Remove obsolete heap_formtuple / heap_modifytuple / heap_deformtuple functions (Peter Geoghegan)

Add macros to make AllocSetContextCreate() calls simpler and safer (Tom Lane) Writing out the individual sizing parameters for a memory context is now deprecated in favor of using one of the new macros ALLOCSET_DEFAULT_SIZES , ALLOCSET_SMALL_SIZES , or ALLOCSET_START_SMALL_SIZES .  Existing code continues to work, however. 

Unconditionally use static inline functions in header files (Andres Freund) This may result in warnings and/or wasted code space with very old compilers, but the notational improvement seems worth it. 

Improve TAP testing infrastructure (Michael Paquier, Craig Ringer, Álvaro Herrera, Stephen Frost) Notably, it is now possible to test recovery scenarios using this infrastructure. 

Make trace_lwlocks identify individual locks by name (Robert Haas)

Improve psql's tab-completion code infrastructure (Thomas Munro, Michael Paquier) Tab-completion rules are now considerably easier to write, and more compact. 

Nail the pg_shseclabel system catalog into cache, so that it is available for access during connection authentication (Adam Brightwell) The core code does not use this catalog for authentication, but extensions might wish to consult it. 

Restructure index access method API to hide most of it at the C level (Alexander Korotkov, Andrew Gierth) This change modernizes the index AM API to look more like the designs we have adopted for foreign data wrappers and tablesample handlers.  This simplifies the C code and makes it much more practical to define index access methods in installable extensions.  A consequence is that most of the columns of the pg_am system catalog have disappeared.  New inspection functions have been added to allow SQL queries to determine index AM properties that used to be discoverable from pg_am . 

Add pg_init_privs system catalog to hold original privileges of initdb-created and extension-created objects (Stephen Frost) This infrastructure allows pg_dump to dump changes that an installation may have made in privileges attached to system objects.  Formerly, such changes would be lost in a dump and reload, but now they are preserved. 

Change the way that extensions allocate custom LWLocks (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas) The RequestAddinLWLocks() function is removed, and replaced by RequestNamedLWLockTranche() .  This allows better identification of custom LWLocks , and is less error-prone. 

Improve the isolation tester to allow multiple sessions to wait concurrently, allowing testing of deadlock scenarios (Robert Haas)

Introduce extensible node types (KaiGai Kohei) This change allows FDWs or custom scan providers to store data in a plan tree in a more convenient format than was previously possible. 

Make the planner deal with post-scan/join query steps by generating and comparing Paths , replacing a lot of ad-hoc logic (Tom Lane) This change provides only marginal user-visible improvements today, but it enables future work on a lot of upper-planner improvements that were impractical to tackle using the old code structure. 

Support partial aggregation (David Rowley, Simon Riggs) This change allows the computation of an aggregate function to be split into separate parts, for example so that parallel worker processes can cooperate on computing an aggregate.  In future it might allow aggregation across local and remote data to occur partially on the remote end. 

Add a generic command progress reporting facility (Vinayak Pokale, Rahila Syed, Amit Langote, Robert Haas)

Separate out psql's flex lexer to make it usable by other client programs (Tom Lane, Kyotaro Horiguchi) This eliminates code duplication for programs that need to be able to parse SQL commands well enough to identify command boundaries.  Doing that in full generality is more painful than one could wish, and up to now only psql has really gotten it right among our supported client programs.  A new source-code subdirectory src/fe_utils/ has been created to hold this and other code that is shared across our client programs.  Formerly such sharing was accomplished by symbolic linking or copying source files at build time, which was ugly and required duplicate compilation. 

Introduce WaitEventSet API to allow efficient waiting for event sets that usually do not change from one wait to the next (Andres Freund, Amit Kapila)

Add a generic interface for writing WAL records (Alexander Korotkov, Petr Jelínek, Markus Nullmeier) This change allows extensions to write WAL records for changes to pages using a standard layout.  The problem of needing to replay WAL without access to the extension is solved by having generic replay code.  This allows extensions to implement, for example, index access methods and have WAL support for them. 

Support generic WAL messages for logical decoding (Petr Jelínek, Andres Freund) This feature allows extensions to insert data into the WAL stream that can be read by logical-decoding plugins, but is not connected to physical data restoration. 

Allow SP-GiST operator classes to store an arbitrary "traversal value" while descending the index (Alexander Lebedev, Teodor Sigaev) This is somewhat like the "reconstructed value", but it could be any arbitrary chunk of data, not necessarily of the same data type as the indexed column. 

Introduce a LOG_SERVER_ONLY message level for ereport() (David Steele) This level acts like LOG except that the message is never sent to the client.  It is meant for use in auditing and similar applications. 

Provide a Makefile target to build all generated headers (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane) submake-generated-headers can now be invoked to ensure that generated backend header files are up-to-date.  This is useful in subdirectories that might be built "standalone".