PostgreSQL 16 Beta 1 is now available in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 16 Beta 1 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate the pre-release of PostgreSQL 16 on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. You can deploy PostgreSQL 16 Beta 1 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment that has the benefits of a fully managed database, making it simpler to set up, operate, and monitor databases.

The PostgreSQL community released PostgreSQL 16 Beta 1 on May 25, 2023. PostgreSQL 16 includes enhancements to logical replication, including enabling logical replication from standbys and numerous performance improvements. PostgreSQL 16 also adds support for SQL/JSON constructors and identity functions, more query types that can use parallelism, introduction of using SIMD CPU acceleration, and the ‘pg_stat_io’ view that provides statistics on I/O usage. Please refer to the PostgreSQL community announcement for more details about the release.

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments on the latest generation of instance classes. Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances 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.