PostgreSQL Posts

Navigation of articles about PostgreSQL development, administration, principles, ecosystem, tools, architecture design, performance optimization, troubleshooting, and more.

The same forces that once led MongoDB and MySQL toward closure are now at work in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. The PG world needs a distribution that represents “software freedom” values.

The 2025 SO global developer survey results are fresh out, and PostgreSQL has become the most popular, most loved, and most wanted database for the third consecutive year. Nothing can stop PostgreSQL from consolidating the entire database world!

PGDG cuts off FTP rsync sync channels, global mirror sites universally disconnected - this time they really strangled global users’ supply chain.

The annual PostgreSQL developer conference will be held in Montreal in May. Like the first PG Con.Dev, there’s also an additional dedicated event - Postgres Extensions Day

A PG kernel fork acquired by Supabase, claiming to solve PG’s XID wraparound problem, eliminate table bloat issues, improve performance by 4x, and support cloud-native storage. Now part of the Pigsty family.

What? PostgreSQL can now be accessed using MySQL clients? That’s right, openHalo, which was open-sourced on April Fool’s Day, provides exactly this capability and has now joined the Pigsty kernel family.

Leverage JuiceFS to turn PostgreSQL into a filesystem with PITR capabilities!

Sharing some interesting recent developments in the PG ecosystem.

Why would we need yet another package manager for PostgreSQL & extensions?

Supabase is great, own your own Supabase is even better. A tutorial for self-hosting production-grade supabase on local/cloud/ VM/BMs.

Never deploy on Friday, or you’ll be working all weekend! PostgreSQL minor releases were pulled on the day of release, requiring emergency rollback.

PG17 achieved extension ecosystem adaptation in half the time of PG16, with 300 available extensions ready for production use. PG 12 officially exits support lifecycle.

PostgreSQL Is Eating the Database World through the power of extensibility. With 390 extensions powering PG, we may not say it’s invincible, but it’s definitely getting much closer.

PostgreSQL is now the world’s most advanced open-source database and has become the preferred open-source database for organizations of all sizes, matching or exceeding top commercial databases.

PostgreSQL can directly replace Oracle, SQL Server, and MongoDB at the kernel level. Of course, the most thorough replacement is SQL Server - AWS’s Babelfish provides wire-protocol-level compatibility.

Just like the vector database extension race two years ago, the current PostgreSQL ecosystem extension competition has begun revolving around DuckDB. MotherDuck’s official entry into the PostgreSQL extension space undoubtedly signals that competition has entered white-hot territory.

The 2024 StackOverflow Global Developer Survey results are fresh out, and PostgreSQL has become the most popular, most loved, and most wanted database globally for the second consecutive year. Nothing can stop PostgreSQL from devouring the entire database world anymore!

Dify is an open-source LLM app development platform. This article explains how to self-host Dify using Pigsty.

Experience & Feeling on the PGCon.Dev 2024

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces PostgreSQL 17’s first Beta version is now available. This time, PostgreSQL has truly burst the toothpaste tube!

Today, one of the biggest trends in software development is PostgreSQL becoming the de facto database standard. There have already been blogs about using PostgreSQL for everything, but until now, there haven’t been many articles explaining the reasons behind this phenomenon (and more importantly, why it matters).

PostgreSQL will not change its license, Since the license is literally named after the project, and the project has a long-standing commitment to open source community collaboration.

PostgreSQL isn’t just a simple relational database; it’s a data management framework with the potential to engulf the entire database realm.

Whether production databases should be containerized remains a controversial topic. From a DBA’s perspective, I believe that currently, putting production databases in Docker is still a bad idea.

ParadeDB aims to be an Elasticsearch alternative: “Modern Elasticsearch Alternative built on Postgres” — PostgreSQL for search and analytics.

This article describes how Cloudflare scaled to support 55 million requests per second using 15 PostgreSQL clusters, and PostgreSQL’s scalability performance.

DB-Engines officially announced today that PostgreSQL has once again been crowned “Database of the Year.” This is the fifth time PG has received this honor in the past seven years. If not for Snowflake stealing the spotlight for two years, the database world would have almost become a PostgreSQL solo show.

No rules, no standards. Some developer conventions for PostgreSQL 16.

Query optimization is one of the core responsibilities of DBAs. This article introduces how to use metrics provided by pg_stat_statements for macro-level PostgreSQL query optimization.

FerretDB aims to provide a truly open-source MongoDB alternative based on PostgreSQL.

Backups are a DBA’s lifeline — but what if your PostgreSQL database has already exploded and you have no backups? Maybe pg_filedump can help you!

Vector-based features will become key elements in building applications, just like JSON in history. PostgreSQL once again stands at the forefront of the times leading database trends, securing high growth in the AI era with vector extension support.

StackOverflow 2023 Survey shows PostgreSQL is the most popular, loved, and wanted database, solidifying its status as the ‘Linux of Database’.

This article focuses on vector databases hyped by AI, introduces the basic principles of AI embeddings and vector storage/retrieval, and demonstrates the functionality, performance, acquisition, and application of the vector database extension PGVECTOR through a concrete knowledge base retrieval case study.

Let performance data speak: Why PostgreSQL is the world’s most advanced open-source relational database, aka the world’s most successful database. MySQL vs PostgreSQL performance showdown and distributed database reality check.

