Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL major version 16 (16.1). PostgreSQL 16 adds support for SQL/JSON constructors and identity functions, more query types that can use parallelism, and the ‘pg_stat_io’ view that provides statistics on I/O usage. Please refer to the PostgreSQL community announcement for more details about the release. This release includes new features for Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL version 4.0 such as support for the Full Text Search CONTAINS function. Please refer to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL updates for more information.

To use the new version, create a new Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible database instance with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console. You can also upgrade existing database instances. Please review the Aurora documentation to learn more about upgrading. PostgreSQL 16 is available in all AWS Regions except China regions, but including AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Refer to the Aurora version policy to help you to decide how often to upgrade and how to plan your upgrade process.

Amazon Aurora is designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. It provides built-in security, continuous backups, serverless compute, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services. To get started with Amazon Aurora, take a look at our getting started page.