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It is that time of the year again. The first release candidate of PostgreSQL 18 is out, and things look promising. We should expect General Availability in the next 2-4 weeks. 

Exciting times! 

Over the past many years and as many releases, the PostgreSQL community has done a phenomenal job of being disciplined about the annual release process. And we have done so averaging 150+ new features with each release!

For the upcoming v18, here are the top three features I am most excited about:

Introduction

Recently, I read Laurenz Albe's blog about case insensitive string search. He recommended case insensitive collations saying, "it won't be any more expensive (and maybe more intuitive) than the current techniques of using upper() or the citext extension are today". In other words, a custom collation can be used instead of citext to achieve case insensivity with a lower performance penalty.

In November last year after nearly two decades at my previous gig, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to work at what seemed to be rapidly becoming an AI-focused company and moved to pgEdge where the focus is well and truly on distributed PostgreSQL and Postgres generally. Distributed databases (and particularly Postgres of course) have always been a passion of mine – even being a key topic of my master’s dissertation many years ago.Moving to pgEdge was a breath of fresh air.

Case-insensitive search is one of the most common issues I encounter when helping customers migrate from Oracle or SQL Server to PostgreSQL. Unlike Oracle (with NLS_SORT) or SQL Server (with case-insensitive collations), PostgreSQL does not natively support case-insensitive search. Developers typically rely on workarounds such as:

Developers typically rely on workarounds such as:

PGDay Austria took place on September 4 in Vienna.

Organised by

• Patricia Horvath
• Ilya Kosmodemiansky
• Hans-Jürgen Schönig
• Cornelia Biascics

CfP Committee

• Rafia Sabih
• Oleksii Vasiliev
• Ryan Booz
• Pavlo Golub (non voting member)

Speakers

TPC-C is supposedly the most objective performance measurement of OLTP database systems… and I’ve used it quite a fair bit over the years as well…yet, running it on Postgres is sadly not exactly as smooth as things typically are with Postgres 😔 If to compare at least with the wonderful...

Postgres Ibiza 2025: October 15-17th

Postgres Ibiza 2025 is back in October. A three-day event split into:

I recently completed a training session for one of our customer on best practices for achieving HA clusters with Patroni and Pgpool in PostgreSQL. During the sessions, different points were discussed, but I’d like to highlight a few that should be carefully considered when designing HA clusters.

The programme for PGConf.EU 2025, taking place on 21–24 October in Riga, is now live!

Discover the exciting lineup of world-class PostgreSQL speakers and exciting topics that await you on the schedule for this year.

This year’s conference also features a Community Events Day on Tuesday, with limited spaces available.

We look forward to seeing you in Riga in October!

I just gave a new presentation at PGConf.Brazil titled Three Key Attributes of Postgres. It is similar to my existing The Postgres Trajectory talk, but with more of a business and global focus. It also a psql output slide full of puns at the beginning, and hints to the puns at the end.

I've just returned from the rapidly growing Free and Open Source Yearly conference, or FOSSY 2025, which took place from July 31st - August 3rd, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. Organized by the incredible team at the Software Freedom Conservancy, the event was an awesome gathering of minds dedicated to the principles of free and open-source software.

Introduction

We have explored how to create cluster, take backups, connect to the cluster and run psql commands in our CNPG series. However, one might feel overwhelmed because of those day - to - day operations. That is why CNPG provides a kubectl plugin. CloudNativePG' s plugin enriches kubectl with a set of PostgreSQL - focused commands, making easier to inspect clusters, trigger backups, promote a new instance, run pgbench and run psql commands without leaving existing terminal.

Discover how a PostgreSQL DBA’s decade of expertise evolved into designing Xata’s AI-powered Postgres agent, automating monitoring and observability.

© Laurenz Albe 2025

I recently helped a customer with a slow query. Eventually, an ANALYZE on a partitioned table was enough to fix the problem. This came as a surprise for the customer, since autovacuum was enabled. So I decided to write an article on how PostgreSQL collects partitioned table statistics and how they affect PostgreSQL's estimates.

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.6.0! Best Served with PostgreSQL 18 Beta3 and recently released GEOS 3.14.0.

This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 18beta3, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.14+ is needed. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 2.2.0+ is needed.

Are you in the Pacific Northwest?

In July 2025, during the PG19-1 CommitFest, I reviewed a patch targeting the lack of parallelism when adding foreign keys in pg_restore. Around the same time, I was helping a client with a large production migration where pg_restore dragged on for more than 24 hours and crashed multiple times.

In this blog, I will talk about the technical limitations in PostgreSQL, the proposed fix, and a practical workaround for surviving large restores.

Background 

There are two main types of backups in PostgreSQL:

Just recently, we announced the production-ready release of pg_tde, bringing open source Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to PostgreSQL. Now, I may have spoiled the fun a little with the title, but take a look at the word puzzle below—can you guess the announcement? Bear with me… and my sense of humor, which might be a bit too dry for some :)

A deep dive into the evolution of my GSoC'25 project: the PostgreSQL ABI Compliance Checker. I share my journey of developing the ABICompCheck module using the PostgreSQL BuildFarm, learning Perl, setting up a CGI Server, and launching a public BuildFarm animal to run checks every 24 hours.

In the previous post, I discussed GSoC, my road to acceptance at PostgreSQL, and my project deliverables.

Today, I will share my experience with the PostgreSQL community, and the work I did.

Postgres Community Bonding

The first phase of GSoC is community bonding, where the mentee gets to know the community of his organization.