PostgreSQL 19 Beta 4 Reverts Six Features, Including Property Graph Queries, as Project Targets an October Release
PostgreSQL 19 Beta 4, released September 24, reverts SQL/PGQ graph queries, online checksum toggling, and four other features as the project targets an October general availability.
Overview
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group released the fourth beta of PostgreSQL 19 on September 24, 2026, pulling six previously announced features out of the release just weeks before its planned general availability, according to the project’s announcement. The reverted list includes SQL/PGQ property graph query support, online enabling and disabling of data checksums, and the ability to reorganize partitioned tables in place with ALTER TABLE ... MERGE PARTITIONS and SPLIT PARTITIONS — features that were headline additions when the beta cycle opened in June.
As previously reported, PostgreSQL 19 Beta 1 introduced SQL/PGQ, the SQL-standard syntax for property graph queries, the online checksum toggle, and the partition merge/split commands when it shipped on June 4, 2026, adding support for SQL/PGQ and online enabling and disabling of data checksums among the release’s original feature set, according to the Beta 1 announcement. Beta 4 now walks those back, on top of two additional reverts.
What We Know
Six features reverted since Beta 3
The Beta 4 announcement lists the changes under a “Changes Since Beta 3” heading. The project says it will “[r]evert SQL/PGQ (property graph query) support,” “[r]evert online enabling and disabling of data checksums,” and “[r]evert support for temporal updates/deletes provided by the FOR PORTION OF clause,” according to the announcement. It will also “[r]evert ALTER TABLE ... MERGE PARTITIONS and ALTER TABLE ... SPLIT PARTITIONS,” the announcement states.
Two further changes round out the list: the project will “[r]emove the pg_get_role_ddl(), pg_get_tablespace_ddl(), and pg_get_database_ddl() functions,” and will “[r]evert a change that forced LC_COLLATE to C in the postmaster process,” per the announcement.
The FOR PORTION OF temporal clause had survived the previous beta relatively intact — PostgreSQL shipped Beta 3 on August 13 with only “fixes for the new FOR PORTION OF temporal table syntax,” rather than a revert, according to the Beta 3 announcement. Beta 3 had already reverted a different feature, the GROUP BY ALL syntax, so Beta 4 extends a pattern of scaling back the release rather than introducing it.
The rest of Beta 4 is a fix-up release
Outside the six reverts, Beta 4 is otherwise focused on bug fixes to features still on track for the release. The announcement describes “[s]everal fixes for the new REPACK command, including crashes, incorrect behavior with invalid indexes and materialized views, and several permission and error-reporting corrections,” and “[s]everal fixes for the new WAIT FOR command, including a deadlock and clearer reporting of isolation-level errors,” according to the project.
Other fixes in this beta include validation of an empty FOREIGN_JOIN list in the pg_plan_advice extension, several corrections to CREATE PUBLICATION ... EXCEPT, a fix to logical replication’s initial table synchronization when replicating from an older PostgreSQL version to v19, and “[s]everal fixes for the new autovacuum scoring system, including for TOAST tables,” the announcement says. The release also fixes a crash when accessing a partition whose concurrent detach did not complete, corrects the COPY FROM SIMD optimization, and clarifies that failed transactions are reported separately when using pgbench --continue-on-error.
Release candidate targeted for early October
The project says “[t]he next planned release of PostgreSQL 19 is the release candidate, which should occur in early October,” and that “[b]ased on testing and evaluation, this means that the PostgreSQL 19 GA may also occur in October,” according to the announcement. That timeline is consistent with the general September/October 2026 window the project set when Beta 1 shipped in June.
The project continues to caution that beta software is not final. “As this is a Beta, minor changes to database behaviors, feature details, and APIs are still possible,” the announcement states, and it asks users to test the release against their own workloads before general availability.
What We Don’t Know
The announcement does not explain why SQL/PGQ, the online checksum toggle, the partition merge/split commands, or the other reverted items were pulled — it lists the reverts without giving a rationale for each. It also does not say whether any of the six reverted features are expected to return in a future PostgreSQL release, or whether they will need to go through the project’s feature-freeze process again from the start. The project has not yet set a firm release-candidate date beyond “early October.”