Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

I have pushed  Release 18 of the PostgreSQL Buildfarm client

In addition to numerous minor tweaks and bug fixes, the following changes are made:

I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago entitled Is pg_dump a Backup Tool?. In that post, I argued in the affirmative, but also said that it's probably shouldn't be your primary backup mechanism. For that, you probably shouldn't directly use anything that is included in PostgreSQL itself, but rather a well-maintained third-party backup tool such as barman or pgbackrest.

PostgreSQL is one of the most loved databases, especially by developers, for its simplicity, easy configurations, and massive community support. It's an open-source powerhouse known for handling everything from small projects to large-scale applications. 

While major cloud providers, like AWS, Google, and Microsoft offer robust solutions for hosting databases on the cloud, not all businesses can or want to go this route

• On October 22nd the Extensions Ecosystem Summit took place, as an unofficial side event of PGConf EU in Athens. Supported by Tembo](https://tembo.io/), Percona, Xata, and Timescale, 5 speakers shared their (experience working on) extensions, followed by an open space / contribution fest meant to attract new contributors to the projects.

(A quick interlude in our series on locales and character encodings in PostgreSQL.)

C/POSIX locale is only useful if you know that you will never have characters in your strings other than 7-bit ASCII, or you are 100% sure that you are never going to have mixed client encodings. If you do have non-7-bit-ASCII characters with mixed client encodings, zaniness can result:

For the first time we have a guest writer, Emma Saroyan.

Discovering PostgreSQL - My Journey

I recently traveled from Armenia to New York City to speak at PGConf NYC 2024, organized by PgUS. PostgreSQL, originally called Postgres, is the #1 open source relational database in the world. I gave a talk about my journey into discovering Postgres, and it was an inspiring experience engaging with the PostgreSQL community, sharing insights, and learning about the latest advancements in the field.

Last week I MCed the first Extension Ecosystem Summit EU and attended my first at PGConf EU in Athens, Greece. Despite my former career as an archaeologist — with a focus on Mediterranean cultures, no less! — this was my first visit to Greece.

• On October 15th, Paul Jungwirth presented temporal INSERT at the Chicago PostgreSQL User Group (PUG) meetup. You can find the recording and write-up here.

You followed all the best practices, your sales dates are stored in perfect timestamp format …. but now you need to get reports by day, week, quarters, and months. You need to bin, bucket, and roll up sales data in easy to view reports. Do you need a BI tool? Not yet actually. Your Postgres database has hundreds of functions that let you query data analytics by date. By using some good old fashioned SQL - you have powerful analysis and business intelligence with date details on any data set.

When dealing with very large PostgreSQL tables (we’re talking 15TB+), sometimes routine maintenance like archiving very old data can become surprisingly challenging. Despite having good indexes. I recently faced this issue when trying to clean up very old data on a very large and legacy table. The Problem Initial approach used standard ID-based pagination.

PostgreSQL documentation is, generally speaking, great. But it isn't the easiest thing to search in. Over the years I memorized urls to certain docs, but there is a limit to it. What's more, there are certain inconsistencies. For example – most pages that describe program have name that starts with app-. But not all. Some … Continue reading "New way to search PostgreSQL documentation"

We recently hit an interesting case where planner picked wrong plan. Kinda. And figured it could be used to show how to deal with such cases. So, we have some databases on PostgreSQL 14 (yes, I know, we should upgrade, but it is LONG project to upgrade, so it's not really on the table now). … Continue reading "Case study: optimization of weirdly picked bad plan"

Structured Query Language (SQL) is the standard language for managing and manipulating relational databases. It serves as the core mechanism for interacting with databases, enabling users to perform tasks such as querying data, updating records, and managing database structures. SQL’s declarative nature makes it ideal for retrieving and modifying data, but it has limitations when it comes to implementing complex business logic directly within the database.

The next Prague PostgreSQL Meetup will take place on October 29th!

PostgreSQL Europe Conference 2024

This years conference took place in Athens, Greece from October 22nd until October 25th.
It has been the biggest European PostgreSQL conference so far with more than 780 attendees.

I am very proud that my company, ProOpenSource OÜ, has sponsored each PostgreSQL Europe Conference since the company has been founded.

This is the second installment in our discussion of locales, character encodings, and collations in PostgreSQL. In this installment, we’ll talk about character encodings as they relate to PostgreSQL.

A quick reminder!

A character encoding is a mapping between code points (that is, numbers) and glyphs (what us programmers usually call characters). There are lots, and lots, and lots of different character encodings, most of them some superset of good old 7-bit ASCII.

If you are not familiar with the quote.

This is part one of a series on PostgreSQL and collations, and how to use them without tears. This is an introduction to the general concepts of glyphs, character encodings, collations, and locales.

Glyphs

There is (as always in things involving real human behavior) some controversy over what is a gylph and what isn’t, but as a first approximation, we can use this definition:

Next month, I'll be hosting a discussion of a talk by Andy Pavlo, given for his Intro to Database Systems course at CMU. The title of the talk is "Memory & Disk I/O Management and the video link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoewwZwVmv4. As usual, we have will have three sessions, and you can sign up to participate in one of them using this form.

Learn about the latest changes in pgroll in the 0.7.0 release as we continue developing it into a leading open-source schema migration tool for Postgres.

As many of my followers may recall, we had the pleasure of Paul Jungwirth presenting at the Chicago PUG meetup on October 15. I have high hopes for having true temporal data support in Postgres 18, and I wanted to know all the details of what to expect. I believe I can speak on behalf of everyone who watched and was present on October 15, either in person or virtually – it was an exceptional talk! I do not recall any other meetups where so many people asked me about the recording – and it is finally here!

Enjoy!