Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

PGDay Austria is set to return to the beautiful city of Vienna on September 4th, 2025. And we’re already in the middle of organising the event. As several important deadlines are approaching, I want to share some things you need to know through this blog post. 

Have you ever wanted to get a random integer between 1 and 10 and been a little annoyed the slightly cryptic code you had to write in PostgreSQL? PostgreSQL 17 random functions make that simpler. Sometimes it's the small changes that bring the most joy.

Continue reading "PG 17 new random functions"

 Hot on the heels of release 19, release 19.1 fixes a bug in release 19 that caused some builds to fail.

Also as a small improvement it now collects the log from the meson test setup, so failures there can be diagnosed.

Working on big data loads and or data type changes can be tricky - especially finding and correcting individual errors across a large data set. Postgres versions, 16, 17, and newer have a new function to help with data validation: pg_input_is_valid .

pg_input_is_valid is a sql function that can be queried that will determine if a given input can be parsed into a specific type like numeric, date, JSON, etc. Here’s a super basic query to ask if ‘123’ is a valid integer.

When you’ve got a slow Postgres query, EXPLAIN and its parameters are incredibly useful for working out why.

However, the information returned can be difficult and time-consuming to interpret, especially for more complex queries. Over the years, people have built quite a few tools for visualizing Postgres query plans. As one of those people, I’m a little incredibly biased, but as a fan of many of the others, I hope to do them justice.

I’m happy to announce that some PostgreSQL colleagues and have once again organized the Extension Ecosystem Summit at PGConf.dev in Montréal on May 13.

Release 19 has two main features:

• Adjustment to the way we run cross version upgrade testing, to accommodate the recent statistics import feature
• Adjust to the new SEpgsql test setup

Also included

The concept of "normalization" is often the first thing people who are new to databases are going to learn. We are talking about one of the fundamental principles in the realm of databases. But what is the use of normalization in the first place? Well, we want to avoid redundancies in the data and make sure that information is stored in a way that helps reduce mistakes and inconsistencies. Ultimately, that is all there is to it: No redundancies, no mistakes, no inconsistencies.

It’s our sixth episode of Postgres Café, a collaborative podcast from Data Bene & Xata where we discuss everything from PostgreSQL extensions to community contributions. In today’s episode, Sarah Conway & Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek meet with Andrea Cucciniello on the topic of how companies and individuals can contribute to open source projects, and why they might consider doing so.

Mansplaining Explanation

Whatever the English version of Wikipedia is telling you, obviously wrongly, mansplaining is a form of sexism.

Women are still too often confronted by men who believe they know more than them. They are speaking or writing in a dismissing and/or infantilized way, always trying to imply their knowledge is far ahead of that of a woman.

Managing extensions is one of the biggest challenges in running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. In this article, I explain why I believe CloudNativePG—now a CNCF Sandbox project—is on the verge of a breakthrough. Two important new features for both PostgreSQL and Kubernetes—the extension_control_path option and image volumes—will guarantee immutability to extension container images.

Always good to be back in Brussels, and this year was a bit special. 25 years of FOSDEM, and they even ordered 2 days of sunshine for the entire weekend. I’m impressed! The green field outside the K building, in glaring sunshine In good tradition, PostgreSQL Europe organized a PGDay on Friday before FOSDEM. And we had a stand at the main FOSDEM event, and a Devroom on Sunday.

CommitFest 52 (2025-03), the final CommitFest in the PostgreSQL 18 development cycle, kicked off this week.

On Thursday, Feb 13th, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) released their regularly scheduled minor releases of PostgreSQL: 17.3, 16.7, 15.11, 14.16, and 13.19. These releases, among other bugfixes, resolved a CVE within PostgreSQL, so a sense of urgency in releasing them to our customers was bred.

On 21st of February 2025, Robert Haas committed patch: Allow EXPLAIN to indicate fractional rows.   When nloops > 1, we now display two digits after the decimal point, rather than none. This is important because what we print is actually planstate->instrument->ntuples / nloops, and sometimes what you want to know is planstate->instrument->ntuples.

• Gulcin Yildirim Jelinek organized the Prague PostgreSQL Meetup, February Edition. Belma Canik and Pavlo Golub spoke. Slides are available here.

On 7th of February 2025, Peter Eisentraut committed patch: Virtual generated columns   This adds a new variant of generated columns that are computed on read (like a view, unlike the existing stored generated columns, which are computed on write, like a materialized view).   The syntax for the column definition is   ... GENERATED … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 18 – Virtual generated columns"

The schedule for this year's edition of the conference is now published, You can find it here and it is also linked in the menu above. As many of you suggested to extend the conference to two days we have a second day full of amazing talks this year.

A big thank you goes to the Program Committee, they've spend quite some of their free time for putting together this great schedule.

The schedule for this year's edition of the conference is now published, You can find it here and it is also linked in the menu above. As many of you suggested to extend the conference to two days we have a second day full of amazing talks this year.

A big thank you goes to the Program Committee, they've spend quite some of their free time for putting together this great schedule.

We are thrilled to announce that PostgreSQL has been selected as one of the 185 open-source projects participating in the 21st year of Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! This is an exciting opportunity for us to collaborate with new contributors and continue enhancing the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Join Us as a GSoC Contributor

If you’re passionate about open-source development and eager to work on PostgreSQL projects, here’s how you can get involved: