Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

Finally I found time to get a grip on the issues I had with gohugo and get my blog operational again.

I’m taking the occasion to write about a project I care a lot as it’s strictly related with my hometown, the upcoming PGDay Napoli.

Every time I host a Postgres Meetup, I am thankful to everyone who comes. But today, I am especially thankful because so many people showed up despite the snowstorm! Staying after work to attend a meetup in these weather conditions demonstrates true dedication!

Many thanks to Steve Zelaznik for his wonderful presentations (recording will be available!), and thanks to all participants for listening, asking insightful questions, and a lively discussion afterward!

Anecdotally, this might be the most requested feature in SQL: Allow some trailing commas.

The classic example is

Another one is

There might be a few other popular ones. (Please send feedback.)

I have seen the error from the title reported often enough. If you are not familiar with the internals of PostgreSQL, the message will confuse you: what are xmin and relfrozenxid? Why is it a problem if one is before the other? So I think that it is worth the effort to write an article about the problem and what the error means. I'll also show you how to cope with the situation and fix the error.

After reading Paul's teasing article on Accessing Large Language Models with AI and testing out his code, I decided I should probably stop fighting this AI smothering. I still have a distrust of AI services but downloading an AI model and using on my own local desktop or server is nice and I can break bread with that. One use I tried is using AI to generate fake data and it did a pretty decent job.

For PostGIS Day this year I researched a little into one of my favourite topics, the history of relational databases. I feel like in general we do not pay a lot of attention to history in software development. To quote Yoda, “All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing.”

Postgres' ability to execute queries in parallel is a powerful feature that can significantly improve query performance, especially on large datasets. However, like all resources, parallel workers are finite. When there aren't enough available workers, Postgres may downgrade a parallel query to a serial (non-parallel) execution. This sounds reasonable unless the performance of the downgraded query is well beyond the required response times needed by the application.

Organizing Committee FOSDEM PGDay and the PostgreSQL dev room at FOSDEM:

Shayon Mukherjee: Scaling with PostgreSQL without boiling the ocean