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Introduction

PostgreSQL uses MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control) for concurrency control: reads never block writes, and writes never block reads.

Its locking system has 8 table-level lock modes and 4 row-level lock modes, and the conflict tables in the documentation tell you exactly which lock modes conflict with which.

In practice, though, once you actually operate PostgreSQL, locks end up conflicting in places you never expected. Queries take far longer than anticipated, and in the worst case you end up with an outage.

From Ottawa to Vancouver

For a long time, PGCon in Ottawa was a staple for the PostgreSQL community. I always had a soft spot for Ottawa; it fondly reminded me of my childhood days in Pune. So, when it was first announced that the reincarnated PGConf.dev would take place in Vancouver, I felt a twinge of sadness.

Fourth in a series of dispassionate tours of managed PostgreSQL services. Previously: RDS, Aurora, and Cloud SQL. AlloyDB is Google’s distributed-storage PostgreSQL, the closest architectural parallel on GCP to Aurora on AWS, with enough distinctive differences to be worth understanding as its ow…

A 1990s-vintage PostgreSQL extension shipping a critical buffer overflow in 2026 reveals a larger problem: most teams can't even say what's actually installed…

I’m back home from Vancouver. What a great week – in every way. I’ll try to share a few highlights here.

This story started with a book gifted by a colleague. Reading Jimmy Angelakos' «PostgreSQL Mistakes and How to Avoid Them», I realised something that had been bugging me - in Postgres, the EXPLAIN command produces far too much information. The examples that authors typically present when discussing various aspects of database systems make it harder to analyse the problem at hand and distract the reader.

Why Metadata, Taxonomy, Ontology, Knowledge Graphs, and Context Are Becoming the Foundation of Enterprise AI

The technology industry is entering a fascinating phase where many older ideas are suddenly becoming critically important again.

The Night When Things Almost Went Down

Have you ever left for home on a Friday evening feeling confident about your work for the day, at peace knowing your system would survive the coming weekend? We’ve all felt that way at some point.

Meanwhile, the disk on the server had quietly reached 90% utilization. Write-Ahead Log (WAL) files had accumulated enormously, one long-running query had been running for over an hour, and nobody noticed because, some time earlier, the dashboard had looked fine.

At the end of April, I had the incredible opportunity to represent credativ on the HOW2026 (Hello Open-source World), the PostgreSQL & IvorySQL Eco Conference in Jinan, China. IvorySQL is a Chinese fork of PostgreSQL with extended Oracle compatibility. In recent years, it has been gaining popularity not only in China. The conference brought together PostgreSQL and IvorySQL experts, contributors, and open-source database enthusiasts from around the world.

PGConf.dev 2026 took place from May 19-22 2026, organized by

• Gwen Shapira
• Jonathan Katz
• Kaiting Chen
• Magnus Hagander
• Melanie Plageman
• Paul Ramsey
• Robert Haas
• Steve Singer

Program Committee:

• Jacob Champion
• Jonathan Katz
• Dilip Kumar
• Melanie Plageman
• Paul Ramsey

Tuesday Planning Committee:

`client_min_messages` controls what your session sees, not what the server logs—a confusion that spawns most of its trouble.

Introduction

I recently wrote a post about WAL log shipping and how a standby built on log shipping is a great way to give data analysts production data without putting the primary at risk. Having access to the production data in this way is great, but it’s read-only. How can we create views of this data for better analytics work?

PostgreSQL 14 added a parameter that detects dead client connections during query execution, stopping wasted work before it's too late.

PostgreSQL is a popular open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) used by many organizations to store and manage their data. To ensure high availability and prevent downtime, it’s essential to have a robust HA setup for PostgreSQL. Patroni, HAProxy, Keepalived, etcd, and watchdog can be used together to achieve this goal. Short description of the components used

Snowflake Postgres is community Postgres, not a fork with a proprietary storage layer—a correction to Wednesday's post on table access methods, and a closer…

In earlier posts in this series we established that every heap tuple lives inside a strict 8KB page. Everything else is built on top of that hard limit: MVCC, HOT updates, and indexes that point at (page, line_pointer). And yet this still works:

OUTER JOIN is a typical plague of ORM-based PostgreSQL configurations: the planner is still relatively poor at optimising it. At the same time, ORM frameworks — and 1C as a prominent example — often generate outer joins from standard templates, which opens the door to targeted optimisations. In this article, I dig into one such template — polymorphic reference resolution: what the pattern is, where it comes from (Rails, Django, Hibernate, Salesforce — not just 1C), how widespread it is, and why its structural properties make it possible to significantly speed up execution.

Character encoding conversions happen silently between client and server—until they don't.

Howto guide for upgrading PostgreSQL from version 17 to 18 on Ubuntu, after its upgrade from version 25.10 (Questing Quokka) to 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon).

Meet two checkpoint neighbors paired by the alphabet, not the topic: `checkpoint_flush_after` tunes kernel writeback hints, while `checkpoint_warning` logs…