Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

“The database is locked up.” We heard some version of that sentence more than once this past week, from the same team, about what looked like the same problem. It was not the same problem. Once, Postgres had genuinely stopped responding. Every other time, Postgres was fine, and a connection sitting in the application’s pool had quietly died somewhere between the app and the database.

Idle transactions hold locks and block vacuums, turning one forgotten connection into a cascading outage.

ident_file tells the server where pg_ident.conf lives, but when it's wrong, the server just logs a quiet failure and keeps running.

`hot_standby_feedback` trades primary bloat to prevent query cancellations on standbys—but it only stops cleanup conflicts, not lock or drop conflicts, and…

 

The PostgreSQL Performance Farm is still not quite a reality, but I think there is some hope on the horizon.

On 16th of March 2026, Peter Eisentraut committed patch: SQL Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ)   Implementation of SQL property graph queries, according to SQL/PGQ standard (ISO/IEC 9075-16:2023).

I'm pleased to announce that David Rowley will be joining us in September to discuss his talk Optimizing code in the hot path; with examples from tuple deformation. If you're interesting in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. As always, thanks to David for agreeing to join the sessions.

PostgreSQL 18 adds a Grand Unified Configuration (GUC), , that lets an extension's control and SQL files live outside the server's own directories. Together with Kubernetes's ImageVolume and Docker's , that makes it practical to package an extension as its own small OCI container image and mount it into the PostgreSQL pod at runtime, without rebuilding the server image.The idea is compelling. A fleet of clusters sharing one lean, unmodified PostgreSQL image. Extensions versioned and upgraded independently.

The official logs are still processing, but the raw data is ready.

Welcome to the newest #UNLOGGED drop from WAWTech+Summer 2026 in Warsaw. We traded the classic conference center for an open-air tech festival at Tor Służewiec, and the energy was incredible.

Postgres ships with a genuinely bountiful catalog of built-in functions. There are literally thousands of them, covering everything from trigonometry to JSON path queries to full-text ranking. It's a kitchen sink of staggering proportions. Somehow despite all of that, there are actually still a few gaps to fill.Need a random date for some test data? That's going to be an entire expression, I'm afraid. How about the exact definition of a role, tablespace, or database?

PostgreSQL's hot_standby switch transforms a spare server into a readable replica, but the real tuning work happens elsewhere.

Most production vector queries are not simple nearest-neighbor searches. Rarely is the query to return "the 10 most similar documents in the entire table." Typically, it's something closer to: find the 10 most similar documents in the legal category, published in the last 30 days. That mix of similarity ranking plus scalar filters is hybrid search.

High availability setups are never “set and forget”. Every new release of your tooling can change how your cluster behaves at 03:00 when something breaks.

vip-manager v5 is one of those releases you really want to read about before just hitting apt upgrade. In this post I’ll walk through the important breaking changes, what they mean in practice, and what you should do before rolling this out on production.

hba_file points to your authentication rules, not the rules themselves. Reload changes to pg_hba.conf instantly; restart when moving the file.

What Is Open Alliance for PostgreSQL Education (OAPE)?

The OAPE is the recently founded organistion that will offer indipendent community PostgreSQL certifications.

Why Becoming A Supporter

For years there have only been companies offering PostgreSQL certifications.

I always believed, that the PostgreSQL community could do better with community based certifications.
A community based certification has the advantage, that even the process itself becomes public.

 DBeaver recently introduced interactive chat capabilities into the free, open-source Community Edition. What does that mean? 

It means some of your database tasks can be accomplished significantly faster! 

First, you can ask for information without coding SQL. I love Structured Query Language, but it is much faster to write this prompt:

What are the top ten most popular rentals and how much revenue did they generate?

• Background
• Why a new driver
• Things you won't find in other Java drivers
  • Batch INSERT rewritten to array parameters<

Hash and sort operations have wildly different relationships with memory, and `hash_mem_multiplier` lets you feed them separately.

Seven major versions of PostgreSQL shipped between 2018 and 2025, one per year without exception, and each with a changelog of 150 to 200 user-visible changes. Each release covers a broad canvas — performance, replication, administration, and security — but every one of them also advanced the SQL layer, filling gaps in the standard, adding missing functionality, or cleaning up long-standing rough edges. Working through the new edition of The Art of PostgreSQL forced me to catalogue them all; this is my selection of the features I kept reaching for while rewriting the examples.

Picture this: it's Monday morning, your coffee is still warm, and someone from finance slides into your DMs asking why the Q4 revenue number doesn't match what they expected. You know the data flows through about five transformation steps, but the pipeline was built by someone who left two years ago, and the documentation is... let's say aspirational.