Daniel Westermann

PostgreSQL 16: More statistics in pg_stat_*_tables

PostgreSQL 16 is already in feature freeze and Beta1 has been released on May 25th. This is the time you should start testing and report any issues back to the community. There are plenty of new features, as usual, and(…)

2023.pgconf.de and the Swiss PGDay are just around the corner

Time flies, we are in June already and at the end of this month two PostgreSQL conferences will take place: There is 2023.pgconf.de, this year in Essen, the 27th of June. For the first time in(…)

How a merge join produced the wrong result in PostgreSQL

This was a really interesting customer case and I learned a lot by troubleshooting this. The original request was: We have two databases connected via postgres_fdw and when a merge join is chosen by PostgreSQL we(…)

PostgreSQL 16: GENERIC_PLAN option for EXPLAIN and SHELL exit codes for psql

Last week some smaller features got committed for PostgreSQL. The first one is an option which can be given to explain for displaying the generic plan for a statement. I’ve written about generic plans in the past, please read(…)

pgDay Paris 2023

Another great PostgreSQL community conference is over, and I came back with a lot of impressions yesterday. It was probably the worst time of the year for the conference to happen, as massive strikes are ongoing in France currently. Nothing(…)

Starting PostgreSQL logical replication for some tables based on a dump

Recently at a customer we faced a somehow strange issue: We’ve setup logical replication from a public cloud managed PostgreSQL service to a PostgreSQL instance on a VM hosted by the same public cloud provider. For most of the tables(…)

More compression options for pg_dump in PostgreSQL 16

The last releases of PostgreSQL already introduced new options for compression, see here and here. PostgreSQL 16 will build on top of that and will come with LZ4(…)

PostgreSQL 16: More I/O statistics

PostgreSQL is already tracking various kinds of statistics which can help in identifying bottlenecks. Some of these statistics are available in the the pg_statio_* catalog views: postgres=# select viewname from pg_views where viewname like '%statio%'; viewname -------------------------- pg_statio_all_sequences pg_statio_all_tables pg_statio_sys_tables(…)

PostgreSQL 16: reserved_connections

The maximum number of connections that PostgreSQL will allow, is controlled by the max_connections parameter. By default this allows a maximum of one hundred connections: postgres=# show max_connections; max_connections ----------------- 100 (1 row) In reality not one hundred connections(…)

Converting from Unix timestamps to “real” timestamps in PostgreSQL

Recently we’ve been asked how an application can be changed from using Unix timestamps to PostgreSQL timestamps. It is still not so uncommon to store dates and times in numeric data types,(…)