Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

Quick announcement to say that I’ve replaced the ancient markdown parser with a new one, discount, which supports tables, code fences, definition lists, and more. I reindexed pg_clickhouse this morning and it’s sooo nice to see the table properly formatted.

PostgreSQL 17 introduced streaming I/O – grouping multiple page reads into a single system call and using smarter posix_fadvise() hints. That alone gave up to ~30% faster sequential scans in some workloads, but it was still strictly synchronous: each backend process would issue a read and then sit there waiting for the kernel to return data before proceeding. Before PG17, PostgreSQL typically read one 8kB page at a time.

Earlier this year we started a program (“Developer U”) to help colleagues who show promise for PostgreSQL Development to become contributors. Meet: Nishant Sharma, Staff SDE, who maintains a list of places in the world he has yet to visit.

Data privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA have made it increasingly important for organisations to protect personally identifiable information (PII) in their databases. Whether you're creating a development environment from production data, sharing datasets with third parties, or simply trying to minimise risk, you'll often need to anonymise sensitive data whilst maintaining the structure and relationships within your database.I've been working on a tool to address this need: .

On December 11, the PGDay CERN 2026 CfP committee met to finalize the talk selection. The committee members are listed here:

From time to time I see questions from otherwise well informed people about how the PostgreSQL Build farm checks how pg_upgrade checking is done across versions, e.g. how does it check upgrading from release 9.5 to release 18. I realize that this isn't well documented anywhere, so here is a description of the process.

All of the code referenced here can be found at https://github.com/PGBuildFarm/client-code.

PostgreSQL maintenance doesn't have to mean downtime anymore. With pgEdge's zero-downtime node addition, you can perform critical maintenance tasks like version upgrades, hardware replacements, and cluster expansions without interrupting production workloads. Your applications stay online. Your users stay connected.

There is common misconception that troubles most developers using PostgreSQL: tune VACUUM or run VACUUM, and your database will stay healthy. Dead tuples will get cleaned up. Transaction IDs recycled. Space reclaimed. Your database will live happily ever after.

But there are couple of dirty "secrets" people are not aware of. First of them being VACUUM is lying to you about your indexes.