Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

On a PostgreSQL build with assertions enabled, run the standard make check-world suite with a small debugging extension called pg_pathcheck loaded. It will report on pointers to freed memory in the planner's path lists. Such dangling pointers exist even in the core Postgres now. They are harmless today. But the word today is what makes this worth writing about.

We begin at allow_alter_system, which is both new and politically fraught — so let’s start with a fight. ALTER SYSTEM was added in 9.4 as a quality-of-life improvement: set GUCs from an SQL prompt, have the values written into postgresql.auto.conf, no shell access required. It was immediate…

For most of PostgreSQL’s history, the official community position on query hints has been a polite version of “no, and stop asking.” The position isn’t subtle. The PostgreSQL wiki maintains a page titled Not Worth Doing, and “Oracle-style optimizer hints” is li…

REPACK is a new PostgreSQL 19 feature for physically compacting a table by rewriting it into new storage. Like VACUUM, it deals with the space left behind by dead tuples, but it does so by building a fresh table file instead of mostly cleaning pages in place. Ordinary VACUUM can mark space reusable

The London PostgreSQL Meetup Group met on April 14, 2026 organized by:

• Valeria K. (Data Egret)
• Chris Ellis
• Alastair Turner
• Michael Christofides

Monica Sarbu spoke at the The San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup Group met virtually on April 14, 2026 organized by

Everyone who’s gone at least knee-deep in photography knows there’s this idea of the exposure triangle: aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. Depending on what you’re going for artistically, you adjust the three parameters, knowing that there are trade-offs in doing so. After working on a few cases, and presenting solutions to customers, I’ve started to think about Postgres performance tuning in a similar way – there are basic parameters that can be tuned, and there are trade-offs for the choices DBAs make:

pg_plan_advice is expected to land in PostgreSQL 19. That makes this a good moment to look at query hints — what they are, what every other major database does with them, and how PostgreSQL ended up being the obvious outlier. Three parts. This is the first. What a hint is A query hint is an instr…

You run SELECT * FROM orders in one psql session and see 50 million rows. A colleague in another session runs the same query at the same moment and sees 49,999,999. Neither of you is wrong, and neither is seeing stale data. You are both reading the same 8KB heap pages, the same bytes on disk.

Postgres table partitioning is one of those features that feels like a superpower right up until it isn't. Just define a partition key, carve up data into manageable chunks, and everything hums along beautifully. And what's not to love? Partition pruning in query plans, smaller tables, faster maintenance, easy archiving of old data; it's a smorgasbord of convenience.Then you try to enforce a unique constraint without including the partition key, and Postgres behaves as if you just asked it to divide by zero. Well... about that.

I have just completed the first draft of the Postgres 19 release notes. It includes little developer community feedback and still needs more XML markup and links. This year I have created a wiki page explaining the process I use.

On 3rd of April 2026, Daniel Gustafsson committed patch: Online enabling and disabling of data checksums   This allows data checksums to be enabled, or disabled, in a running cluster without restricting access to the cluster during processing.   Data checksums could prior to this only be enabled during initdb or when the cluster is … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Online enabling and disabling of data checksums"

Xata core is now available as open source under the Apache 2 license. It adds copy-on-write branching, scale-to-zero compute to Postgres.

In my previous blog, I walked through setting up the pgEdge MCP Server with a distributed PostgreSQL cluster, and connecting Claude to live database data through natural language. In this blog I want to look at a different problem: how do you build AI-powered search over your own content, without adding a separate vector database to your infrastructure?This is where the pgEdge Vectorizer and RAG Server come in.

Every year, PostgreSQL gets faster. Researchers benchmarking the optimizer from version 8 through 16 found an average 15% performance improvement per major release. That’s a decade of consistent, measurable progress. The project has been doing this since 1996. So when a headline claimed Linux 7.0 just halved PostgreSQL throughput, DBAs, Sys Admins, and DevOps started panicking (in particular, those working with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS which plan to ship Linux kernel 7.

Most AI projects do not fail because the model is weak. They fail because the seams around the model break under real-world constraints such as data truth, governance, and production reality.

This was my first time attending PGConf.India. That is a conference I wanted to visit for quite a while, heard good things about the it, but never had a chance before. During past years it overlapped with another conference I’m attending in Germany - but this year it worked out! Overall this is the 9th Indian PostgreSQL Conference, with no signs of slowing down. Stage at PGConf India 2026 The conference is well attended, and very vibrant.

This article examines how managed database services deliberately suppress access to the physical replication stream, turning operational convenience into permanent lock-in. It makes the case for a cloud-neutral stack — PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, and CloudNativePG — as the only architecture that returns full operational sovereignty to the organisation that owns the data.

Deploy ParadeDB on Railway with one click. Full-text search, vector search, and hybrid search over Postgres — now available on your favorite cloud platform.

In response to a generous corpus of real-world user feedback, we’ve been hard at work the past week adding a slew of updates to pg_clickhouse, the query interface for ClickHouse from Postgres. As usual, we focused on improving pushdown, especially for various date and time, array, and regular expression functions.

The Toulouse PostgreSQL User Group met on April 7, 2026 organized by

• Geoffrey Coulaud
• Xavier SIMON
• Jean-Christophe Arnu

Speakers: