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Yes, it was St. Patrick’s Day, and also Illinois Primaries, and the weather was beyond bad, but we still had a good crowd!

Pizza always comes first :), because nobody is going to go hungry! Whether you stay for Postgres or not is up to you, so I am assuming that when people are coming and staying, it’s not just for pizza

Introduction: The End of “Just SSH Into the Box”

There was a time when High Availability in PostgreSQL came with an implicit assumption: if something important happened, an administrator could log into the server, inspect the state of the cluster, and run the command that steadied the ship. That assumption is fading fast. In many modern enterprises, direct OS-level access is no longer part of the operating model.

On 10th of March 2026, Álvaro Herrera committed patch: Introduce the REPACK command   REPACK absorbs the functionality of VACUUM FULL and CLUSTER in a single command. Because this functionality is completely different from regular VACUUM, having it separate from VACUUM makes it easier for users to understand; as for CLUSTER, the term is heavily … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Introduce the REPACK command"

 

PostgreSQL major version upgrades are one of those tasks that every DBA has to deal with regularly. They are routine — but they are also full of small, potentially dangerous details that can turn a straightforward maintenance window into an incident. Having performed hundreds of upgrades across different environments over the years, I want to share a comprehensive, practical guide to upgrading from PostgreSQL 17 to 18, with particular focus on what has changed and what has finally improved in the upgrade process itself.

I'm planning to hold a single hacking workshop for April and May combined, covering Masahiko Sawada's talk, Breaking away from FREEZE and Wraparound, given at PGCon 2022. If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to Sawada-san for agreeing to join us.

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On 4th of March 2026, Amit Kapila committed patch: Allow table exclusions in publications via EXCEPT TABLE.   Extend CREATE PUBLICATION ... FOR ALL TABLES to support the EXCEPT TABLE syntax. This allows one or more tables to be excluded. The publisher will not send the data of excluded tables to the subscriber.   To … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Allow table exclusions in publications via EXCEPT TABLE."

Most RAG systems were built for a specific workload: abundant reads, relatively few writes, and a document corpus that doesn't change much. That model made sense for early retrieval pipelines, but it doesn't reflect how production agent systems actually behave. In practice, multiple agents are constantly writing new observations, updating shared memory, and regenerating embeddings, often at the same time. The storage layer that worked fine for document search starts showing cracks under that kind of pressure.The failures that result aren't always obvious.

Like much of the world, I have been exploring capabilities and realities of LLMs and other generative tools for a while now. I am focused on using the technology with the framing of my technology-focused work, plus my other common scoping on data privacy and ethics. I want basic coding help (SQL, Python, Docker, PowerShell, DAX), ideation, writing boilerplate code, and leveraging existing procedures. Naturally, I want this available offline in a private and secure environment.

Obligatory selfie from SCaLE 23x

The 23rd edition of the Southern California Linux Expo, or SCaLE 23x, took place from March 5-8, 2026, in Pasadena, California. It was another fantastic community-run event with talks you don't get to hear anywhere else, and that incredible open-source community spirit.

On 26th of February 2026, Andrew Dunstan committed patch: Add non-text output formats to pg_dumpall   pg_dumpall can now produce output in custom, directory, or tar formats in addition to plain text SQL scripts. When using non-text formats, pg_dumpall creates a directory containing: - toc.glo: global data (roles and tablespaces) in custom format - map.dat: … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Add non-text output formats to pg_dumpall"

Skip the OLAP stack. See how we built a product analytics warehouse on vanilla Postgres with materialized views, pg_cron, and copy-on-write branches.

pgNow is a lightweight PostgreSQL diagnostic tool developed by Redgate that provides quick visibility into database performance without requiring agents or complex setup. It connects directly to a PostgreSQL instance and delivers real-time insights into query workloads, active sessions, index usage, configuration health, and vacuum activity, helping DBAs quickly identify performance bottlenecks.

The COMMENT command has been in Postgres for decades. It allows text descriptions to be attached to almost any database object. During its long history, it was mostly seen as a nice-to-have addition to database schemas, allowing administrators and developers to more easily understand the schema. Tools like pgAdmin allow you to assign and view comments on database objects.

It started as a humble personal project, few years back. The objective was to convert all my PostgreSQL notes and learning into a automatic diagnostic tool, such that even a new DBA can easily spot the problems. The idea was simple, a simple tool which don’t need any installation but do all possible analysis and […]

On Tuesday March 10, 2026 PUG Belgium met for the March edition, organized by Boriss Mejias and Stefan Fercot.

Speakers:

• Esteban Zimanyi
• Thijs Lemmens
• Yoann La Cancellera

Robert Haas organized a Hacking Workshop on Tuesday March 10, 2026. Tomas Vondra discussed questions about one of his talks.

PostgreSQL Edinburgh meetup Mar 2026 met on Thursday March 12, 2026

Speakers:

Introduction

If you’ve been paying attention to the technology landscape recently, you’ve probably noticed that AI is everywhere. New frameworks, new terminology, and a dizzying array of acronyms and jargon: LLM, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, MCP, and more.

This is the third and final post in a series covering the new AI functionality in pgAdmin 4. In the first post, I covered LLM configuration and the AI-powered analysis reports, and in the second, I introduced the AI Chat agent for natural language SQL generation.

Continuing the series of CommitFest 19 reviews, today we’re covering the January 2026 CommitFest.

The highlights from previous CommitFests are available here: 2025-07, 2025-09, 2025-11.

In the very early days of my career, an incident made me realise that perfoming my job irresponsibily will affect me adversely, not because it will affect my position adversely, but because it can affect my life otherwise also. I was part a team that produced a software used by a financial institution where I held my account. A bug in the software caused a failure which made several accounts, including my bank account, inaccessible! Fortunately I wasn't the one who introduced that bug and neither was other software engineer working on the product.

I previously blogged about ensuring that the “ON CONFLICT” directive is used in order to avoid vacuum from having to do additional work. I also later demonstrated the characteristics of how the use of the MERGE statement will accomplish the same thing.