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Trust, Governance, Talent, and the Enterprise Reality of PostgreSQL

Last year at the CIO Summit Mumbai, I had the opportunity to participate in a leadership roundtable with CIOs across banking, fintech, telecom, manufacturing, and digital enterprises.

The session was not a product showcase.

Let’s face it, there are a multitude of High Availability tools for managing Postgres clusters. This landscape evolved over a period of decades to reach its current state, and there’s a lot of confusion in the community as a result.

Every query starts with a plan. Every slow query probably starts with a bad one. And more often than not, the statistics are to blame. But how does it really work? PostgreSQL doesn't run the query to find out — it estimates the cost. It reads pre-computed data from pg_class and pg_statistic and does the maths to figure out the cheapest path to your data.

AI-driven pressure on open source maintainers, reviewers and, even, contributors, has been very much in the news lately. Nobody needs another set of edited highlights on the theme from me.

AI-driven pressure on open source maintainers, reviewers and, even, contributors, has been very much in the news lately. Nobody needs another set of edited highlights on the theme from me. For a Postgres-specific view, and insight on how low quality AI outputs affect contributors, Tomas Vondra published a great post on his blog recently [https://vondra.me/posts/the-ai-inversion/], which referenced an interesting talk by Robert Haas [https://www.pgevents.ca/events/pgconfdev2025/schedule/session/254-committer-review-an-exercise-in-paranoia/] at PGConf.dev in Montreal last year.

The random_page_cost was introduced ~25 years ago, and since the very beginning it’s set to 4.0 by default. The storage changed a lot since then, and so did the Postgres code. It’s likely the default does not quite match the reality. But what value should you use instead? Flash storage is much better at handling random I/O, so maybe you should reduce the default? Some places go as far as recommending setting it to 1.0, same as seq_page_cost. Is this intuition right?

Postgres has a big range of user-facing features that work across many different use cases — with complex abstraction under the hood. 

Working with APIs and arrays in the jsonb type has become increasingly popular recently, and storing pieces of application data using jsonb has become a common design pattern.

But why shred a JSON object into rows and columns and then rehydrate it later to send it back to the client?

Thank you, Shaun, for presenting, and huge thanks to all participants for an engaging and productive discussion!

As always, I am glad that people from all over the world can join us virtually, but if you are local, consider coming next time! We have pizza, and you can’t consume it virtually!

During FOSDEM I had a chance to join a presentation of the backup procedure that the engineers from GitLab followed to decrease the downtime during major upgrades. I highly recommend the talk, definitely worth watching!

Your LLM application is probably answering the same question dozens of times a day. It just doesn't realize it because the words are different each time.

Discover the exciting lineup of PostgreSQL speakers and exciting topics that await you on the schedule for this year.

See you in Essen in April

Here's a database riddle: you have two tables with data connected by a foreign key. The foreign key field is set as not null and the constraint is valid and enforced. You execute a query that joins these two tables and you get no results! How is that possible? We thought it wasn't possible, but a recent incident revealed an edge case we never thought about.

In this article I show how under some circumstances row locks with joins can produce surprising results, and suggest ways to prevent it.

New podcast episode “Why it's fun to hack on Postgres performance“ with Tomas Vondra published on February 20 2026 by Claire Giordano and Aaron Wislang from the series “Talking Postgres”.

Hyderabad PostgreSQL User Group met on February 20, organized by Hari Kiran, Ameen Abbas and Rajesh Madiwale.

Speaker:

Open Source communities are trying to quickly adapt to the present rapid advances in technology. I would like to propose some clarity around something that should be common sense.

Automated emails are spam. They always have been. Openclaw (and whatever new thing surfaces this summer) is no different.

If you’ve ever run an insert statement in a terminal or an IDE, you’ve seen it: the cryptic insert 0 1 message. While it looks like a bit of ancient binary, it’s actually a precise status report from the database engine. The Anatomy of a Command Tag 🔗In PostgreSQL, every successful command returns a “Command Tag.” For an insertion, the format is: INSERT [oid] [rows] The “0” (oid1): Historically, Postgres could assign an internal Object ID to every row.

I’ve updated one of my PostgreSQL instances to PostgreSQL 18, it’s time to update the others. This time, I’m going to try pg_update. My usual approach is pg_dump and pg_restore.

As this is my first attempt doing this, I’m posting this mostly for future reference when I try this again. There will be another blog post when I try this again. Which should be soon. This paragraph will link to that post when it is available.

In this post:

A migration case with only a JAR and no source code shows why Oracle syntax compatibility is not always a fake requirement, and how IvorySQL + Pigsty can absorb legacy debt at low cost.

On 9th of February 2026, Álvaro Herrera committed patch: Allow log_min_messages to be set per process type   Change log_min_messages from being a single element to a comma-separated list of type:level elements, with 'type' representing a process type, and 'level' being a log level to use for that type of process. The list must also … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Allow log_min_messages to be set per process type"

On 3rd of February 2026, Fujii Masao committed patch: psql: Add %i prompt escape to indicate hot standby status.   This commit introduces a new prompt escape %i for psql, which shows whether the connected server is operating in hot standby mode. It expands to standby if the server reports in_hot_standby = on, and primary … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – psql: Add %i prompt escape to indicate hot standby status."