[OSM-dev] PostgreSQL 9.6 coming out

[Paul Norman]

PostgreSQL 9.6 RC1 has been released, and depending on bugs found, 9.6 
should be released soon. There are a few changes which should help 
anyone running PostGIS workloads with OSM data.

 From the release notes[1] I've extracted some relevant stuff for this list

Big new stuff:

- Parallel queries. A single query can now do more work in parallel. 
This won't help production tile rendering for various reasons but could 
help analysis where the bottleneck is not geometry computations and 
perhaps rendering latency on unloaded servers.

- Performance improvements, particularly with scalability

- Replication improvements

- GIN index builds can use more than 1 GB maintenance_work_mem. 
osm2pgsql slim tables and others schemas have large GIN tables

- GIN indexes can have their pending list manually cleaned up with 
gin_clean_pending_list. This could allow fastupdate with osm2pgsql GIN 
indexes

Other new stuff:

- Better statistics for columns with many nulls

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/release-9-6.html