Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

Postgres Conference Seattle 2024 partnered up with PASS this year to present a united database front. They accepted my “Kubernetes Killed the High Availability Star” talk, which I graciously gave on the last day of the conference.

The call for proposals for 2025.pgconf.dev has been extended to January 6, 2025, otherwise known as "very soon". I'm writing this post to encourage you to submit, if you haven't done so yet, regardless of whether you have submitted to 2024.pgconf.dev or its predecessor, PGCon, in the past.

I have been playing around with the powercap framework. I wrote a postgres extension that shows the energy usage of a query. Postgres has a hook mechanism that allows an extension to override the default executor. This implementation is very simple: the extension records the current energy reading when a query starts and then calls the actual executor that runs the query. When the query finishes, a second hook records the current energy reading.

Recently I had a customer come to me with a poorly performing query that had a perfectly fine execution time on Oracle, but once migrated to Postgres the query was slow. Upon investigation, it was found that even though the “WHERE” and “JOIN” clauses had explicitly specified partition keys and were joined on the partition key, “pruning” was only happening on one part of the query.

The setup for the test is at the bottom of the blog post: Jump to Test Case Setup

Federico Campoli and Vik Fearing organised PGDay/MED 2025 in Naples, Italy. Speakers presented Gabriele Quaresima, Ryan Booz, Gianluca Padovani, Patrick Lauer, Stefanie Janine Stölting, Fabiana Farias, Pavlo Golub, Devrim Gündüz.

Prepare for the next great event by PgTraining!

PgTraining is organizing the next year event, namely OpenDay 2025 that will be held on April 11th in Bolzano, Italy.

The event will be totally free but registration is required because the room assigned has a fixed number of seats.

Please note that all the speaks will be in italian.

The event will be held at the NOI Techpark.

In the spirit of the holiday season, I thought I would write a quick post regarding some of my favorite queries that I use on a day to day basis working on Postgres. Some of these queries I have developed and others were found on the internet (hat tip to those who have previously posted) and further refined.

Many more are found on my github site:

https://github.com/shane-borden/sqlScripts/tree/master/postgres

Today I’m excited to introduce pg_incremental, a new open source PostgreSQL extension for automated, incremental, reliable batch processing. This extension helps you create processing pipelines for append-only streams of data, such as IoT / time series / event data workloads.

Notable pg_incremental use cases include:

PostgreSQL comes with a variety of functions that allow you to group rows into a “window” and perform calculations on that window. By using these functions, you can create more advanced and efficient queries for analyzing your database.

Version 17 of PostgreSQL has been released for a while. One of the many features is a change by Tom Lane called “Rearrange pg_dump’s handling of large objects for better efficiency”. In the past, we have seen our customers have several problems with a large number of large objects being a performance issue for dump/restore.

The first-ever official PostgreSQL conference was held in Italy. Years later, PGDay/MED 2024 brought us back to this inspiring country. I was excited to visit Naples, often called the cradle of pizza and home to some of the finest cuisines in the world. As a self-proclaimed gastronomic geek, this was a bucket-list experience both professionally and personally!

We're happy to announce that PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2025 will be held in Riga, Latvia on October 21-24 2025. The conference format and schedule will be announced later in 2025.

In the meantime, mark your calendars, and we look forward to seeing you in Riga in October!

While the user notices the positive aspects of technology, a developer, usually encountering limitations, shortcomings or bugs, watches the product from a completely different perspective.