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PostgreSQL 19 ships with parallel autovacuum. The new GUC autovacuum_max_parallel_workers caps the cluster-wide pool, and the per-table storage parameter autovacuum_parallel_workers lets you tune individual tables. Workers come out of the existing max_parallel_workers budget. Off by default. Good…

Stephen O’Grady’s State of Open Source Licensing in 2026 at RedMonk is essential reading. The headline finding — that the long shift from copyleft to permissive licensing has continued, with Apache and MIT consolidating their dominance among the survivors — surprises no one who has be…

pgBackRest is an open source backup and restore tool for PostgreSQL. It’s fair to say it’s one of the most popular options, widely used across the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

PGConf Germany 2026 took place on April 21 and April 22 2026 in Essen, Germany

Organized by:

• Andreas Kretschmer
• Andreas Scherbaum
• Cornelia Biacsics
• Daniel Westermann
• Danilo Endesfelder
• Dirk Krautschik
• Julia Gugel
• Kai Wagner
• Sascha Spettmann

Speaker:

Yesterday, David Steele announced the end of life of pgBackRest — a PostgreSQL backup tool he maintained for thirteen years. The reasons are structural, not personal, and they are a reminder of a pattern we see too often in open-source infrastructure. This article reflects on what that means, on the architectural rivalry between pgBackRest and Barman, and on why CloudNativePG users can take confidence from both the project’s CNCF governance and the virtuous cycle of commercial support that sustains it.

© Laurenz Albe 2026

Over the years of training, consulting and supporting PostgreSQL users, I have come up with a number of queries to monitor autovacuum. Monitoring autovacuum is not a new requirement, so there are already many existing monitoring queries. However, not all of those queries are useful. So I thought it might be a good idea to write an article about my own collection, both as a reference for myself and as a service for PostgreSQL administrators everywhere.

archive_mode is the master switch for WAL archiving. With the last three posts under our belts — archive_cleanup_command, archive_command, archive_library — we now get to the parameter that decides whether any of that machinery runs at all. Three values: off (default), on, and always. Context is …

Yesterday David Steele announced that he is stepping away from pgBackRest. After thirteen years, the most widely-deployed dedicated backup tool in the PostgreSQL ecosystem is no longer maintained. The current release, v2.58.0, is the last release. Steele asks that any forks pick a new name, which…

For thirty years, the answer to “how do I get the DDL for this object?” in PostgreSQL has been: shell out to pg_dump -s and grep. Every tool that has ever needed to reconstruct an object definition — migration tools, schema diff utilities, \d replacements, every ORM that has tried to …

For about fifteen years the answer to “can I turn on data checksums without an initdb?” has been “not really.” pg_checksums showed up in PostgreSQL 12 and made the job survivable, but you still had to shut the cluster down. For anyone running 24×7 production, that has left…

Introduction

When people first start reading PostgreSQL execution plans, they quickly learn a few common scan types: Seq Scan, Index Scan, Index Only Scan. But eventually another one appears that is less obvious: Bitmap Heap Scan, which is almost always accompanied by Bitmap Index Scan.

Before getting into this one, an errata against the previous post. I said backup tools “can register as an archive_library and bypass archive_command entirely” on PostgreSQL 15+. That is what the feature was designed to enable. It is not what the ecosystem has actually shipped. More o…

I have been recommending pgBackRest as the best backup tool for PostgreSQL for years. I even wrote a blog post about it. My students at Université Lyon I were able to backup, restore, and perform PITR in four hours with zero prior knowledge of the tool. That is how good it was. I say “was” because David Steele, the sole maintainer of pgBackRest, has announced on the project’s GitHub page that he is stopping all work on the project.

Last post’s deferred party has arrived. archive_command is how WAL segments leave the primary and travel somewhere durable — the substrate on top of which point-in-time recovery, warm standbys, and every serious backup tool are built. It is also, in the classic formulation, a shell command …

Alphabetical order delivers our first casualty. archive_cleanup_command is a standby-server knob that exists entirely to tidy up after archive_command, which the alphabet insists on deferring until the next post. So we will describe how to sweep up a party we have not yet thrown. The briefest-pos…

Last year’s acquisitions have now shipped products, and for the first time it is possible to compare the Snowflake and Databricks “Postgres-in-the-lakehouse” strategies as real things rather than as marketing decks. The acquisitions: Snowflake bought Crunchy Data in June 2025 (a…

The previous post on the Linux 7.0 pgbench regression ended with the same instruction every other Postgres performance post ends with: set huge pages. This post is the long version. If you have read the Postgres docs on huge_pages and you’re still not completely sure what /proc/meminfo is t…

There's a persistent belief in the database world that vertical scaling solves all problems. Need more throughput? Add CPUs. Running out of cache? More RAM. Queries hitting disk? Higher IOPS. It's a comforting philosophy because it's simple, and for a surprisingly long time, it works. A single beefy Postgres instance can handle an enormous amount of punishment before collapsing under the strain.But there's a ceiling up there, and it's not made of hardware.

Do family meetups always devolve into SQL?

Most GUCs in this series will be operationally irrelevant to most readers. This one is not. application_name is the single cheapest piece of observability infrastructure PostgreSQL ships, and an astonishing number of production databases are running with it unset or stuck at a client library&rsqu…