Bookmarks (117)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

🕒 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.

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.

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.

📈 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.

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.

🤖 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_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.

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.

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.

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

📊 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.

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).

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.

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.

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...

A Practical Guide to Taming Postgres Isolation Anomalies — A practical, Ruby-based (though SQL heavy) walkthrough of Postgres’ concurrency control, detailing real-world issues like lost updates, write skew, and other isolation anomalies. Even if you rarely run into conflicts, you’ll come away with valuable insights on managing transactions.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Why Postgres Needs a Better API for Alternative Table Engines? — Postgres has mechanisms for allowing extensions to provide their own index types and table access methods, but it’s still not as easy to roll out powerful alternative table engines as it could be. Alexander of OrioleDB explains the limitations and some potential ways forward.

pgFormatter 5.6: A Tool to Format SQL Code — You can test it out online, or you can grab the source from GitHub (it’s written in Perl) and run it for yourself. What’s new in v5.6.