~postgresweekly | Bookmarks (116)

pg_squeeze 1.8: Extension to Automate Table Bloat Cleanup — While not a replacement for vacuuming, this extension goes a step further to gain even more space improvements in-situ and now supports Postgres 17.

pgwatch 3.0: A Flexible Postgres Monitoring Solution — v3.0 adds support for Postgres 17 (including new metrics), Windows support, improved Docker support, updated docs, support for parallel sinks, and more. GitHub repo.

Mathesar: A Spreadsheet Interface to Postgres Databases — An open source (GPLv3) tool providing a table-style interface to a Postgres database of your choice with the aim being to enable developers to open up databases more directly to end users. We first linked to it two years ago but v0.2 has just landed. GitHub repo.

VACUUM (INDEX_CLEANUP OFF) Considered Harmful — “Unless you are sure you know what you are doing (that is, you are in a wraparound-point emergency), please pretend this option doesn’t exist. Really.”

A Major Aurora Postgres Upgrade with Zero Downtime — Inspired by an earlier blog post from the Lyft database team, two engineers set out to upgrade their small but heavily used Aurora Postgres instance without affecting their app – here’s the full story along with the problems encountered. (Note that the database does go down for a few seconds, but their app didn’t need...

Logon Triggers in Postgres — In Postgres 17 you can create a trigger that occurs upon login which you could use for auditing or even securing databases in creative ways.

PostgreSQL Performance Monitoring Cheatsheet — Start tracking vital resource and activity metrics from your PostgreSQL databases with our handy cheatsheet. You’ll have useful psql commands at your fingertips, and get a quick-start guide on using Datadog to monitor PostgreSQL performance.

A New Postgres Block Storage Layout for Full Text Search — pg_search is a Postgres extension providing BM25-powered full text search but has required the use of external, non-Postgres files till now. No more. It’s now fully using Postgres block storage – here’s the why and how.

Implementing Thread-Safe Scanners and Parsers in Postgres — Unless you’re a Postgres implementer (like top 5 contributor Peter Eisentraut here) this probably won’t be directly useful to you, but it’s fascinating to see what’s involved in potentially moving Postgres’ scanners and parsers to be thread safe. Spoiler: It’s a lot.

Who Contributed to Postgres Development in 2024? — Each year, Robert compiles a list of those who contributed most to Postgres’ development over the past year. 229 folks were the principal authors of at least one commit, and 66% of new lines of code came from the top 18 contributors.

Anatomy of Table-Level Locks: Reducing Locking Impact — It’s easy to lock an entire table when performing an operation, but the performance and uptime impacts should quickly drive you to using less restrictive approaches. Gulcin explains some options.

VeilStream – Simple Data Access Management for Postgres — VeilStream is a secure, self-hosted, Postgres filter that sits in front of your production database to provide a powerful and simple GUI and API for setting up data redaction and anonymization rules. Try it for free today.

GROUP BY and Fixing Optimizer Estimates — Did you know the more columns a GROUP BY contains, the more likely the optimizer overestimates the row count? Postgres maintains separate statistics for each column and creates group estimates by multiplying them together. Creating extended statistics can help get things in order.

Don't Forget About the Parallel Leader Participation Setting — Kaarel has his own TLDR: “You should actually look into disabling parallel_leader_participation if you’re working with larger out-of-cache datasets, have plenty of cores and especially when the tables are partitioned.”

DBOS Transact v2: Lightweight Durable Execution in TypeScript — An opensource library for lightweight durable execution built on Postgres. Durable execution means persisting the execution state of a program while it runs, so if it's interrupted or crashes, it resumes from where it left off, ideal for long-running or business-critical workflows. Documentation.

HeidiSQL 12.10: A Native Windows App for Database Work — A handy, open source database management tool. Supports Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, and SQLite. Written in Delphi and is open source.

Don't Do This (in Postgres) — An interesting page on the official Postgres wiki that rounds up a variety of advice around ‘common mistakes’ in using Postgres and what not to do, such as “Don’t use char(n)” and “Don’t use serial“. Some of these will be contentious, but are well backed up with reasons. The page is updated, but it’d be nice to see...

Ruby Active Record Adapter for AWS Aurora DSQL — The “very beginnings” of an Active Record (Ruby on Rails) connection adapter for Amazon’s new Aurora DSQL database (essentially a Postgres-compatible serverless, distributed database service).

🐕 pgDog: A New Rust-Powered Postgres Query Router and Proxy — The main developer of the PgCat Postgres pooler has shifted to working on this dog-themed ‘spiritual successor’ that offers similar pooling, load balancing, and proxying, but with a plugin system and an AGPL license (PgCat is MIT).

pg_mooncake: Fast Columnstore Tables in Postgres for Analytics — A Postgres extension that adds columnar storage and vectorized execution (using DuckDB) for fast analytics within Postgres. Columnstore tables are stored as Iceberg or Delta Lake tables on the local file system or cloud storage. v0.1 just landed.

Idle Transactions Cause Table Bloat? Wait, What? — “Yup, you read it right. Idle transactions can cause massive table bloat that the vacuum process may not be able to address.”

The Anatomy of Table-Level Locks — A look at the meaning and motivation behind locking in database systems, before more closely looking at the various ways tables can be locked in Postgres and how conflicts between these locks are resolved.

Find the Best Postgres Monitoring & Tuning Vendor for 2025 — Download our free Vendor Evaluation Template to swiftly compare features, score demos, and confidently pick the best Postgres performance & monitoring solution to meet your 2025 budget needs.

The Power of Open Source in Postgres — Laurenz demonstrates how Postgres’ open source nature is invaluable when it comes to answering questions about how it operates, in case by tracking down the reason for the default setting for autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor. Knowing how to do what he does in this post is a valuable skill.