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There's a persistent belief in the database world that vertical scaling solves all problems. Need more throughput? Add CPUs. Running out of cache? More RAM. Queries hitting disk? Higher IOPS. It's a comforting philosophy because it's simple, and for a surprisingly long time, it works. A single beefy Postgres instance can handle an enormous amount of punishment before collapsing under the strain.But there's a ceiling up there, and it's not made of hardware.

Do family meetups always devolve into SQL?

Most GUCs in this series will be operationally irrelevant to most readers. This one is not. application_name is the single cheapest piece of observability infrastructure PostgreSQL ships, and an astonishing number of production databases are running with it unset or stuck at a client library&rsqu…

A benchmark came out of AWS earlier this month showing PostgreSQL throughput on Linux 7.0 dropping to 0.51x what the same workload produced on Linux 6.x. The Phoronix headline wrote itself. Hacker News did what Hacker News does. By the end of the week, I had been asked by three separate clients w…

 Postgres Conference 2026 was held in San Jose, California, and once again, I was lucky to be invited to speak. This is a great show for the 'hallway track' where you talk to members of the community and discover many interesting things.

I had a brief conversation with two early contributors to the original PostgreSQL project. One said he was surprised by how much of his code was still in the code base after FORTY YEARS. 

PostgreSQL 18 shipped asynchronous I/O. The dominant flavor on Linux was io_uring; everything else fell back to a worker pool controlled by io_method=worker. Early benchmarks from pganalyze, Aiven, and Better Stack showed real wins on read-heavy workloads with large sequential scans. They also sh…

Here is a GUC that ships with a warning label. The docs, which are normally restrained to the point of parody, state plainly that setting this parameter wrong can cause “irretrievable data loss or seriously corrupt the database system.” When the PostgreSQL docs raise their voice, list…

If you’re going to hire a PostgreSQL consultant, hire one. That means access to the database. I’m writing this because the “we hired you but you can’t touch the thing” conversation happens at the start of roughly one in four PGX engagements, and I would like to have …

PostgreSQL is dominating the database market, and the monitoring tools haven't noticed.More teams run Postgres in production every year. More of those deployments are distributed, multi-region, and mission-critical. And the tooling most of those teams rely on was built for a simpler world: a single instance, a handful of threshold alerts, and a senior DBA who can interpret what the graphs mean at 3 AM. That works when you have one cluster and one person who knows where the bodies are buried.

allow_in_place_tablespaces exists so the PostgreSQL test suite can test replication. That’s it. If you’re reading this as an operator, you will never touch it. But it’s in the alphabet, so here we are. When off (the default), CREATE TABLESPACE requires a LOCATION that points to …

Some time ago someone posted on Reddit that they have problems adding Polish configuration to their PostgreSQL. While checking it, I found some interesting news. And of course figured out how to have Polish configuration… First, the news: apparently in PostgreSQL 19, we will automatically get Polish dictionary, thanks to this commit from 5th of … Continue reading "Polish configuration for TSearch"

Robert Haas’s pg_plan_advice patch set, proposed for PostgreSQL 19, is where the twenty-year argument from Part 2 has landed — or is trying to. It is not pg_hint_plan brought into core. It is a different thing, with different mechanics, a different scope, and a different answer to the &ldqu…

On 6th of April 2026, Álvaro Herrera committed patch: Add CONCURRENTLY option to REPACK   When this flag is specified, REPACK no longer acquires access-exclusive lock while the new copy of the table is being created; instead, it creates the initial copy under share-update-exclusive lock only (same as vacuum, etc), and it follows an MVCC … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Add CONCURRENTLY option to REPACK"

A couple of months back, the CEO challenged product and marketing to revamp the developer experience on our website in three weeks. I vibe-coded a proof of concept full of "try it now" buttons and interactive guides, the CEO loved it, and then I had to deal with almost every one of those interactive guides being a placeholder card.

PostgreSQL is widely adopted because it removes licensing constraints and gives companies like OpenAI, Lovable, and Supabase, a reliable foundation for running production systems at scale. However, once deployed, the cost conversation of PostgreSQL shifts away from licensing and toward how efficiently the database supports the workload it is running.

pg_plan_advice is expected to land in PostgreSQL 19. That makes this a good moment to look at query hints — what they are, what every other major database does with them, and how PostgreSQL ended up being the obvious outlier. Three parts. This is the first. What a hint is A query hint is an instr…

On a PostgreSQL build with assertions enabled, run the standard make check-world suite with a small debugging extension called pg_pathcheck loaded. It will report on pointers to freed memory in the planner's path lists. Such dangling pointers exist even in the core Postgres now. They are harmless today. But the word today is what makes this worth writing about.

We begin at allow_alter_system, which is both new and politically fraught — so let’s start with a fight. ALTER SYSTEM was added in 9.4 as a quality-of-life improvement: set GUCs from an SQL prompt, have the values written into postgresql.auto.conf, no shell access required. It was immediate…

For most of PostgreSQL’s history, the official community position on query hints has been a polite version of “no, and stop asking.” The position isn’t subtle. The PostgreSQL wiki maintains a page titled Not Worth Doing, and “Oracle-style optimizer hints” is li…

REPACK is a new PostgreSQL 19 feature for physically compacting a table by rewriting it into new storage. Like VACUUM, it deals with the space left behind by dead tuples, but it does so by building a fresh table file instead of mostly cleaning pages in place. Ordinary VACUUM can mark space reusable