PostgreSQL 16.0 is now available in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL 16.0 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate PostgreSQL 16.0 on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. You can deploy PostgreSQL 16.0 in the Preview Environment and have the same benefits of a fully managed database, making it simpler to set up, operate, and monitor databases. PostgreSQL 16.0 in the Preview Environment also includes support for logical decoding on read replicas, AWS libcrypto (AWS-LC), and over 80 PostgreSQL extensions such as pgvector, pg_tle, h3-pg, pg_cron, and rdkit.

The PostgreSQL community released PostgreSQL 16.0 on September 14, 2023 that enables logical replication from standbys and includes numerous performance improvements. PostgreSQL 16 also adds support for SQL/JSON constructors and identity functions, more query types that can use parallelism, introduction of SIMD CPU acceleration, and the ‘pg_stat_io’ view that provides statistics on I/O usage.

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment supports the latest generation of instance classes that are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. Amazon RDS database snapshots that are created in the Preview Environment can only be used to create or restore database instances within the Preview Environment. You can use the PostgreSQL dump and load functionality to import or export your databases from the Preview Environment.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region.