Exploring PostgreSQL 17: A Developer’s Guide to New Features – Part 1 – PL/pgSQL | Database and Migration Insights
PostgreSQL 17 Beta was released on May 23, 2024, introducing a host of exciting new features anticipated to be part of the official PostgreSQL 17 release. In this blog series, we’ll delve into these features and explore how they can benefit database developers and migration engineers transitioning to the latest PostgreSQL version.
PL/pgSQL is the default procedural language preinstalled on PostgreSQL whenever a new database is created. It is a loadable procedural language that follows a block-based structure, making it easier to wrap functional logic in stored code as functions or procedures.
With PostgreSQL 17, we can now directly declare array types based on the primitive type of columns, or using row types from tables or user-defined types with %TYPE or %ROWTYPE.
Prior to PostgreSQL 17, if we needed to declare an array variable, we couldn’t use %TYPE or %ROWTYPE to refer to the underlying database type. Instead, we had to manually note the underlying data type and use it explicitly in the array declaration.
