Daniel Westermann

How to contribute to YaK

Some days ago we officially launched YaK, which is our open source tool for deploying infrastructures everywhere. Because the core component of Yak is open source, can you contribute if you want. Contributions are more than(…)

Be careful with “public” in PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL comes with the "public" schema by default and we always recommend to drop it for PostgreSQL versions up to 14. The reason is, that everybody who is able to connect to a database, by default, can create objects in(…)

Do you really need varchar(n) in PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL comes with three data types for storing characters. char, varchar and text. What we often see at our customers is, that varchar(n) is used when they want to store characters and limit the amount of characters which are allowed(…)

TOASTing in PostgreSQL, let’s see it in action

The last two posts introduced TOASTing strategies and how TOAST tables look like. Have a look at those posts if you are not yet familiar with TOAST in PostgreSQL. In this post we'll look(…)

TOASTing in PostgreSQL, TOAST tables

Make sure that you read the last post about TOASTing strategies in PostgreSQL before you continue with this one, at least if you are not familiar with the previous topic. The strategies we looked at are one(…)

TOASTing strategies in PostgreSQL

In Oracle a single row can span more than one block, which is called row chaining. As PostgreSQL does not allow a row to span multiple blocks, there needs to be a way to work around that. The default block(…)

In which schema do temporary tables go in PostgreSQL?

As you might know, you can create temporary tables, views and sequences in PostgreSQL. Temporary means, that the temporary table, view or sequence will be dropped when you either end your session or you transaction. When the drop will happen(…)

A 7 year journey, my longest employment ever

It has been an amazing ride: 1st of May 2022 I have been with dbi services for exactly seven years. This is by far the longest employment in my career. When I started way back in 2015 most of my(…)

Helvetia used AWS SCT & DMS to migrate to AWS RDS for PostgreSQL

One of our long term-time customers, Helvetia, successfully migrated on-prem Oracle databases to AWS, not only because of the licenses, but more importantly: to deploy faster, innovate faster, and use the state-of-the-art open source(…)

PostgreSQL 15: More flexibility with setting parameters

Another nice feature just made it into PostgreSQL 15: You can now control who is allowed to set specific parameters. This gives you a lot more flexibility, especially when you are hosting PostgreSQL instances for your customers. You can delegate(…)