~postgresweekly | Issue 595 - Comparing Postgres and SQL Server's indexing approaches (9)

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).

📊 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.

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.