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In response to a generous corpus of real-world user feedback, we’ve been hard at work the past week adding a slew of updates to pg_clickhouse, the query interface for ClickHouse from Postgres. As usual, we focused on improving pushdown, especially for various date and time, array, and regular expression functions.

The Toulouse PostgreSQL User Group met on April 7, 2026 organized by

• Geoffrey Coulaud
• Xavier SIMON
• Jean-Christophe Arnu

Speakers:

Introduction

One of the most useful debugging tools in modern PostgreSQL is the wait event system. When a query slows down or a database becomes CPU bound, a natural question is: “What are sessions actually waiting on?” Postgres exposes this information through the pg_stat_activity view via two columns:

wait_event_type wait_event

These fields reveal what the backend process is blocked on at a given moment. Among the different wait types, one category tends to cause confusion:

A few days ago, Shaun Thomas published an article over on the pgEdge blog called [Checkpoints, Write Storms, and You]. Sadly a lot of corporate blogs don’t have comment functionality anymore.

One GitHub issue turned into an extension sprint. 32 new additions, 504 in total, say a lot about where PostgreSQL is headed.

There is a point in every security tool’s life where adding one more feature is less important than removing one more obstacle.

That is what makes column_encrypt v4.0 interesting.

In today’s E121 of “5mins of Postgres” we're talking about the upcoming Postgres 19 release, and how a change in the Postgres instrumentation handling reduces overhead of timing measurements in EXPLAIN ANALYZE using the RDTSC instruction, and why this will allow turning on for more workloads. We dive into the recently committed change that I (Lukas) authored together with Andres Freund and David Geier. See the full transcript with examples below. Share this episode: Click here to share this…

Every database has to reconcile two uncomfortable truths: memory is fast but volatile, and disk is slow but durable. Postgres handles this tension through its Write-Ahead Log (WAL), which records every change before it happens. But the WAL can't grow forever. At some point, Postgres needs to flush all those accumulated dirty pages to disk and declare a clean starting point. That process is called a checkpoint, and when it goes wrong, it can bring throughput to its knees.

On 5th of April 2026, Andrew Dunstan committed patch: Add pg_get_database_ddl() function   Add a new SQL-callable function that returns the DDL statements needed to recreate a database. It takes a regdatabase argument and an optional VARIADIC text argument for options that are specified as alternating name/value pairs. The following options are supported: pretty (boolean) … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – new pg_get_*_ddl() functions"

Recently, we encountered a production incident where PostgreSQL 16.8 became unstable, preventing the application from establishing database connections. The same behavior was independently reproduced in a separate test environment, ruling out infrastructure and configuration issues. Further investigation identified the pg_prewarm extension as the source of the problem.

In my first post about pgcollection, I introduced the collection type to address the challenge of migrating Oracle associative arrays keyed by strings to PostgreSQL. For integer-keyed associative arrays, I noted that native PostgreSQL arrays work well enough for simple cases. That holds true until the keys are sparse.

Consider this Oracle pattern:

A practical blueprint for secure, private, high-performance AI systems

The Prague PostgreSQL Meetup met on March 30, 2026, organized by Gulcin Yildirim Jelinek and Mayur B.

Speakers:

• Radim Marek
• Mayur B.

Community Blog Posts:

• Pat Wright about Nordic Pg Day 2026

Community Videos:

• Pavlo Golub about SCALE 23x

I recently wrapped up my blog series covering the exciting new features in PostgreSQL 18 — from Asynchronous I/O and Skip Scan to the powerful RETURNING clause enhancements.

© Laurenz Albe 2026

Thanks to my colleague Ozair, who sent me a JIRA ticket saying “I need to drop that huge column, what are the consequences?” My first question was: how huge? That’s when the rabbit hole opened. It looks simple. It is simple. Just use the administrative function pg_column_size(). Until you have toasted attributes. Then it gets interesting. A bit of history 🔗pg_column_size() was added in PostgreSQL 8.1 by Mark Kirkwood (commit a9236028).

Hi, it’s me, back again with another update to pg_clickhouse, the query interface for ClickHouse from Postgres. This release, v0.1.10, maintains binary compatibility with earlier versions but ships a number of significant improvements that increase compatibility of Postgres features with ClickHouse. Highlights include:

Not so long ago, the biggest threat to production databases was the developer who claimed it worked on their machine. If you've attended my sessions, you know this is a topic I'm particularly sensitive to.

These days, AI agents are writing your SQL. The models are getting incredibly good at producing plausible code. It looks right, it feels right, and often it passes a cursory glance. But "plausible" isn't a performance metric, and it doesn't care about your execution plan or locking strategy.

Introduction

Every so often, I talk to someone working in data analytics who wants access to production data, or at least a snapshot of it. Sometimes, they tell me about their ETL setup, which takes hours to refresh and can be brittle, with a lot of monitoring around it. For them, it works, but it sometimes gets me wondering if they need all that plumbing to get a snapshot of their live dataset. Back at Turnitin, I set up a way to get people access to production data without having to snapshot nightly, and I thought maybe I should share it with people here.

Thanks to Boris Novikov, who pointed me in the PAX direction in the first place and followed up with many insightful technical discussions. I’m grateful for all his time and the great conversations we’ve had and continue to have. To dive deeper into the mechanics of PAX, I highly recommend checking out my previous post: PAX: The cache performance you’re looking for. PAX looks elegant on paper: minipages, cache locality, column-oriented access inside an 8KB page.