Difference between Postgres Pro and PostgreSQL

Postgres Pro is the most actual PostgreSQL version with some additional patches applied and extensions added. Mostly, these are patches already accepted by the PostgreSQL community and committed into PostgreSQL. Also there some patches and extensions developed by Postgres Professional. Users of Postgres Pro thus have early access to some important features and fixes.

Currently the difference between Postgres Pro and PostgreSQL is the following:

  • Performance improvement on multicore systems (buffer manager and locks optimization).
  • Full text search improvements: phrase search, hunspell morphology, some dictionaries are bundled with distribution and can be enabled by a single SQL statement, shared_ispell allowing to store dictionaries in shared memory.
  • Covering indexes.
  • libicu support on all platforms, providing platform-independent sort for various locales.
  • pg_trgm module supporting fuzzy string comparison and substring search.
  • Improved pageinspect module provides access to internal data storage structure.
  • sr_plan module allows to save and restore query plans.
  • dump_stat module allowing to save and restore database statistics when dumping/restoring the database.
  • jsquery module provides a specific language for effective index-supported querying of JSONB data.

Postgres Pro releases are following the PostgreSQL releases, though sometimes occur more frequently. The Postgres Pro versioning scheme is based on the PostgreSQL one and has an additional decimal place.