~postgresweekly | Issue 586 - Doing an Aurora Postgres upgrade without downtime (8)

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.