Database users are developers, but what about developers’ preferences, likes, and choices? Looking at StackOverflow survey results over the past six years, it’s clear that in 2022, PostgreSQL has won all three categories, becoming literally the “most successful database”

Yesterday I gave a live presentation in the PostgreSQL Chinese community, introducing the open-source PostgreSQL full-stack solution — Pigsty

Databases are the core component of information systems, relational databases are the absolute backbone of databases, and PostgreSQL is the world’s most advanced open source relational database. With such favorable timing and positioning, how can it not achieve great success?

How to implement relatively complex fuzzy search logic in PostgreSQL?

What? Don’t know what COLLATION is? Remember one thing: using C COLLATE is always the right choice!

Replica identity is important - it determines the success or failure of logical replication

This article introduces the principles and best practices of logical replication in PostgreSQL 13.

Machine restarted due to failure, NTP service corrected PG time after PG startup, causing Patroni to fail to start.

How to change column types online, such as upgrading from INT to BIGINT?

Understanding the golden monitoring metrics in PostgreSQL

Concepts and their naming are very important. Naming style reflects an engineer’s understanding of system architecture. Poorly defined concepts lead to communication confusion, while carelessly set names create unexpected additional burden. Therefore, they need careful design.

Managing databases is similar to managing people - both need KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). So what are database KPIs? This article introduces a way to measure PostgreSQL load: using a single horizontally comparable metric that is basically independent of workload type and machine type, called PG Load.

How to modify PostgreSQL column types online? A general approach

Understanding the TCP protocol used for communication between PostgreSQL server and client, and printing messages using Go

PostgreSQL actually has only two transaction isolation levels: Read Committed and Serializable

Today encountered an interesting case where a customer reported database connection issues caused by extensions.

Change Data Capture is an interesting ETL alternative solution.

When GIN indexes are used to search with very long keyword lists, performance degrades significantly. This article explains why GIN index keyword search has O(n^2) time complexity.

Replication is one of the core issues in system architecture.

There are various backup strategies. Physical backups can usually be divided into four types.

Sometimes, interactions between components manifest in subtle ways. For example, using pg_dump to export data from a connection pool can cause connection pool contamination issues.

Using binary editing to repair PostgreSQL data pages, and how to make a primary key query return two records.

PostgreSQL uses MVCC as its primary concurrency control technology. While it has many benefits, it also brings other effects, such as relation bloat.

TimescaleDB is a PostgreSQL extension plugin that provides time-series database functionality.

If you use Integer sequences on tables, you should consider potential overflow scenarios.

XID WrapAround is perhaps a unique type of failure specific to PostgreSQL

A common requirement in application development is GeoIP conversion - converting source IP addresses to geographic coordinates or administrative divisions (country-state-city-county-town-village)

Detailed understanding of trigger management and usage in PostgreSQL

Without rules, there can be no order. This article compiles a development specification for PostgreSQL database principles and features, which can reduce confusion encountered when using PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL’s slogan is “The World’s Most Advanced Open Source Relational Database,” but I think the most vivid characterization should be: The Full-Stack Database That Does It All - one tool to rule them all.

How to efficiently solve the typical reverse geocoding problem: determining administrative regions based on user coordinates.

Ultimate optimization of KNN problems, from traditional relational design to PostGIS

Tables in PostgreSQL correspond to many physical files. This article explains how to calculate the actual size of a table in PostgreSQL.

PgAdmin is a GUI program for managing PostgreSQL, written in Python, but it’s quite dated and requires some additional configuration.

Recently there was a perplexing incident where a database had half its data volume and load migrated away, but ended up being overwhelmed due to increased load.

Some tips for interacting between PostgreSQL and Bash.

Use Distinct On extension clause to quickly find records with maximum/minimum values within groups

PostgreSQL functions have three volatility levels by default. Proper use can significantly improve performance.

Exclude constraint is a PostgreSQL extension that can implement more advanced and sophisticated database constraints.

Cars need oil changes, databases need maintenance. For PG, three important maintenance tasks: backup, repack, vacuum

Backup is the foundation of a DBA’s livelihood. With backups, there’s no need to panic.

PgBackRest is a set of PostgreSQL backup tools written in Perl

Pgbouncer is a lightweight database connection pool. This guide covers basic Pgbouncer configuration, management, and usage.

It’s recommended to configure PostgreSQL’s log format as CSV for easy analysis, and it can be directly imported into PostgreSQL data tables.

FIO is a convenient tool for testing disk I/O performance

Although PostgreSQL provides pgbench, sometimes you need sysbench to outperform MySQL.

Data migration typically involves stopping services for updates. Zero-downtime data migration is a relatively advanced operation.

Indexes are useful, but they’re not free. Unused indexes are a waste. Use these methods to identify unused indexes.

Quick configuration for passwordless login to all machines

Wireshark is a very useful tool, especially suitable for analyzing network protocols. Here’s a simple introduction to using Wireshark for packet capture and PostgreSQL protocol analysis.

With file_fdw, you can easily view operating system information, fetch network data, and feed various data sources into your database for unified viewing and management.

top, free, vmstat, iostat: Quick reference for four commonly used CLI tools

PostGIS is PostgreSQL’s killer extension, but compiling and installing it isn’t easy.

Similar to JDBC, Go also has a standard database access interface. This article details how to use database/sql in Go and important considerations.

Cleverly utilizing PostgreSQL’s Notify feature, you can conveniently notify applications of metadata changes and implement trigger-based logical replication.

Sometimes we want to record important metadata changes for audit purposes. PostgreSQL triggers can conveniently solve this need automatically.

UUID properties, principles and applications, and how to manipulate UUIDs using PostgreSQL stored procedures.

Recently had business requirements to access MongoDB through PostgreSQL FDW, but compiling MongoDB FDW is really a nightmare.