Improving parallelism

PostgreSQL 9.6 was the first version supporting parallel queries in their most basic form. Of course, not all parts of the server are fully parallel yet. Therefore, it is an ongoing effort to speed up even more operations than before. PostgreSQL 10.0 is a major step towards even more parallelism as a lot more operations can now benefit from multi-core systems.

Indexes are a key area of improvement and will benefit greatly from additional features introduced into PostgreSQL 10.0. There is now full support for parallel b-tree scans as well as for bitmap scans. For now, only b-tree indexes can benefit from parallelism but this will most likely change in future releases too, to ensure that all types of indexes can enjoy an even better performance.

In addition to indexing, the PostgreSQL community has also worked hard to introduce support for parallel merge joins and to allow for more procedures to run in parallel. Some of the latest blog posts from the PostgreSQL community already suggest that many new features related to parallelism are in the pipeline for PostgreSQL 11.0.