Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

PostgreSQL Person of the Week Interview with Emma Saroyan: I’m Emma Saroyan, a Developer Advocate from Yerevan, Armenia. Since graduating from university, I’ve been working with tech startups and actively contributing to open-source communities by mentoring, giving talks, and organising meetups.

CommitFest 52 (2025-03), the final CommitFest in the PostgreSQL 18 development cycle, is past the halfway stage, and this week has seen a number of new features.

I was recently looking into some workloads that generate a lot of I/O and CPU contention on some very high-write code paths and came across synchronous_commit (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/wal-async-commit.html). It can be very tempting to turn this off globally because the performance gains in terms of I/O, CPU, and TPS (transactions per second) are very hard to overlook. I noticed I/O completely gone, CPU down 20% (at peak), and a 30% increase in TPS.

 Artificial Intelligence is one of those conundrums where the ability to have some tasks handled for you contrasts with a mix of ego and pride that it may be better than you at those tasks.  I recently wrote a blog using another database about an AI-generated SQL that was quite sophisticated. But what about asking an AI to create a table with a specification like a DBA/SRE/Analyst might receive?

On March 6 and 7, PostgreSQL@SCaLE22x took place in Pasadena, California. The PostgreSQL team organized and volunteered at the event, with PGUS hosting the booth. The list of involved volunteers:

Now – to the afternoon sessions (see Part I for morning sessions)

What's your favourite infinite sequence of non-repeating digits? There are some people who make a case for e, but to my mind nothing beats the transcendental and curvy utility of π, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

Drawing circles is a simple thing to do in PostGIS -- take a point, and buffer it. The result is circular, and we can calculate an estimate of pi just by measuring the perimeter of the unit circle.

SELECT ST_Buffer('POINT(0 0)', 1.0);

This option didn’t seem super widely documented from my initial searches online; it should be able to basically enforce layer 4 ingress/firewall rules at the individual service level. This is a quick test to check if it works.

"PostgreSQL scales" - we have all heard this phrase over and over again. However, the question is: What does this actually mean? Does it mean 1 million rows? Or maybe even 1 billion rows? So, on a rainy weekend, I decided to do a little experiment to figure out if it is possible to squeeze 1 trillion rows (= 1000 billion rows) into my local personal computer.

For those of you who don't believe this to be possible - here is proof:

On 5th of March 2025, Andrew Dunstan committed patch: Allow json{b}_strip_nulls to remove null array elements   An additional paramater ("strip_in_arrays") is added to these functions. It defaults to false. If true, then null array elements are removed as well as null valued object fields. JSON that just consists of a single null is not … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 18 – Allow json{b}_strip_nulls to remove null array elements"

Hi Postgres community, apologies for the delay one more time – here is the recording of our February meetup! If you didn’t have a chance to attend in person or virtual, please take a moment to watch! You won’t be disappointed!

Also, one more reminder that our March meetup will take place later in the month than usual: on March 25. That will be the last meetup before PG Day Chicago, and I hope you will be able to attend!

On 3rd of March 2025, Tomas Vondra committed patch: Allow parallel CREATE INDEX for GIN indexes   Allow using parallel workers to build a GIN index, similarly to BTREE and BRIN. For large tables this may result in significant speedup when the build is CPU-bound.   The work is divided so that each worker builds … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 18 – Allow parallel CREATE INDEX for GIN indexes"

© Laurenz Albe 2025

I have worked with PostgreSQL since 2006. Still, I keep learning about new aspects of PostgreSQL regularly. Sometimes it feels like the more I know, the better I see that I have yet a lot to learn. Often, beginners' questions in a training session make me learn something new! Today, my co-worker Pavlo told be about the PostgreSQL parameter stats_fetch_consistency. Probably not a parameter that you want to tune every day, but you never know.

I have always been a fan of RANGE partitioning using a date/time value in PostgreSQL. This isn't always possible, however, and I recently came across a scenario where a table had grown large enough that it had to be partitioned, and the only reasonable key to use was a UUID styled identifier.

The goal of this post is to highlight when and why hashing your data across partitions in PostgreSQL might be a better approach.

Range vs. Hash Partitioning in PostgreSQL

Range Partitioning (A Quick Recap)

PostgreSQL Person of the Week Interview with Doug Ortiz: Consider myself a Technologist first and foremost that enjoys immersing into new and emerging technologies and trends. As to where I am from, I am originally a New Yorker that has moved around multiple continents and the USA.

pgNow is a free, cross-platform desktop tool created by Redgate that helps you identify key performance metrics and configuration optimizations in your running Postgres instance. Available now as a public preview application, it’s designed to help when you’re in a pinch and don’t have the Postgres experience or monitoring solution already in place to help ... Read more

A new version with an interesting improvement in the configuration management.

pgenv 1.4.0 is out!

pgenv 1.4.0 is out with an interesting improvement regarding the configuration management.

There are still seats available for this entire day dedicated to PostgreSQL!

OpenDay 2025 by PgTraining

PgTraining is organizing a free for all entire day dedicated to PostgreSQL, where people is going to meet by face.

The event, that will be held in the great NOI Techpark in Bolzano (Italy) will be organized in two parts:

CommitFest 52 (2025-03), the final CommitFest in the PostgreSQL 18 development cycle, is underway.

Here, I am describing the results of a Postgres extension I developed out of curiosity. This extension focuses on the automatic management of extended statistics for table columns. The idea originated while I was finishing another "smart" query-driven project aimed at enhancing the quality of Postgres query planning. I realised that Postgres is not yet equipped enough for fully autonomous poor query plan detection and adjustment optimisations. Therefore, it might be beneficial to approach the problem from a different angle and create an autonomous, data-driven helper.