Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

Next month, I'll be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of Thomas Munro's talk, Investigating Multithreaded PostgreSQL, given at 2025.pgconf.dev (talk description here).

It's been a while since the last performance check of Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) in Cybertec's PGEE distribution - that was in 2016. Of course, the question is still interesting, so I did some benchmarks.

My trip to pgday.at started Wednesday at the airport in Düsseldorf. I was there on time, and the plane started with an estimated flight time of about 90 minutes. About half an hour into the flight, the captain announced that we would be landing in 30 minutes - in Düsseldorf, because of some unspecified technical problems. Three hours after the original departure time, the plane made another attempt, and we made it to Vienna.

This article has been published with explicit permission from Jesús Espino. It's a copy of a post originally published on his LinkedIn account on September 16, 2024.

It is that time of the year again. The first release candidate of PostgreSQL 18 is out, and things look promising. We should expect General Availability in the next 2-4 weeks. 

Exciting times! 

Over the past many years and as many releases, the PostgreSQL community has done a phenomenal job of being disciplined about the annual release process. And we have done so averaging 150+ new features with each release!

For the upcoming v18, here are the top three features I am most excited about:

Introduction

Recently, I read Laurenz Albe's blog about case insensitive string search. He recommended case insensitive collations saying, "it won't be any more expensive (and maybe more intuitive) than the current techniques of using upper() or the citext extension are today". In other words, a custom collation can be used instead of citext to achieve case insensivity with a lower performance penalty.

In November last year after nearly two decades at my previous gig, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to work at what seemed to be rapidly becoming an AI-focused company and moved to pgEdge where the focus is well and truly on distributed PostgreSQL and Postgres generally. Distributed databases (and particularly Postgres of course) have always been a passion of mine – even being a key topic of my master’s dissertation many years ago.Moving to pgEdge was a breath of fresh air.

Case-insensitive search is one of the most common issues I encounter when helping customers migrate from Oracle or SQL Server to PostgreSQL. Unlike Oracle (with NLS_SORT) or SQL Server (with case-insensitive collations), PostgreSQL does not natively support case-insensitive search. Developers typically rely on workarounds such as:

Developers typically rely on workarounds such as:

PGDay Austria took place on September 4 in Vienna.

Organised by

• Patricia Horvath
• Ilya Kosmodemiansky
• Hans-Jürgen Schönig
• Cornelia Biascics

CfP Committee

• Rafia Sabih
• Oleksii Vasiliev
• Ryan Booz
• Pavlo Golub (non voting member)

Speakers

TPC-C is supposedly the most objective performance measurement of OLTP database systems… and I’ve used it quite a fair bit over the years as well…yet, running it on Postgres is sadly not exactly as smooth as things typically are with Postgres 😔 If to compare at least with the wonderful...

Postgres Ibiza 2025: October 15-17th

Postgres Ibiza 2025 is back in October. A three-day event split into:

I recently completed a training session for one of our customer on best practices for achieving HA clusters with Patroni and Pgpool in PostgreSQL. During the sessions, different points were discussed, but I’d like to highlight a few that should be carefully considered when designing HA clusters.

The programme for PGConf.EU 2025, taking place on 21–24 October in Riga, is now live!

Discover the exciting lineup of world-class PostgreSQL speakers and exciting topics that await you on the schedule for this year.

This year’s conference also features a Community Events Day on Tuesday, with limited spaces available.

We look forward to seeing you in Riga in October!

I just gave a new presentation at PGConf.Brazil titled Three Key Attributes of Postgres. It is similar to my existing The Postgres Trajectory talk, but with more of a business and global focus. It also a psql output slide full of puns at the beginning, and hints to the puns at the end.

I've just returned from the rapidly growing Free and Open Source Yearly conference, or FOSSY 2025, which took place from July 31st - August 3rd, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. Organized by the incredible team at the Software Freedom Conservancy, the event was an awesome gathering of minds dedicated to the principles of free and open-source software.

Introduction

We have explored how to create cluster, take backups, connect to the cluster and run psql commands in our CNPG series. However, one might feel overwhelmed because of those day - to - day operations. That is why CNPG provides a kubectl plugin. CloudNativePG' s plugin enriches kubectl with a set of PostgreSQL - focused commands, making easier to inspect clusters, trigger backups, promote a new instance, run pgbench and run psql commands without leaving existing terminal.

Discover how a PostgreSQL DBA’s decade of expertise evolved into designing Xata’s AI-powered Postgres agent, automating monitoring and observability.

© Laurenz Albe 2025

I recently helped a customer with a slow query. Eventually, an ANALYZE on a partitioned table was enough to fix the problem. This came as a surprise for the customer, since autovacuum was enabled. So I decided to write an article on how PostgreSQL collects partitioned table statistics and how they affect PostgreSQL's estimates.

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.6.0! Best Served with PostgreSQL 18 Beta3 and recently released GEOS 3.14.0.

This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 18beta3, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.14+ is needed. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 2.2.0+ is needed.

Are you in the Pacific Northwest?