Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

Eight years ago, PostgreSQL introduced scram-sha-256 hashes for passwords.

Eleven months ago, MD5 was deprecated.

Yesterday, I got caught up with all this.

Some of this post will deal with how I fixed it, but mostly it is documenting (for myself) what I did. The fix covers several services and takes place over multiple days.

First, some background on why this change has come into focus for me.

Did you know a table can have no more than 1,600 columns? This blog article was inspired by a conversation Pierre Ducroquet and I had.

First, the documentation

The PostgreSQL documentation Appendix K states a table can have a maximum of 1,600 columns.

After stumbling on a pair of interesting blog posts — You Don’t Need Kafka, Just Use Postgres (Considered Harmful) — somewhat in the style of good old “flame wars” (which are increasingly rare these days) in the recent Postgres Weekly, as a response to a previous article — Kafka is...

 In the previous post, we asked AI to make recommendations to help clean up the data loaded directly from a CSV file. The initial data load for the Name failed because a VARCHAR(64) was estimated to be insufficient to hold the data. But it was not, and a TEXT field was used instead. 

So now we want to save some disk space!  

Starting at $8 USD, the new Developer tier includes everything from the Free tier, with extra disk space, preserved uptime for idle services, and Basic support to keep you building without interruption.

© Laurenz Albe 2025

First, on 9th of October 2025, Amit Kapila committed patch: Add "ALL SEQUENCES" support to publications.   This patch adds support for the ALL SEQUENCES clause in publications, enabling synchronization/replication of all sequences that is useful for upgrades.   Publications can now include all sequences via FOR ALL SEQUENCES.

PostgreSQL 18 brings a couple of performance related features to the table which will help applications to run more efficiently, providing a better and more enjoyable user experience. One of those performance features is called “skip scans”. Most of you might ask yourself at this point: Wow, sounds cool, but what is a skip scan? The purpose of this post is to shed some light and explain how this works, what it does and most importantly: How one can benefit from this feature in real life.

Making GROUP BY a bit easier to use is in my experience among the top three requested features in SQL.

Like, if you do

CREATE TABLE t1 (a int, b int, ...); SELECT a, avg(b) FROM t1 GROUP BY a;

the column list in the GROUP BY clause doesn’t convey much information. Of course you wanted to group by a, there is no other reasonable alternative. You can’t not group by a because that would be an error, and you can’t group by things besides a, because there is nothing else in the select list other than the aggregate.

Your API is slowing down. You check your database and find 42 indexes on your users table. Which ones can you safely drop? How much performance are they costing you? Let's look at what actually happens in Postgres when you have too many indexes.

If you're a backend or full-stack engineer, you probably don't want to become an indexing expert — you just want your API fast and stable, without babysitting pg_stat_user_indexes.

This quarter's round of minor releases are expected later this week. Note this will be the last minor release for PostgreSQL 13 .

New podcast episode published by Claire Giordano from her series “Talking Postgres” : Building a dev experience for Postgres in VS Code with Rob Emanuele

Blog posts

• Ellyne Phneah Key takeaways from the PostgreSQL & AI Summit: RAG, agents, and tuning

PostgreSQL 19 changes this week EXPLAIN wal_fpi_bytes value exposed in EXPLAIN (WAL) pg_stat_wal column wal_fpi_bytes added pg_stat_get_backend_wal() output column wal_fpi_bytes added psql prompt configuration option %S added, showing the current value of search_path PostgreSQL 19 articles Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Add psql PROMPT variable for search_path.

Postgres has an awesome amount of data collected in its own internal tables. Postgres hackers know all about this  - but software developers and folks working with day to day Postgres tasks often miss out the good stuff.

The Postgres catalog is how Postgres keeps track of itself. Of course, Postgres would do this in a relational database with its own schema. Throughout the years several nice features have been added to the internal tables like psql tools and views that make navigating Postgres’ internal tables even easier.

I'm happy to announce release 0.8 of pg_statviz, the minimalist extension and utility pair for time series analysis and visualization of PostgreSQL internal statistics.

This release adds support for PostgreSQL 18, adapting to significant catalog view changes introduced in this release:

PostgreSQL 13 will officially reach End-of-Life (EOL) on November 13, 2025. After this date, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group will stop releasing security patches and bug fixes for this version. That means if you’re still running PostgreSQL 13, you’ll soon be on your own with no updates, no community support, and growing security risks. Why […]

In the third installment of the PostGIS Performance series, I wanted to talk about performance around bounding boxes.

Geometry data is different from most column types you find in a relational database. The objects in a geometry column can be wildly different in the amount of the data domain they cover, and the amount of physical size they take up on disk.

PostgreSQL 19 changes this week ALTER SUBSCRIPTION : REFRESH SEQUENCES syntax added error_on_null() added for checking if the input is the NULL value COPY TO now works with partitioned tables full text search : database default collation now used for parsing psql : Improve tab completion for large objects. PostgreSQL 19 articles PostgreSQL 18 articles Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Support COPY TO for partitioned tables. (2025-10-22) - Hubert 'depesz' Lubaczewski Say Hello to OIDC in PostgreSQL 18!

Upgrading to a new major version of PostgreSQL has become faster and safer with pg_upgrade, but for teams using logical replication, a persistent pain point remained: the state of their subscribers was lost, forcing a tedious and high-risk rebuild of their replication setups.

When communicating UUID-v7 values to third parties, the creation dates inside them are leaked. In this post, let's see how to encrypt the timestamp to solve that problem.