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© Laurenz Albe 2025

I have worked with PostgreSQL since 2006. Still, I keep learning about new aspects of PostgreSQL regularly. Sometimes it feels like the more I know, the better I see that I have yet a lot to learn. Often, beginners' questions in a training session make me learn something new! Today, my co-worker Pavlo told be about the PostgreSQL parameter stats_fetch_consistency. Probably not a parameter that you want to tune every day, but you never know.

I have always been a fan of RANGE partitioning using a date/time value in PostgreSQL. This isn't always possible, however, and I recently came across a scenario where a table had grown large enough that it had to be partitioned, and the only reasonable key to use was a UUID styled identifier.

The goal of this post is to highlight when and why hashing your data across partitions in PostgreSQL might be a better approach.

Range vs. Hash Partitioning in PostgreSQL

Range Partitioning (A Quick Recap)

PostgreSQL Person of the Week Interview with Doug Ortiz: Consider myself a Technologist first and foremost that enjoys immersing into new and emerging technologies and trends. As to where I am from, I am originally a New Yorker that has moved around multiple continents and the USA.

pgNow is a free, cross-platform desktop tool created by Redgate that helps you identify key performance metrics and configuration optimizations in your running Postgres instance. Available now as a public preview application, it’s designed to help when you’re in a pinch and don’t have the Postgres experience or monitoring solution already in place to help ... Read more

A new version with an interesting improvement in the configuration management.

pgenv 1.4.0 is out!

pgenv 1.4.0 is out with an interesting improvement regarding the configuration management.

There are still seats available for this entire day dedicated to PostgreSQL!

OpenDay 2025 by PgTraining

PgTraining is organizing a free for all entire day dedicated to PostgreSQL, where people is going to meet by face.

The event, that will be held in the great NOI Techpark in Bolzano (Italy) will be organized in two parts:

CommitFest 52 (2025-03), the final CommitFest in the PostgreSQL 18 development cycle, is underway.

Here, I am describing the results of a Postgres extension I developed out of curiosity. This extension focuses on the automatic management of extended statistics for table columns. The idea originated while I was finishing another "smart" query-driven project aimed at enhancing the quality of Postgres query planning. I realised that Postgres is not yet equipped enough for fully autonomous poor query plan detection and adjustment optimisations. Therefore, it might be beneficial to approach the problem from a different angle and create an autonomous, data-driven helper.

I am behind the rest of the Postgres Community members attending SCaLE 22x, who have already posted a lot! In my defense, all the talks were so interesting that I could not skip any, even though I had to beat the Arctic cold of Ballroom G!

In addition to the regular program, Jimmy Angelakos had a live stream before the start of the talks both on Thursday and Friday and here are the links (I am in the first one).

As I said, I loved all the talks, although one or two ended up being not what I thought they will be, but interesting nevertheless).

High Availability of databases is one of major Enterprise-grade features required by any Organization. It is important that databases are always accessible, minimizing downtime and maintaining business continuity. In the world of databases like PostgreSQL or Oracle or SQL Server, High Availability is achievable with the introduction of a Standby (or Replica), that continuously replicates […]

PGDay Austria is set to return to the beautiful city of Vienna on September 4th, 2025. And we’re already in the middle of organising the event. As several important deadlines are approaching, I want to share some things you need to know through this blog post. 

Have you ever wanted to get a random integer between 1 and 10 and been a little annoyed the slightly cryptic code you had to write in PostgreSQL? PostgreSQL 17 random functions make that simpler. Sometimes it's the small changes that bring the most joy.

Continue reading "PG 17 new random functions"

 Hot on the heels of release 19, release 19.1 fixes a bug in release 19 that caused some builds to fail.

Also as a small improvement it now collects the log from the meson test setup, so failures there can be diagnosed.

Working on big data loads and or data type changes can be tricky - especially finding and correcting individual errors across a large data set. Postgres versions, 16, 17, and newer have a new function to help with data validation: pg_input_is_valid .

pg_input_is_valid is a sql function that can be queried that will determine if a given input can be parsed into a specific type like numeric, date, JSON, etc. Here’s a super basic query to ask if ‘123’ is a valid integer.

When you’ve got a slow Postgres query, EXPLAIN and its parameters are incredibly useful for working out why.

However, the information returned can be difficult and time-consuming to interpret, especially for more complex queries. Over the years, people have built quite a few tools for visualizing Postgres query plans. As one of those people, I’m a little incredibly biased, but as a fan of many of the others, I hope to do them justice.

I’m happy to announce that some PostgreSQL colleagues and have once again organized the Extension Ecosystem Summit at PGConf.dev in Montréal on May 13.

Release 19 has two main features:

• Adjustment to the way we run cross version upgrade testing, to accommodate the recent statistics import feature
• Adjust to the new SEpgsql test setup

Also included

The concept of "normalization" is often the first thing people who are new to databases are going to learn. We are talking about one of the fundamental principles in the realm of databases. But what is the use of normalization in the first place? Well, we want to avoid redundancies in the data and make sure that information is stored in a way that helps reduce mistakes and inconsistencies. Ultimately, that is all there is to it: No redundancies, no mistakes, no inconsistencies.

It’s our sixth episode of Postgres Café, a collaborative podcast from Data Bene & Xata where we discuss everything from PostgreSQL extensions to community contributions. In today’s episode, Sarah Conway & Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek meet with Andrea Cucciniello on the topic of how companies and individuals can contribute to open source projects, and why they might consider doing so.

Mansplaining Explanation

Whatever the English version of Wikipedia is telling you, obviously wrongly, mansplaining is a form of sexism.

Women are still too often confronted by men who believe they know more than them. They are speaking or writing in a dismissing and/or infantilized way, always trying to imply their knowledge is far ahead of that of a woman.