PostgreSQL's Graph Queries Took Two Years to Build. An AI Bug Tally Killed Them in Nine Days

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0530

On September 7, PostgreSQL’s release team reverted SQL/PGQ, the built-in property-graph query feature, out of the PostgreSQL 19 branch. Forty-seven commits gone: the feature itself and every post-commit fix layered on top of it since March. It had been in development since February 2024. It shipped in beta. It is not shipping in 19.

The proximate cause wasn’t a single catastrophic bug report. It was a pgsql-hackers thread from August 25 titled “scary patch contest,” in which Robert Haas, one of PostgreSQL’s longest-serving committers, wrote that he’d asked Claude to rank the release’s patches by how many bugs had been fixed in them since feature freeze. SQL/PGQ was one of six patches the exercise flagged. Nine days after Andres Freund replied to that thread with his own independent findings, SQL/PGQ was gone.

Release-Engineering on Kuldeep Pisda

PostgreSQL's Graph Queries Took Two Years to Build. An AI Bug Tally Killed Them in Nine Days