned general availability date for PostgreSQL 19, a month or more later than the October release its roadmap page still shows. The first release candidate came out on 15 October, and a second will follow on 12 November, the same day as the next scheduled update release for every supported version.

Why there is a second release candidate

The RC 1 announcement gives the reason plainly. The 12 November update release for the supported branches will carry a large number of fixes, and the release team chose to put those fixes into PostgreSQL 19 before it ships rather than leave the new major version behind its older siblings on day one. Hence RC 2 on 12 November and general availability a week later, unless an issue turns up that needs another delay or candidate.

Since Beta 4, the project lists fixes to REPACK (CONCURRENTLY), to the pg_plan_advice planner hinting, to planner optimisations that depend on whether an expression can be NULL, to automatic enablement of logical replication when wal_level is replica, and to parallel autovacuum. One behaviour change is worth knowing for anyone exporting data: COPY (query) TO ... (FORMAT json) now uses the query's column names, aliases included, as JSON keys instead of the table's.

What was taken out

Peter Eisentraut, a long-standing committer, wrote on 9 October that about eight to ten significant features had been reverted from the PostgreSQL 19 branch after beta began, some of them late. He gives several causes. Some features had architectural defects that could not be fixed quickly during beta. Many others had a long tail of small edge-case bugs that LLM-assisted code review now finds quickly, leaving developers with "a list of like forty defect reports" and no time to work through them. Security fixes also occupied senior developers from April to August, which cut the usual beta testing. He says the code was written well before vibe coding was possible.

The best-known casualty is SQL/PGQ, the property graph query syntax added to the SQL standard in 2023. The Register reported its removal in September, quoting EDB's Tom Kincaid confirming it would not be in version 19. Eisentraut expects many of the reverted features to return, and says some are already queued for PostgreSQL 20.

What still ships

Eisentraut names REPACK CONCURRENTLY, logical replication of sequences and planner hinting with pg_plan_advice as headline items. REPACK CONCURRENTLY is the one database administrators have waited for: it reclaims space from bloated tables without the exclusive lock that VACUUM FULL holds for the whole rewrite.

Planning the upgrade

Moving to RC 1 or to the final release from an earlier major version needs a major-version method such as pg_upgrade or pg_dump and pg_restore. Teams on managed services should expect providers to add PostgreSQL 19 some time after 19 November rather than on the day. Anyone who had scheduled testing around an October release, or had planned work around graph queries in 19, now has a later date for the first and needs to wait for version 20 for the second. Our relational database category lists 35 products, among them PostgreSQL and EDB Postgres Advanced Server.

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Sources

• PostgreSQL Global Development Group: PostgreSQL 19 RC 1 Released, 15 October 2026
• Peter Eisentraut: The reverts will continue until morale improves, 9 October 2026
• PostgreSQL: Roadmap, upcoming minor releases (read 2026-10-18), 18 October 2026
• The Register: PostgreSQL 19 graph queries fail the would-you-ship-this test, 15 September 2026
• The Register: Postgres 19 delayed after AI reviewers find more bugs than humans can fix, 16 October 2026