Bookmarks (117)

How OpenAI Scales Postgres to the Next Level — A writeup of a talk given by OpenAI engineer Bohan Zhang at PGConf.dev about how OpenAI manages to scale with an unsharded approach using just one writer and multiple readers despite Postgres being ‘the backbone of [its] most critical systems’. If it’s good enough for them…

Why Upgrade Postgres? Here's Why — A perennially useful resource that lets you pick ‘from’ and ‘to’ versions and see what Postgres gained in the interim. Even this 17.4 to 17.5 example is packed with details.

pgfdb: Making Postgres Distributed with FoundationDB — pgfdb is an experimental extension to turn Postgres into a stateless layer that sits atop FoundationDB, a distributed, multi-model data store.

📊 PG Exporter 1.0: Advanced Postgres + Pgbouncer Metrics Exporter for Prometheus — Exposes 600+ metrics covering core internals as well as popular extensions, all through a single, fully customizable exporter. v1.0 offers some initial Postgres 18 support too.

A Dockerfile to Build Postgres 18 Beta from Source — A handy way to get playing with Postgres 18 beta 1 quickly, since betas don’t get official container images.

How to Run Cron Jobs in Postgres Without Extra Infrastructure — pg_cron might be your go-to if you want to keep everything in Postgres itself, but if you’re building a Node app (such as with Wasp, as in this tutorial) then the pg-boss job queue offers an alternative option.

Debugging Memory Leaks in Postgres via Heaptrack — A Linux-only walk through an artificial example of introducing memory leaks into Postgres and then debugging them using the heaptrack memory profiler.

Using pg_test_fsync for Testing Low Latency Writes — pg_test_fsync is a tool that comes with Postgres for determining the fastest wal_sync_method option to use on your hardware.

PostgresqlCO.NF: Postgres Config Settings for Humans — A helpful online reference guide to Postgres’ various parameters from basics like log_statement and application_name through to things added in the very latest versions (including v18, currently in beta).

pgconf.dev 2025 Wraps Up with Great Success in Montreal — I’ve heard from numerous sources that last week’s PGConf.dev event was a raging success, and this is one of the most thorough writeups (complete with photos) I’ve ever seen of a Postgres event. Hopefully we’ll get to see some of the videos too in coming weeks.

dblab: An Interactive Client for Postgres, MySQL, and More — A Go-powered cross-platform (yes, including Windows) TUI-style app for working with various database systems. Certainly looks different to the standard CLI clients.

Data Archiving and Retention in Postgres — Daria presents her slides, along with explanations, from her talk at PGConf Germany where she covered best practices when working with large datasets. Lots of good tips in here.

▶  Scaling Postgres: A Weekly Show about Postgres — For several years now, Creston has been producing a video a week where he digs into the latest Postgres news, articles, and so forth – much like us, but he gets to riff a little more and share his experiences and insights.

Creating Short Alphanumeric Pseudorandom Identifiers — Suppose you need to create a readable and unique multi-character identifier to represent an ID, but without being as long as a UUID (think something like a YouTube video ID). PL/PgSQL to the rescue!

Microsoft Unveils an IDE for Postgres in VS Code — Microsoft has unveiled a public preview of a new Postgres extension for its VS Code editor that lets you manage database objects, use IntelliSense to build queries, and integrate with Copilot too.

Postgres 18 Beta is Out: 7 Features You Should Know About — Last week’s big news was the release of Postgres 18 Beta 1. Neon has put together a quick roundup of seven features to be aware of.

Vircadia: A Postgres-Powered Reactivity Layer for Games — It seems to be early days, but the idea is you can use Vircadia to simulate agentic worlds and manage in-game entities through SQL.

pgwatch 3.3: A Postgres Monitoring Solution — A self-contained metrics monitoring dashboard tool for Postgres servers. Can be easily deployed with Docker in a non-invasive way (no extensions needed). GitHub repo.

pgModeler 1.2: A Postgres Database Modelling Tool — An easy way to create and edit database models in a more visual way. It’s packaged up as a paid product but is also open source (GPLv3 – repo here) so you can build it yourself. v1.2 is a significant update.

POSETTE 2025: Save the Date! — POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, a free & virtual developer event, is less than a month away -- June 10-12. Learn from 45 experts from the PostgreSQL ecosystem. Choose from 42 unique talks via 4 livestreams with live chat on Discord. Save the date.

PostgREST 13: A RESTful API for Postgres Databases — A standalone web server that turns your Postgres database directly into a RESTful HTTP API. v13.0 adds support for spread to-many relationships and automatic tsvector conversion allowing the use of fts on text and json types out of the box.

[New from O’Reilly] The 2nd Edition of CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide — Learn how to build resilient, scalable apps with a Postgres-compatible distributed SQL database. Same Postgres feel—familiar tools, schema, and queries—built to scale globally, on premise or in any cloud, with native geo-data placement and low TCO.

The Draft Release Notes for Postgres 18 — Bruce Momjian has just completed his first draft of the Postgres 18 release notes in time for Beta 1. The final release is expected in September or October.

Postgres 18 Beta 1 Released — The first official look at Postgres 18 has just landed in the past few hours. The release notes paint the big picture, but PG18 is shaping up to be a solid release with faster scans and vacuuming on Linux, parallel GIN builds, virtual generated columns, OAuth support, enhanced EXPLAIN ANALYZE output and more. It's time to go and play.

Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O in Postgres 18 — The first beta release of Postgres 18 adds limited asynchronous I/O (AIO) support – something that’s been years in the making. This post explains what it is, how it works, and what it means for performance optimization.

