Bookmarks (121)

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.

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).

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.

📊 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.

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.

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.

⭐ 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.

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.

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.

Sure, You Can Roll Your Own Auth - If You Hate Free Time — Don’t sacrifice your control. FusionAuth is downloadable, and can be developed and tested locally. A single-tenant architecture provides better scale and security than a purely multi-tenant SaaS model, even if you deploy via the cloud. Try it for free!

You Can Make Postgres Scale — Newsflash: Postgres scales! After last week’s experiments with a 1 trillion row table using Citus, we know Postgres scales, but once you go beyond a certain point, bringing multiple machines into play becomes a potentially complex necessity and the PgDog horizontal scaling/sharding approach offers just one solution.

pgzx 0.3: Create Postgres Extensions using Zig — If you’re familiar with pgrx as a way to build Postgres extensions with Rust, this is a similar idea in the world of Zig, another modern systems language that’s a little more C-like than Rust.

pg_ivm 1.10: Incremental View Maintenance (IVM) Extension — A more efficient way to update materialized views incrementally, applying only changes instead of fully recomputing the view like REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW does.

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.

Troubleshooting Duplicate Primary Key Rows — If a table has unwanted ‘duplicate rows’ (which can happen due to a variety of quirks causing corrupt unique indexes) Greg has a multi-step technique for getting things back under control.

Think About MERGE in Terms of a RIGHT JOIN — RIGHT JOIN isn’t encountered too often in SQL as you can just write a more universally understood LEFT JOIN alternative instead. However, right join semantics play an important role with the MERGE statement.

Xata Agent: An 'AI Expert' in Postgres — An open source agent that monitors your database, finds root causes of issues, and suggests fixes and improvements. It’s early days in this space but it’s interesting to see different takes on the idea.

▶  🎤 Why Python Developers Just Use Postgres — Dawn Wages of the Python Software Foundation joins Claire Giordano to talk about why Postgres is particularly popular in the Python and Django communities.

Can Artificial Intelligence Create Better Tables Than You? — As someone guilty of leaning on LLMs for a little SQL grunt work lately, this was an interesting read. As ever, you need to stay on your toes and check anything produced before rolling it into production!

▶ Don’t Let Postgres Maintenance Slip Through the Cracks — Secure your spot to learn the proactive maintenance practices that uncover hidden database performance risks, like slow queries, checkpoint behavior, & connection issues, before they escalate.

1 Trillion Rows in Citus? — “Postgres scales,” but just how far does that go? Hans-Jürgen decided to find out, running a little (or is it big?) experiment to see if a 1 trillion row table is even achievable.