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I would like to know if it could be possible to gain any performance benefits from upgrading the default PostgreSQL JDBC drivers from applications like Confluence or JIRA.

Assume that you cannot modify the application that is using them, the question if there are any visible benefits from switching from the current driver postgresql-8.4-702.jdbc3.jar to something newer?

  • the backend is using PostgreSQL 9.1 and soon will be upgraded to 9.3
  • JVM being used is the latest 1.7 from Oracle

Does it make sense or not? If so, which version should I pick?

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You should always ensure that the JDBC driver is at least as new as the back-end server.

PostgreSQL's catalogs change between major versions, and other details like the bytea quoting method, string escaping features, etc have also changed over time. PgJDBC contains compatibility code to cope with this by querying the server version. If you don't use a current driver, you may have issues with some features, particularly JDBC metadata access and bytea fields.

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  • you do not mention anything about performance or stability. i am not interested about features, as clearly the application is not going to use them as it was not designed to benefit from them. also i have serious doubts that the app will need access to metadata.
    – sorin
    May 10, 2014 at 8:39
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    It's about correctness - which is certainly an aspect of stability. Performance improvements have also been made in PgJDBC over time, but there isn't currently any consistent benchmarking of the JDBC driver done - we barely have the resources to maintain it at all. So it's not really possible to definitively say you'll get a performance boost - not least because you haven't provided any detail about your app and workload.
    – Craig Ringer
    May 10, 2014 at 11:39

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