~postgresweekly | Bookmarks (115)

🕒 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.

🤖 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.

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.

📊 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.

Postgres vs. SQL Server: A Look at B-Tree Index Differences — Both Postgres and Microsoft’s SQL Server use B-tree indexes as their default indexing mechanism but their approaches differ significantly. Even if you don’t use SQL Server, this is a good look behind the scenes and you’ll pick up a thing or two about how Postgres does things and how deduplication can lead to...

The Internals of MVCC: Hidden Costs of Updates vs Inserts — Postgres’ multiversion concurrency control (MVCC) features, while incredibly useful, add overhead to certain actions, such as updating, rather than inserting, rows. Rohan digs into the how and why.

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).

Debugging Postgres More Easily — Hans-Jürgen shares a technique for using table inheritance to debug transactions in an interesting way.

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.

Trunk: A Postgres Extension Registry — A Rust-powered open source package installer and registry for Postgres extensions with over 200 extensions already on offer. Trunk was built prior to Tembo’s hiring of PGXN’s David Wheeler to work on improving the Postgres extension ecosystem. PIG is another option in this space.

pg_sentence_transformer: Run A HuggingFace Sentence Transformer Model in a Background Worker — A prototype extension that starts a background worker and computes embeddings for a given source table and stores them into a newly created embeddings table without using an external LLM service.

Semantic Search in Postgres: An Overview — Full text search is great, but if you want to query data based on its meaning rather than the literal data, you’ll need to bring in extensions like pgvector. Hans-Jürgen explains how it all works here.

Rainfrog 0.3: A Database Management TUI for Postgres — Think a little more structured than psql with vim-style navigation of queries, history, schemas, etc.

⭐ Electric 1.0: A Postgres Sync Engine — “Electric solves sync.” The idea is that if you have data in Postgres you need to sync elsewhere, Electric solves the hard problems of sync for you, including partial replication, fan-out, and data delivery, no matter your data model or Web framework. More info here.

Teable: Open Source Airtable Alternative atop Postgres — Airtable is a popular data table database SaaS, but here’s an open-source alternative along similar lines that sits atop Postgres and allows direct data querying with SQL. GitHub repo.

Life Altering Postgres Patterns — The author promises the title isn’t just clickbait and delivers twelve different bite-size, hard-learned tips and insights in areas from using UUIDs as primary keys and table naming to the use of schemas and views.

Reducing Cloud Spend: Migrating Logs from CloudWatch to Iceberg with Postgres — Postgres provider Crunchy Data has a lot of logs to store and storing those in AWS CloudWatch costs a lot too. Craig explains how Crunchy Data implemented a new workflow to store the logs in Iceberg tables on S3 instead, while still allowing SQL querying via Crunchy Data Warehouse.

Creating Postgres Roles with Passwords Stored in Gopass — Gopass is a Go-powered CLI-based password manager for teams.

🔒 A Postgres Security Checklist — The Center for Internet Security (CIS) releases security benchmarks for a variety of popular tools and services used in Internet infrastructure, and now there’s a set of Postgres guidelines (though it's behind an email wall with commercial-use restrictions, alas).