Analytics Accelerator 1.6 release notes v1.6

Released: 4 February 2026

Analytics Accelerator 1.6 includes the following enhancements and bug fixes, reflecting all changes since version 1.3.1:

Highlights

• Native Azure support: PGAA now officially supports Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS), allowing you to leverage Azure-based data lakes as primary storage locations for your analytical workloads.
• Expanded Parquet support: The Parquet storage format is now supported for PGFS locations using both file:// and s3:// protocols.
• Advanced query pushdown: Significant performance gains for CompatScan with new support for offloading joins and group-by aggregations directly to the vectorized engine.

Features

Performance & query optimization

• Added general optimizations for the Iceberg storage format.
• Enabled DirectScan for HTAP tables when an analytics_storage_location is set.
• The caching object store now invalidates entries immediately upon file read errors, but doesn't invalidate in-memory entries if file writes fail.
• Updated DataFusion to version 51 for improved stability and query performance.
• Added native support for NOT LIKE and NOT ILIKE operators.

Replication & data types

• Added support for the Postgres UUID type during replication.
• Added the following wrapper functions for easier PGD management: pgaa.enable_analytics_replication, pgaa.disable_analytics_replication, pgaa.convert_to_analytics, pgaa.restore_from_analytics, and pgaa.convert_to_tiered_table.
• All integer-like types smaller than BIGINT are now coerced to INTEGER.
• Updated default pgaa.max_replication_lag_s and pgaa.flush_task_interval_s to 5 seconds for more responsive data freshing.
• Added support for BYTEA replication and schema inference.
• Introduced support for replicating Postgres array types to native lakehouse types, including specific support for BPCHAR and UUID arrays.
• Added a fallback mechanism that converts unsupported types to TEXT to prevent replication failures.
• Integrated the option pgd.purge_analytics_target into the pgaa.enable_analytics_replication and pgaa.convert_to_tiered_table functions to purge existing analytics before replicating.

Catalog & storage management

• Iceberg REST connections now support OAuth2 authentication.
• Added pgaa.execute_compaction to improve the performance and storage efficiency of an analytical Iceberg table using a Spark Connect executor engine.
• Added helper commands for environment management:
  • pgaa.list_analytics_tables() to monitor table sizes and replication status.
  • pgaa.list_tiered_tables() to view all tiered/partitioned tables.
  • pgaa.pgaa_version(): to retrieve detailed version information.
• Added pgaa.test_storage_location() and pgaa.test_catalog() functions to verify connectivity and configurations.
• Added support for Parquet format for a PGFS storage location using file:// and s3:// protocols.
• Added a cascade parameter to pgaa.detach_catalog(), which drops all tables managed by the catalog before detaching.
• Included a safety improvement to the pgaa.delete_catalog() function, by making it require an explicit cascade := true parameter if tables are present, preventing accidental metadata loss.
• Added automated catalog connection checks for the pgaa.add_catalog() and pgaa.update_catalog() functions.
• Added the pgaa.list_catalog_tables() function which allows you to explore the all tables and views in a catalog without having to import or attach the tables to your local database first, with optional namespace filtering.
• Added the pgaa.drop_catalog_tables() function, which removes all local Postgres table and view definitions managed by a specific Iceberg catalog, without affecting tables in the remote Iceberg catalog.
• Added namespace filtering to pgaa.import_catalog(), allowing for selective schema imports.
• Changed default value for configuration parameters such as pgaa.tiered_table and pgaa.purge_data_if_exists to true if specified without an explicit value.

Bug fixes

• Fix object store cache issues when reading from Iceberg REST catalog.
• Fixed a lock-up issue where the PGAA autoupgrade worker could block PGD DDL replication.
• Resolved CTAS failures on multi-node setups by preventing tuple insertions on follower nodes.
• Fixed a segmentation fault occurring during NULL insertions in CREATE TABLE AS SELECT operations.
• Fixed table recreation issues after purging by resetting sync collection before CTAS execution.
• Fixed misleading batch size estimation in the replication writer.
• Refined row squashing logic for append or remove-only batches.
• Resolved an issue where pre-existing tables or incompatible views were not correctly dropped for partitioned tables.
• Fixed query truncation issues in DirectScan query extraction.
• Resolved an issue where DirectScan failed to operate after a failed CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS).
• Fixed sync writer purges for views.
• Resolved duplicate key constraint violations when modifying the pgaa.tiered_table option.
• Corrected object deletion scoping when dropping SingleTableFileCatalog tables.
• Resolved an issue with table truncation where so now table truncation correctly replaces data with "no files" instead of an empty Parquet file.
• Resolved a memory leak during Create Table As Select (CTAS) operations that caused Out-of-Memory (OOM) errors on large tables.
• Fixed memory leaks occurring during internal table mapping operations.
• Fixed an issue where tiered table DML failed when using qualifiers without partition columns.
• Removed an unnecessary table existence warning from the CTAS hook.
• Fixed a duplicate key error triggered when repeatedly setting the tiered_table option.

Infrastructure & other changes

• Added automated benchmarks for replication performance.
• Updated rustc to 1.92.0.
• Upgraded to DataFusion 50.
• Introduced ABI version 300, exposing new functionality including pgaa_tabular_exists and object purging.
• Exposed the ability to purge data via the PGAA ABI v300.

Deprecations

• Removed standalone metastore-agent.
• Dropped support for PGD versions prior to 6.1.
• Removed BigAnimal sidecar images.
• Removed the pgaa.get_all_analytics_table_settings function.
• Upgrade paths from versions prior to 1.3 have been removed. Users on older versions must first upgrade to PGAA 1.3.1 before moving to 1.6.0.