~postgresweekly | Issue 585 - See every byte of a Postgres query made over the network (8)

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.

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.

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.