A Missing Link in Postgres 11: Fast Column Creation with Defaults — brandur.org

If you read through the release notes for upcoming Postgres 11, you might see a somewhat inconspicuous addition tucked away at the bottom of the enhancements list: Many other useful performance improvements, including making ALTER TABLE .. ADD COLUMN with a non-null column default faster It’s not a flagship feature of the new release, but it’s still one of the more important operational improvemen