PostgreSQL 12 Beta 2 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the beta version of PostgreSQL 12 on Amazon RDS.

PostgreSQL 12 Beta 2 can now be deployed for development and testing in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment without the hassle of installing, provisioning, and managing the database. The PostgreSQL community released PostgreSQL 12 Beta 2 on June 20, 2019. PostgreSQL 12 includes improved functionality, performance, management of indexing, improved partitioning capabilities, JSON path queries per SQL/JSON specifications, nondeterministic collations which support case-insensitive and accent-insensitive comparisons for ICU provided collations, most common-value statistics for improved query plans, creation of generated columns that computes values with an expression, pluggable table storage interface, ability to enable/disable page checksums, and many more.

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments on the latest generation of instance classes (currently T2, M4, and R4), and can be encrypted at rest using KMS keys. 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. Customers can use standard PostgreSQL dump and load functionality to import or export their 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.

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment Forum is available for customers and the Amazon RDS team to share information and concerns about both the candidate versions of PostgreSQL 12 and the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment.

