PostgreSQL 19 is almost here, and it makes a strong case for moving your Oracle workloads. Online maintenance, smarter vacuuming, planner control and smoother replication add up to a modern home for them. The only question is how to get there without rewriting years of PL/SQL.
What's new in PostgreSQL 19
PostgreSQL 19 is a practical, operations-focused release rather than a flashy one. The changes that matter most for a migration:
- Online table maintenance. The new REPACK command combines VACUUM FULL and CLUSTER, and its CONCURRENTLY option repacks without blocking reads and writes. That removes a common source of maintenance-window downtime.
- Parallel autovacuum. Autovacuum can use parallel workers on a table's indexes, and a new scoring system prioritises the tables that most need attention.
- Planner control. The pg_plan_advice extension stabilises and controls planner decisions, and pg_stash_advice applies that advice automatically per query. Teams used to Oracle hints will appreciate this.
- Smoother replication. Logical replication now replicates sequence values and can be enabled without a restart, and WAIT FOR LSN makes "read-your-writes" patterns on replicas easier. Both help low-downtime cutovers.
- Also in the box. GROUP BY ALL, ON CONFLICT DO SELECT, SNI support for per-hostname TLS certificates, and significantly faster foreign key checks.
The modern home for your Oracle workloads
PostgreSQL 19 gives you an open, steadily improving platform without Oracle licence fees. The obstacle is rarely the database itself. It is the thousands of Oracle-dialect queries, packages and procedures your applications depend on, and rewriting them is where timelines and budgets blow up.
Migrate with Liberatii
Liberatii Gateway is a database virtualisation platform that does real-time SQL translation, so PostgreSQL can run applications written for Oracle. Your application keeps speaking Oracle and PostgreSQL does the work underneath: no code changes, weeks not years. In practice:
- Assess first. An assessment extension for Azure Data Studio checks your database, or just files of SQL, against the gateway to see which statements are supported. You know the scope before you commit.
- Migrate in stages. The process runs through defined stages, from initialisation and schema migration through to workload replay, so fixes don't mean starting over.
- Prove it before cutover. Workload replay re-runs the original workload on both source and a target sandbox and verifies that results match. That is far better than hoping.
- Decouple app and database migration. Liberatii covers schema conversion, data migration, CDC and testing, keeping applications compatible without code changes. You can move the database now and modernise code at your own pace.
Getting to PostgreSQL 19
Run the assessment against your estate, stand up a PostgreSQL 19 sandbox, replay your real workload against it, and let the results decide. You get the PostgreSQL features above, and Liberatii takes the Oracle dependency out of the critical path.
Ready to see what your migration looks like? Get in touch for an assessment.
