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Every now and then I need a break from writing code. In those cases I like looking at data about a subject I’m interested in - looking for trends, quantifying the expected effects, and so on. I needed just such a break a couple days ago, and I decided to look at statistics about the development activity of the Postgres project. So, here’s a bunch of charts (with a bit of commentary).

PostgreSQL's `max_index_keys` has counted more than keys since INCLUDE columns arrived in version 11, but stays locked at 32 due to on-disk tuple format…

On 8 September 2026, PGDay UK 2026 was held in London.

Organized by:

• Chris Ellis
• Dave Page
• Devrim Gunduz

Program Committee:

• Alastair Turner (chair, non-voting)
• Celeste Horgan
• Greg Clough
• Sastry Karamcheti

Code of Conduct Committee:

• Ayşe Bilge İnce
• Jimmy Angelakos

Speakers:

On October 1, I’ll be speaking at PG Summit 2026 about benchmarking hardware with Postgres. I’m looking forward to sharing some tips and learnings that I’ve picked up over the years. In anticipation of the presentation, I just wanted to share a little bit about some of my motivations for the topic.

max_identifier_length reports a number, 63, and the number is the least interesting thing about it. Every relational database caps the length of a name. What is unusual about PostgreSQL is what happens when you go over: MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle reject the statement, while PostgreSQL cuts the …

PostgreSQL won't let you pass more than 100 arguments to a function, and changing it requires rebuilding every extension on your machine.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve learned more about renovate, SBOMs, provenance and attestations than I ever wanted to know. (But if I’m being honest, I do enjoy learning a bit more about it.)

PostgreSQL's max_files_per_process isn't a hard limit—it's a descriptor pool that quietly recycles old files when full.

Logical replication has been part of Postgres since version 10, and the syntax page that governs it is almost comically brief.  wants a name, a connection string, a list of publications, and then it offers one innocuous line:That single line expands to more than a dozen options, and several of them change how logical replication uses storage resources. After all, subscriptions created with no  clause work perfectly fine.

Being "the database guy" comes with a lot of questions, and over the last eight months those questions changed. The repetitive ones disappeared, nobody asks how to avoid putting things in the database any more, and the code arriving for review got noticeably more polished. Then this summer a schema landed in front of me with twelve proposed index drops on a single table, which is when I started assuming coding agents over-index. The next schema I looked at had the same shape.

max_connections is a memory budget and a circuit breaker wearing a capacity costume. It does not decide how many queries your server can run at once; the core count and the storage decide that, and they were decided when you bought the hardware. What max_connections decides is how many client bac…

A prepared statement ran in 274 ms for five executions and 2,319 ms from the sixth, on the same connection in the same minute. One EXPLAIN ANALYZE is a sample of size one and cannot see this; twelve in a row, with the plan kept per run, can. The plan cache mechanism behind it, why psql cannot reproduce it, which drivers trigger it, and the one-line fix. Measured on PostgreSQL 17 using ExoBench with twelve repetitions per connection.

A new agent needs a database login, so the role it logs in as gets the treatment every runbook recommends. Two ALTER ROLE lines go in, one capping how long a single statement may run and one making transactions read-only by default. From the operator's side, the Postgres role for AI agent sessions now looks contained.

Aggregates in PostgreSQL aren't particularly efficient, computationally speaking. It shows most in a scenario where partial aggregation doesn't help: when aggregation only prepares data for the query, processing a large stream of rows and producing, at the output, a not-much-smaller set of groups and the aggregates computed over them. Variable-length types have it worst of all. And the typical example here is SUM(numeric).

Key takeaways

max_active_replication_origins is a ten-year-old XXX comment that finally got paid off. It arrived in PostgreSQL 18, and it exists because the thing it controls had been borrowing another parameter’s number since 9.5. On 14 through 17, the number of replication origins a subscriber can track is s…

pgsql.cc is live, with Chinese documentation for all 11 PostgreSQL major versions from 10 through 20, a redesigned mirror of the official website, and better full-text search. Kept in sync with upstream, with no ads.

 Structured Query Language 101 -15:00–16:20 Nov. 6, 2026 · 15:00 - 6:20

I will be teaching the basics of SQL at the 2026 Texas Linuxfest. The session is listed for only 100 minutes, but I wrote the materials for a 3-hour course. We will cover as much of those three hours as the audience can stand (sit?), or they send us off to Sixth Street.

Tickets are available, and this event is great for networking.  Ping me if you have questions about this session. 

 

Elizabeth: I know a little bit of your history prior to joining the Postgres project. I think you did work on JPEG — the image specification. The internet thinks that you did some work on libjpeg, which was part of the Mars Perseverance camera work. Tell me a little bit about that and how that stuff affects your work in Postgres.