Announcing pg_parquet v.0.4.0 — pg_parquet provides a way to export and import Parquet files directly within Postgres, without relying on third-party tools.

Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ Clusters Violate Snapshot Isolation — Jepsen is well known for its analysis of distributed systems. After some experimentation, the author found that Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL multi-AZ clusters (specifically) violate Snapshot Isolation, the strongest consistency model supported across all endpoints.

Is Your Application Prepared for Your Next High Traffic Event? — Are you tired of your Postgres database feeling like a black box? Watch Postgres expert Lukas Fittl walk through the latest pganalyze features to tune slow queries, catch regressions, and keep Postgres running at its best in this on-demand video.

What Really Happens When You Drop a Column — When you run a ALTER TABLE .. DROP COLUMN you probably don’t think too hard about what’s going on behind the scenes, but sometimes specifics of the process can rear their ugly head. In short, ‘dropped’ columns may be gone but not forgotten.

PGlite 0.3: Postgres on WASM, Now Based on Postgres 17 — PGlite is a WebAssembly-based build of Postgres that enables you to run an instance of Postgres wherever WebAssembly can be run (such as in the browser as in this demo). v0.3 takes a big step forward in moving up to Postgres 17.4. (GitHub repo.)

Why All Your Workflows Should Be Postgres Rows — It may be no surprise the folks behind the DBOS durable execution/workflow library think storing workflows in Postgres is a good idea, but here’s how they think about it from a schema POV.

Scaling Certificate Transparency with 100B+ Rows of Data — Merklemap is a service that aggregates together certificate transparency data for issued TLS certificates – here’s how they use Postgres for task of managing data spanning 20TB of storage and 100 billion rows.

Hacking the Postgres Statistics Tables for Faster Queries — Postgres’s internal statistics drive query planning and index choices, but the process isn’t perfect. This practical post shows how to manually add extended statistics to teach Postgres about useful correlations — and how even a single CREATE STATISTICS can make a query 97x faster.

Fully Managed Postgres with Aiven for PostgreSQL® — Set up a fully managed Postgres database in 10 minutes and focus on your code – let Aiven do the heavy lifting.

A Postgres Language Server for Your IDE — Most modern code editors support language servers for providing language-specific coding enhancements like auto-complete, syntax highlighting, and refactoring. Supabase has come up with such a server for Postgres too, offering linting, autocompletion, error highlighting and type-checking out of the box.

Doltgres Beta Launch: A Version Controlled SQL Database — Doltgres is a Go-powered Postgres-flavored variant of the Dolt SQL database that offers Git-style merging and forking in a Postgres-wire compatible form.

Reordering Expressions in SQL Queries for Performance — Techniques to speed up query execution, with a focus on rearranging conditions in filter expressions, JOINs, HAVING clauses, and similar constructs.

Striping Postgres Data Volumes - A Free Lunch? — Depending on your usage patterns, yes, striping together cheap cloud volumes can yield significant throughput and latency benefits.

A Roadmap to Scaling Postgres — An experienced Postgres specialist presented an ordered list of steps to think through when scaling up a Postgres deployment from first getting your data model right, through to indexing, hardware, tuning, and sharding.

🤖 Postgres Pro: An MCP Server to Let AI Agents Tune and Improve Your Database Usage — I suspect it’ll need to be renamed (so as not to confused with the company of the same name?), but this is an interesting first step at providing a bridge between modern AI models and agents and Postgres by way of an MCP server that lets AI agents...

pg_auto_failover 2.2: Automated Failover Extension — An extension and service that monitors and manages automated failover for a Postgres cluster. Now supporting Postgres 17.

Creating Histograms with Postgres — A histogram visualizes data distribution by grouping values into bins and displaying the frequency of each bin. Postgres has a width_bucket to help you do this, and Elizabeth shows off some fantastic queries here.

📈 Making Postgres Better with OrioleDB — OrioleDB is an alternative storage engine for Postgres that extends the table access method framework to optimize performance on modern hardware. But by how much? Brian runs some tests.

2x-40x Faster Docker Builds with Blacksmith — With a one-line code change, Blacksmith can make your Docker builds incremental by mounting your Docker layer cache into your GitHub Actions runner. Blacksmith is used by 350+ companies like Ashby, Clerk, and Mintlify.

🕒 Time to Better Know the Time in Postgres — If you’ve ever been guilty of just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best when working with times in Postgres, this is for you. Packed with examples and advice, Radim looks at how different time data types work, how to work with time zones, intervals, time ranges, and more.

📊 RTABench: A Benchmark For Real Time Analytics — An open source benchmark built by the Timescale team that differs from many classical database benchmarks by focusing on real-world queries across normalized tables and incremental pre-aggregated materialized views.

Autobase 2.2.0: A Self-Hosted DBaas Platform for Postgres — For when you want something akin to RDS or Cloud SQL, but on your own hardware. It automates deployment and maintenance, ensuring high availability, scalability, and cost efficiency. v2.2 adds TLS support across all cluster components, ARM compatibility, and automated backups to Hetzner Object Storage.

Running into Limits with Aurora? — Aurora hits walls with regional HA, failover lag, and manual sharding. CockroachDB speaks Postgres, but goes further — with global consistency, zero-downtime ops, and effortless scale. Watch the side-by-side tech breakdown in this on-demand webinar.

2025 Postgres Extensions Mini Summit Two — Several Postgres users and developers held a virtual event recently discussing recent progress in adding an ‘extension search path’ feature to Postgres, as a way to make it easier for Postgres installs to discover and pick up newly installed extensions (there’s a 50-minute video of the event, but the transcript is good too).