Last week the first official alpha version of PostgreSQL 9.5 was released. Whilst the stable release is still 2-3 months away, now is a good time to review what is upcoming, and which changes and improvements we can expect.

Here is an overview of the most important changes for monitoring tools:

• pg_stat_statements gets new columns min_time, max_time, mean_time & stddev_time - making it much easier to identify outliers in the query statistics
• New pg_stat_ssl view that shows active SSL connections and the ciphers used by them
• New WAL configuration tune-ables min_wal_size and max_wal_size replace the old checkpoint_segments, telling the server how many WAL files to keep in your pg_xlog directory
• log_autovacuum_min_duration can now be set per table/index to help you debug slow auto VACUUMing

For other changes you can read the official What's new in PostgreSQL 9.5 wiki page as well as the well-known blog series Waiting for 9.5.

New with pganalyze: Stability Improvements

To start, unfortunately we suffered from a few minor outages in the last few weeks, related to our processing backend, mostly affecting customers on our Lite plans.

We have invested resources to improve stability throughout the system, as well as make sure that our system enforces appropriate rate limits to avoid run-off scripts impacting the backend.

We've also recently released the new 0.8 version of the pganalyze-collector that submits compressed statistics snapshots to reduce bandwidth requirements. If you run an older version we recommend you upgrade by re-running the installation instructions.

New with pganalyze: Weekly Reports 2.0

Today we're launching a major overhaul of our weekly reports you receive on databases you own or collaborate with.

With the new format we’re focusing on showing you the Top 10 slowest queries, as well as indicators for an upwards or downwards trend in average runtime.

Our goal is that this helps you identify new problematic queries faster, or identify an old query that suddenly started being slow.

We plan to make more improvements to this weekly report format and incorporate other trending data, e.g. tables that have seen significant growth, or structural changes to the database.

If you are an existing pganalyze customer you will receive these new reports starting today :)

And now, have fun testing 9.5 & we hope you enjoy the new reports!