PostgreSQL 17 support

[liudonghua123]

I see postgresql 17 was released with a lot of improvements and bugfix.

So is there any plan or roadmap for supporting this major updates.

[samwillis]

Yes, we will move to PG v17, but not quite yet.

We want to ensure there is a clean upgrade path first. The file storage for Postgres is not compatible between major versions, you normally have to move your data from one database to another, or do an in-place update of the database in order to move between them. The intention is to have, at a minimum, a WASM build of pg_dump before we move to PG v17, so that users can easily export a database and import it into a new PG v17 based PGlite.

There is also an open question as to if we want to have multiple versions of PGlite, one for each of the currently supported Postgres versions. There are compelling arguments for it, particularly with the local development, unit and CI testing use case where you would want to test against something representative of the major Postgres versions. However, we are a small team and maintaining multiple versions will eat away at time available for further research and development. I suspect we will one day do this, but we need to be much further down the development path for things like libpglite (a native library build), and have explored other development routes, such as multi connection support.