Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

Last week I MCed the first Extension Ecosystem Summit EU and attended my first at PGConf EU in Athens, Greece. Despite my former career as an archaeologist — with a focus on Mediterranean cultures, no less! — this was my first visit to Greece.

You followed all the best practices, your sales dates are stored in perfect timestamp format …. but now you need to get reports by day, week, quarters, and months. You need to bin, bucket, and roll up sales data in easy to view reports. Do you need a BI tool? Not yet actually. Your Postgres database has hundreds of functions that let you query data analytics by date. By using some good old fashioned SQL - you have powerful analysis and business intelligence with date details on any data set.

When dealing with very large PostgreSQL tables (we’re talking 15TB+), sometimes routine maintenance like archiving very old data can become surprisingly challenging. Despite having good indexes. I recently faced this issue when trying to clean up very old data on a very large and legacy table. The Problem Initial approach used standard ID-based pagination.

PostgreSQL documentation is, generally speaking, great. But it isn't the easiest thing to search in. Over the years I memorized urls to certain docs, but there is a limit to it. What's more, there are certain inconsistencies. For example – most pages that describe program have name that starts with app-. But not all. Some … Continue reading "New way to search PostgreSQL documentation"

We recently hit an interesting case where planner picked wrong plan. Kinda. And figured it could be used to show how to deal with such cases. So, we have some databases on PostgreSQL 14 (yes, I know, we should upgrade, but it is LONG project to upgrade, so it's not really on the table now). … Continue reading "Case study: optimization of weirdly picked bad plan"

Structured Query Language (SQL) is the standard language for managing and manipulating relational databases. It serves as the core mechanism for interacting with databases, enabling users to perform tasks such as querying data, updating records, and managing database structures. SQL’s declarative nature makes it ideal for retrieving and modifying data, but it has limitations when it comes to implementing complex business logic directly within the database.

The next Prague PostgreSQL Meetup will take place on October 29th!

PostgreSQL Europe Conference 2024

This years conference took place in Athens, Greece from October 22nd until October 25th.
It has been the biggest European PostgreSQL conference so far with more than 780 attendees.

I am very proud that my company, ProOpenSource OÜ, has sponsored each PostgreSQL Europe Conference since the company has been founded.

This is the second installment in our discussion of locales, character encodings, and collations in PostgreSQL. In this installment, we’ll talk about character encodings as they relate to PostgreSQL.

A quick reminder!

A character encoding is a mapping between code points (that is, numbers) and glyphs (what us programmers usually call characters). There are lots, and lots, and lots of different character encodings, most of them some superset of good old 7-bit ASCII.

If you are not familiar with the quote.

This is part one of a series on PostgreSQL and collations, and how to use them without tears. This is an introduction to the general concepts of glyphs, character encodings, collations, and locales.

Glyphs

There is (as always in things involving real human behavior) some controversy over what is a gylph and what isn’t, but as a first approximation, we can use this definition:

Next month, I'll be hosting a discussion of a talk by Andy Pavlo, given for his Intro to Database Systems course at CMU. The title of the talk is "Memory & Disk I/O Management and the video link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoewwZwVmv4. As usual, we have will have three sessions, and you can sign up to participate in one of them using this form.

Learn about the latest changes in pgroll in the 0.7.0 release as we continue developing it into a leading open-source schema migration tool for Postgres.

As many of my followers may recall, we had the pleasure of Paul Jungwirth presenting at the Chicago PUG meetup on October 15. I have high hopes for having true temporal data support in Postgres 18, and I wanted to know all the details of what to expect. I believe I can speak on behalf of everyone who watched and was present on October 15, either in person or virtually – it was an exceptional talk! I do not recall any other meetups where so many people asked me about the recording – and it is finally here!

Enjoy!

We are excited to announce the release of Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes 5.7! This latest version brings a wealth of new features and enhancements designed to make your Postgres deployments on Kubernetes more flexible, efficient, secure, and robust than ever before.

We have highlighted a few of the features that we are excited about below. You can also check out the release notes for more details

The 14th PostgreSQL Conference in Europe is taking place in Athens, Greece from 22-25 October 2024. In this blog post, I will be sharing what I look forward to at PGConf.EU 2024 including a great keynote, extension ecosystem summit, Xata dinner and more.

I’m often asked what do I think the future for Postgres holds, and my answer has been mostly the same for probably 8 years now, maybe even longer. You see for Postgres itself stability and reliability is core. So where does the new stuff come from if it’s not in the stable core… extensions.

I recently created a presentation about what I think are the most important areas of improvement in Postgres 17:

Today, we’re excited to release pg_parquet - an open source Postgres extension for working with Parquet files. The extension reads and writes parquet files to local disk or to S3 natively from Postgres. With pg_parquet you're able to:

In today's fast-paced digital world, ensuring that your data is always up-to-date and accessible is crucial. For businesses using PostgreSQL, replication is a key feature that helps achieve this. While many are familiar with streaming replication, bi-directional replication offers unique advantages that can enhance data availability and reliability. In this blog post, we'll explore what bi-directional replication is, how it differs from streaming replication, and provide a practical example to setup bi directional replication in PostgreSQL

It’s time for a new Postgres release! PostgreSQL 17 shipped a few weeks ago, with lots of new features to explore.

As a mature database system, prized for reliability, stability, and backwards compatibility, new features aren’t often the most splashy. However, there are still goodies that could become new tools in the toolboxes of data application builders.

The Postgres 17 release notes is a good starting point, as it covers a breadth of items.