Daniel Westermann

PostgreSQL: Maybe we should give ZFS a chance (3) – testing with an aligned record size

In the last post about PostgreSQL on ZFS the pgbench tests showed, that ZFS was slower for the standard tests compared to ext4 on Debian. A comment to that post made me wonder if changing the ZFS record size(…)

PostgreSQL: Maybe we should give ZFS a chance (2) – testing

In the last post we’ve set the baseline for comparing ext4 to zfs when it comes to PostgreSQL. We’ve ended with two PostgreSQL clusters, one running on the ext4 file system while the other is running(…)

PostgreSQL: Maybe we should give ZFS a chance (1) – baseline

Recently I’ve switched my PostgreSQL playground from Linux to FreeBSD. Not because I don’t like Linux anymore, just because I like trying out other operating systems and see what works the same and what is different.

PostgreSQL: Partitioning an existing table (almost) online using table inheritance

The PostgreSQL mailing list archives are a wonderful place to get new ideas just by reading through random posts. This time I found an interesting idea on how to partition an existing(…)

PostgreSQL: Delaying authentication to debug a process

While investigating a customer issue (details here) one of the replies suggested to use pre_auth_delay to add a delay before a session is authenticated. Even if this was not useful for the actual issue, this(…)

2024.pgconf.eu – Bigger than ever, the family is growing fast

The PostgreSQL community is growing every year and the same happens for pgconf.eu, which happened in Athens, Greece, this year. Attending this event is one of the best opportunities to get in touch with the people behind PostgreSQL. This year(…)

Improved not null/null planning in PostgreSQL 17

PostgreSQL 17 came with quite some additional features for the optimizer. One of them is about “is null” and “is not null” handling when column have a “not null” constraint defined. In the past it was(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Tweaking relation statistics

Up to now, there is no official way in PostgreSQL to tweak optimizer statistics manually. While this is quite common in other relational databases, PostgreSQL did not provide anything to do this. The first steps to allow this have now(…)

PostgreSQL 18: REJECT_LIMIT for COPY

With the just released version of 17 of PostgreSQL, copy got the “ON_ERROR” switch. This is very useful if you load something which contains rows that cannot be inserted into the target(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Verify tar format and compressed backups

While PostgreSQL 17 was released just a couple of days ago, the development of PostgreSQL 18 is already going on and the first patches got committed. One of them addresses a limitation with pg_verifybackup: Currently(…)