PostgreSQL 16 introduces quite a few improvements to the query planner and makes many SQL queries run faster than they did on previous versions of PostgreSQL. If you look at the PG16 release notes, you’ll see some of these planner improvements. But with the volume of changes made in each PostgreSQL release, it’s not possible to provide enough detail about each and every change. So maybe you might

The 2nd step above is new in Citus 11. The citus_finish_citus_upgrade function will ensure that all the nodes have metadata, such that your existing cluster behaves the same as a brand new Citus 11 cluster. We recommend also calling citus_finish_citus_upgrade after any future Citus upgrade, since we may add additional steps. No application changes are required when switching to Citus 11. You can c

This post by David Rowley about Postgres 15 was originally published on the Microsoft TechCommunity Blog. In recent years, PostgreSQL has seen several improvements which make sorting faster. In the PostgreSQL 15 development cycle—which ended in April 2022—Ronan Dunklau, Thomas Munro, Heikki Linnakangas, and I contributed some changes to PostgreSQL to make sorts go even faster. Each of the improvem

Personally I'm a big fan of email, just like blogging. To me a good email thread can be like a good novel where you're following along always curious for what comes next. And no, I don't mean the ones where there is an email to all-employees@company.com and someone replies all, to only receive reply-all's to not reply-all. I mean ones like started last week internally among the Azure Postgres team

Last week I wrote about locking behaviour in Postgres, which commands block each other, and how you can diagnose blocked commands. Of course, after the diagnosis you may also want a cure. With Postgres it is possible to shoot yourself in the foot, but Postgres also offers you a way to stay on target. These are some of the important do’s and don’ts that we’ve seen as helpful when working with users

A health check playbook for your Postgres database Written by Craig Kerstiens March 29, 2019 I talk with a lot of folks that set their database up, start working with it, and then are surprised by issues that suddenly crop up out of nowhere. The reality is, so many don't want to have to be a DBA, instead you would rather build features and just have the database work. But your is that a database i

Running periodic jobs such as vacuuming or removing old data is a common requirement in PostgreSQL. A simple way to achieve this is to configure cron or another external daemon to periodically connect to the database and run a command. However, with databases increasingly running as managed services or stand-alone containers, running and configuring a separate deamon is often impractical. It is al

Wouldn’t it be great if you could run SQL queries on your data in DynamoDB? While this isn’t possible directly, there is an alternative: With Podyn, you can automatically replicate the schema, data, and changes in your DynamoDB tables to Postgres. Once your data is flowing into Postgres, you can start using a wide array of features including views, indexes, rollup tables, and advanced SQL queries.

Citus 12.1 is out! Now with PG16 Support. Read all about it in Naisila’s 12.1 blog post. 💥 A key part of running a reliable database service is ensuring you have a good plan for disaster recovery. Disaster recovery comes into play when disks or instances fail, and you need to be able to recover your data. In those type of cases logical backups, via pg_dump, may be days old and in such cases not i

As a developer your CLI is your home. You spend a lifetime of person-years in your shell and even small optimizations can pay major dividends to your efficiency. For anyone that works with Postgres and likely the psql editor, you should consider investing some love and care into psql. A little known fact is that psql has a number of options you can configure it with, and these configuration option

Everybody counts, but not always quickly. This article is a close look into how PostgreSQL optimizes counting. If you know the tricks there are ways to count rows orders of magnitude faster than you do already. The problem is actually underdescribed—there are several variations of counting, each with its own methods. First think whether you need an exact count or whether an estimate suffices. Next

With the release of Citus 5.0 in 2016, all pg_shard functionality is included directly in Citus. We encourage you to take a look at Citus, instead of pg_shard which is now deprecated. Citus is available as open source and in the cloud, as the Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL managed service. If you’re looking to run Citus in the cloud, take a look at Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. The open source p

Hot off the press: the schedule for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is now available. Big welcome 🤝 to our speakers! In April we released cstore_fdw, the first columnar store foreign data wrapper for PostgreSQL. Our initial blog post received lots of interest in cstore_fdw but also lots of questions. In this blog post we're going to attempt to answer some of the more common performance related que