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Learn how pgstream v0.7.1 transforms JSON data, improves snapshot experience with progress tracking and wildcard support.

When designing a highly available PostgreSQL cluster, two popular tools often come into the conversation: Pgpool-II and Patroni. Both are widely used in production environments, offer solid performance, and aim to improve resilience and reduce downtime; however, they take different approaches to achieving this goal.

In a recent Hacker News discussion, there was some confusion about the differences between OrioleDB and Neon. Both look alike at first glance. Both promise a "next‑gen Postgres". Both have support for cloud‑native storage.

This post explains how the two projects differ in practice. And importantly, OrioleDB is more than an undo log for PostgreSQL.

Next month, I'll be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of Tomas Vondra's talk, Fast-path locking improvements in PG18, given at 2025.pgconf.dev (talk description here). If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions.

PostgreSQL active-active replication, do you really need it? Before we start, what is active-active?

Active-active, also referred to as multi-primary, is a setup where multiple database nodes can accept writes at the same time and propagate those changes to the others. In comparison, regular streaming replication in PostgreSQL allows only one node (the primary) to accept writes. All other nodes (replicas) are read-only and follow changes.

In an active-active setup:

CloudNativePG 1.26 introduces enhanced support for Kubernetes startup probes, giving users finer control over how and when PostgreSQL instances are marked as “started.” This article explores the new capabilities, including both basic and advanced configuration modes, and explains the different probe strategies—such as pg_isready, SQL query, and streaming for replicas. It provides practical guidance for improving the reliability of high-availability Postgres clusters by aligning startup conditions with actual database readiness.

© Laurenz Albe 2025

Everybody wants good performance. When it comes to the execution of SQL statements, accurate optimizer statistics are key. With the upcoming v18 release, PostgreSQL will preserve the optimizer statistics during an upgrade with dump/restore or pg_upgrade (see commit 1fd1bd8710 and following). With the beta testing season for PostgreSQL v18 opened, it is time to get acquainted with the new feature.

© Laurenz Albe 2025

Recently, while investigating a deadlock for a customer, I was again reminded how harmful SELECT FOR UPDATE can be for database concurrency. This is nothing new, but I find that many people don't know about the PostgreSQL row lock modes. So here I'll write up a detailed explanation to let you know when to avoid SELECT FOR UPDATE.

Working with timezones can sometimes lead to confusing results, especially when combining Django's ORM, raw SQL for performance (like in PostgreSQL materialized views), and specific timezone requirements. I recently had an issue while aggregating traffic stop data by year, where all yearly calculations needed to reflect the 'America/New_York' (EST/EDT) timezone, even though our original data contained timestamp with time zone fields.

PostgreSQL Person of the Week Interview with Nisha Moond: Hi! I’m Nisha Moond, based in Bangalore, India - the tech hub. I have over 8+ years of experience in databases. I started my journey tweaking Oracle’s query optimizer and now contribute to the PostgreSQL OSS team at Fujitsu.

PostgreSQL links Blogs, podcasts, newsletters etc. Scaling Postgres 370 - New Scale Out Options (2025-06-15) Postgres Weekly Issue 603 (2025-06-12) Announcements PostgreSQL JDBC 42.7.7 Security update for CVE-2025-49146 (2025-06-13) powa-archivist 5.0.3 is out! (2025-06-11) pg_dumpbinary v2.20 released (2025-06-11) pgtt v4.3 released (2025-06-09) Pgpool-II 4.6.2 released.

BLOBs In PostgreSQL Previous Blog Post

I have already published a blog post about PostgreSQL blobs.

But due to someone posting to get help about another implementation on the PostgreSQL Chat Telegram group about a very unusual method to store blobs, I thought, that should now also be covered.

I did not cover that method, because it is one of the worst ideas to handle blobs inside PostgreSQL.

PG Day France 2025 took place on June 3 and 4 in Mons, Belgium, organized by Leila Bakkali, Matt Cornillon, Stefan Fercot, Flavio Gurgel, Anthony Nowocien, and Julien Riou, with the help of Jean-Paul Argud

Most applications start with a single PostgreSQL database, but over time, the need to scale out, distribute the load, or integrate naturally arises. PostgreSQL's logical replication is one of the features that meets these demands by streaming row-level changes from one PostgreSQL instance to another, all using a publish-subscribe model. Logical replication is more than an advanced feature; it provides a flexible framework you can build on to further distribute and integrate PostgreSQL within your architecture.

One of the things I admire most about PostgreSQL is its ease of getting started.

I have seen many developers and teams pick it up, launch something quickly, and build real value without needing a DBA or complex tooling. That simplicity is part of what makes PostgreSQL so widely adopted.

However, over time, as the application grows and traffic increases, new challenges emerge. Queries slow down, disk usage balloons, or a minor issue leads to unexpected downtime.

PostgreSQL 18 changes this week

Of note:

new GUC log_lock_failure renamed to log_lock_failures commit e5a3c9d9 (" postgres_fdw: Inherit the local transaction's access/deferrable modes. ") was reverted PostgreSQL 18 articles What's New in PostgreSQL 18 - a DBA's Perspective (2025-05-23) - Tianzhou

more...

Regular expressions and PostgreSQL have been a great team for many many years. The same is true for PostgreSQL arrays, which have been around for a long time as well. However, what people rarely do is combine those two technologies into something more powerful that can be used for various purposes.

pgsql_tweaks is a bundle of functions and views for PostgreSQL

The source code is available on GitLab, a mirror is hosted on GitHub.
One could install the whole package, or just copy what is needed from the source code.

The extension is also available on PGXN.

PostgreSQL Person of the Week Interview with Teresa Lopes: I am Teresa Lopes, born in Lisbon, Portugal. While living in Portugal, I always divided my time between Lisbon (house/school/work) and Sertã, Castelo Branco (weekends/holidays). At the end of 2023, I decided to move to Berlin and more recently relocated to Amsterdam (got to love the EU 💙💛).

The Call for Presentations for PostgreSQL Conference Europe that will take place in Riga, Latvia from October 21 to 24 is now open.

Key dates

• Submission deadline: 30 June (at midnight, local time Riga, Latvia; GMT+3)
• Speakers notified: before 1 August
• Conference: 21-24 October

To submit your proposals and for more information see our website. Speakers can submit up to three (3) proposed talks each.