Release 2.17.0

This release adds support for PostgreSQL 17, significantly improves the
performance of continuous aggregate refreshes,
and contains performance improvements for analytical queries and delete
operations over compressed hypertables.
We recommend that you upgrade at the next available opportunity.

**Highlighted features in TimescaleDB v2.17.0**

* Full PostgreSQL 17 support for all existing features. TimescaleDB
v2.17 is available for PostgreSQL 14, 15, 16, and 17.

* Significant performance improvements for continuous aggregate
policies: continuous aggregate refresh is now using
`merge` instead of deleting old materialized data and re-inserting.

This update can decrease dramatically the amount of data that must be
written on the continuous aggregate in the
presence of a small number of changes, reduce the `i/o` cost of
refreshing a continuous aggregate, and generate fewer
  Write-Ahead Logs (`WAL`).
Overall, continuous aggregate policies will be more lightweight, use
less system resources, and complete faster.

* Increased performance for real-time analytical queries over compressed
hypertables:
we are excited to introduce additional Single Instruction, Multiple Data
(`SIMD`) vectorization optimization to our
engine by supporting vectorized execution for queries that group by
using the `segment_by` column(s) and
aggregate using the basic aggregate functions (`sum`, `count`, `avg`,
`min`, `max`).

Stay tuned for more to come in follow-up releases! Support for grouping
on additional columns, filtered aggregation,
  vectorized expressions, and `time_bucket` is coming soon.

* Improved performance of deletes on compressed hypertables when a large
amount of data is affected.

This improvement speeds up operations that delete whole segments by
skipping the decompression step.
It is enabled for all deletes that filter by the `segment_by` column(s).

**PostgreSQL 14 deprecation announcement**

We will continue supporting PostgreSQL 14 until April 2025. Closer to
that time, we will announce the specific
version of TimescaleDB in which PostgreSQL 14 support will not be
included going forward.

**Features**
* timescale#6882: Allow delete of full segments on compressed chunks without
decompression.
* timescale#7033: Use `merge` statement on continuous aggregates refresh.
* timescale#7126: Add functions to show the compression information.
* timescale#7147: Vectorize partial aggregation for `sum(int4)` with grouping on
`segment by` columns.
* timescale#7204: Track additional extensions in telemetry.
* timescale#7207: Refactor the `decompress_batches_scan` functions for easier
maintenance.
* timescale#7209: Add a function to drop the `osm` chunk.
* timescale#7275: Add support for the `returning` clause for `merge`.
* timescale#7200: Vectorize common aggregate functions like `min`, `max`, `sum`,
`avg`, `stddev`, `variance` for compressed columns
of arithmetic types, when there is grouping on `segment by` columns or
no grouping.

**Bug fixes**
* timescale#7187: Fix the string literal length for the `compressed_data_info`
function.
* timescale#7191: Fix creating default indexes on chunks when migrating the data.
* timescale#7195: Fix the `segment by` and `order by` checks when dropping a
column from a compressed hypertable.
* timescale#7201: Use the generic extension description when building `apt` and
`rpm` loader packages.
* timescale#7227: Add an index to the `compression_chunk_size` catalog table.
* timescale#7229: Fix the foreign key constraints where the index and the
constraint column order are different.
* timescale#7230: Do not propagate the foreign key constraints to the `osm`
chunk.
* timescale#7234: Release the cache after accessing the cache entry.
* timescale#7258: Force English in the `pg_config` command executed by `cmake` to
avoid the unexpected building errors.
* timescale#7270: Fix the memory leak in compressed DML batch filtering.
* timescale#7286: Fix the index column check while searching for the index.
* timescale#7290: Add check for null offset for continuous aggregates built on
top of continuous aggregates.
* timescale#7301: Make foreign key behavior for hypertables consistent.
* timescale#7318: Fix chunk skipping range filtering.
* timescale#7320: Set the license specific extension comment in the install
script.

**Thanks**
* @MiguelTubio for reporting and fixing the Windows build error.
* @posuch for reporting the misleading extension description in the generic loader packages.
* @snyrkill for discovering and reporting the issue with continuous
aggregates built on top of continuous aggregates.

---------

Signed-off-by: Pallavi Sontakke <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Yannis Roussos <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Sven Klemm <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Yannis Roussos <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: atovpeko <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Sven Klemm <[email protected]>

src/import/ht_hypertable_modify.c

@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@
  * the PostgreSQL License.
  */
 #include <postgres.h>
+#include "debug_assert.h"
 #include <catalog/pg_type.h>
 #include <executor/nodeModifyTable.h>
 #include <executor/tuptable.h>
@@ -459,6 +460,12 @@ lmerge_matched:;
 	 * visible to our MVCC snapshot.
 	 */
 
+#if PG17_GE
+	if (oldtuple != NULL)
+		ExecForceStoreHeapTuple(oldtuple, resultRelInfo->ri_oldTupleSlot,
+								false);
+	else
+#endif
 	if (!table_tuple_fetch_row_version(resultRelInfo->ri_RelationDesc,
 					   tupleid,
 					   SnapshotAny,
@@ -742,6 +749,7 @@ lmerge_matched:;
 					 * tuple, for the refetch we do at
 					 * the top.
 					 */
+					Ensure(tupleid != NULL, "matched tupleid during merge cannot be null");
 					ItemPointerCopy(&context->tmfd.ctid, tupleid);
 					goto lmerge_matched;