Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

For next month, I'm scheduling 2 or 3 discussions of Matthias van de Meent's talk, Improving scalability; Reducing overhead in shared memory, given at 2025.pgconf.dev (talk description here).

A couple times within the past month, I’ve had people send me a message asking if I have any suggestions about where to learn postgres. I like to share the collection of links that I’ve accumulated (and please send me more, if you have good ones!) but another thing I always say is that the public postgres slack is a nice place to see people asking questions (Discord, Telegram and IRC also have thriving Postgres user communities).

Huge thanks to everyone who came to the Prairie Postgres meetup and celebrated our first birthday with us! Thank you for helping me to rehearse my talk, and for your insightful questions!

Here are my presentation slides:

If you’ve been following the buzz around PostgreSQL, you’ve probably already heard that database level open source data-at-rest encryption is now available thanks to the Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) extension available in the Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL. So naturally, the next question is:

Where’s Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 18?

The short answer:

It’s coming.

The slightly longer one:

It’s taking a bit of time, for all the right reasons.

System outages, hardware failures, or accidental data loss can strike without warning. What determines whether operations resume smoothly or grind to a halt is the strength of the disaster recovery setup. PostgreSQL is built with powerful features that make reliable recovery possible.

This post takes a closer look at how these components work together behind the scenes to protect data integrity, enable consistent restores, and ensure your database can recover from any failure scenario.

Something I’ve presented about recently (a couple times, now!) is how we can make AI actually useful with Postgres. Not the mystical robot overlord kind of AI that people worry about, but the practical, math-heavy kind that can actually help solve real problems with the data you already have.Let me be clear up front: AI isn't magic. It's math. Lots and lots of math. And if you can write SQL queries (which, let's be honest, is why you're here), you can build AI applications with Postgres. Let me show you how.

As was discussed in #PostgresMarathon 2-002, for a simple SELECT from a table, at planning time, Postgres locks the table and all of its indexes with AccessShareLock. A simple demo to remind it (let me be a bit weird here and save some bytes when typing SQL):

By default, the PostgreSQL JDBC driver fetches all rows at once and attempts to load them into memory vs. other drivers such as Oracle that by default only fetches 10 rows at a time. Both defaults have pros and cons, however in the context of the types of workloads I see every day, the PostgreSQL default is typically not optimal.

I recently did three interviews for Edd Mann's Compiled Conversations. The first is a general interview about the Postgres project, its history, and challenges. The other is a two-part (1, 2) interview about how a table is created and populated internally. Total recording time is 3.5 hours.

At PGDay Lowlands 2025, I had the chance to give my very first Lightning Talk. My topic? The idea of thinking about PostgreSQL as a village.

It was inspired by a phrase I recently came across: ”If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” (I’m not sure who first said this, but I really like it.)

I hope everyone's looking forward to PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2025 in Riga next week!

I can't wait to see all of my favourite Postgres people, and meet some new ones.

On 3rd of October 2025, Tatsuo Ishii committed patch: Add IGNORE NULLS/RESPECT NULLS option to Window functions.   Add IGNORE NULLS/RESPECT NULLS option (null treatment clause) to lead, lag, first_value, last_value and nth_value window functions. If unspecified, the default is RESPECT NULLS which includes NULL values in any result calculation. IGNORE NULLS ignores NULL values.

Are you in the Pacific Northwest?

#PostgresMarathon 2-007: Should we worry about pg_blocking_pids()'s observer effect?

Many years ago, when developing complex automated procedures for a large company, I realized that my automation needs monitoring components. Including understanding heavyweight lock contention – for example, to recognize situations when a poorly designed change is blocked by things like autovacuum running in transaction ID wraparound prevention mode (it doesn't yield to anybody, when in this mode).

Hi

sparql_fdw Forreign Data Wrapper

The sparql_fdw is a foreign data wrapper to connect to query web databases with the SPARQL protocol from inside PostgreSQL written in Python.

Test Against PostgreSQL 18

As multicorn2 is already working with PostgreSQL 18, I tested the sparql_fdw, too.

🥐 We're excited to invite you to the Postgres Women Breakfast, hosted by the PostgreSQL Europe Diversity Committee, during PGConf.EU 2025 in Riga, Latvia! 🇱🇻

This breakfast is a wonderful opportunity to connect with other women in the PostgreSQL community, share experiences, and build meaningful relationships in a welcoming environment. Whether you're a long-time contributor or new to the community, we'd love to have you join us!

Here are the details:

I am kicking off a short blog series on PostGIS performance fundamentals. For this first example, we will cover fundamental indexing.

We will explore performance using the Natural Earth “admin0” (countries) data (258 polygons) and their “populated places” (7342 points).

A classic spatial query is the “spatial join”, finding the relationships between objects using a spatial contain.

“How many populated places are there within each country?”

Recently, we worked on a production PostgreSQL database where a customer reported that a specific SELECT query was performing extremely slowly. The issue was critical since this query was part of a daily business process that directly impacted their operations.

The setting max_locks_per_transaction is mysterious, it is a good illustration of Socrates' "I know that I know nothing". This is the main fact to memorize about max_locks_per_transaction. Don't try to remember details. Unless you touch it often, you'll forget (I do). Instead, let's rely on the docs: