Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

PostgreSQL 18 brings a couple of performance related features to the table which will help applications to run more efficiently, providing a better and more enjoyable user experience. One of those performance features is called “skip scans”. Most of you might ask yourself at this point: Wow, sounds cool, but what is a skip scan? The purpose of this post is to shed some light and explain how this works, what it does and most importantly: How one can benefit from this feature in real life.

Making GROUP BY a bit easier to use is in my experience among the top three requested features in SQL.

Like, if you do

CREATE TABLE t1 (a int, b int, ...); SELECT a, avg(b) FROM t1 GROUP BY a;

the column list in the GROUP BY clause doesn’t convey much information. Of course you wanted to group by a, there is no other reasonable alternative. You can’t not group by a because that would be an error, and you can’t group by things besides a, because there is nothing else in the select list other than the aggregate.

Your API is slowing down. You check your database and find 42 indexes on your users table. Which ones can you safely drop? How much performance are they costing you? Let's look at what actually happens in Postgres when you have too many indexes.

If you're a backend or full-stack engineer, you probably don't want to become an indexing expert — you just want your API fast and stable, without babysitting pg_stat_user_indexes.

This quarter's round of minor releases are expected later this week. Note this will be the last minor release for PostgreSQL 13 .

New podcast episode published by Claire Giordano from her series “Talking Postgres” : Building a dev experience for Postgres in VS Code with Rob Emanuele

Blog posts

• Ellyne Phneah Key takeaways from the PostgreSQL & AI Summit: RAG, agents, and tuning

PostgreSQL 19 changes this week EXPLAIN wal_fpi_bytes value exposed in EXPLAIN (WAL) pg_stat_wal column wal_fpi_bytes added pg_stat_get_backend_wal() output column wal_fpi_bytes added psql prompt configuration option %S added, showing the current value of search_path PostgreSQL 19 articles Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Add psql PROMPT variable for search_path.

Postgres has an awesome amount of data collected in its own internal tables. Postgres hackers know all about this  - but software developers and folks working with day to day Postgres tasks often miss out the good stuff.

The Postgres catalog is how Postgres keeps track of itself. Of course, Postgres would do this in a relational database with its own schema. Throughout the years several nice features have been added to the internal tables like psql tools and views that make navigating Postgres’ internal tables even easier.