Here’s a continued very deep dive into what happens under the covers of Postgres when you run a select statement. If you’ve ever been curious about the internals of Postgres this is a great primer.

“Earlier update releases attempted to fix an issue in PostgreSQL 9.3 and 9.4 with ‘multixact wraparound’, but failed to account for issues doing multixact cleanup during crash recovery. This could cause servers to be unable to restart after a crash. As such, all users of 9.3 and 9.4 should apply this update as soon as possible.”

Indexes will help make your applications and queries much faster. Here’s a look both from a high level, as well as some deep dive specifics on different types of indexes and how to take advantage of them to improve performance.

Bruce Momjian will be teaching foundational and advanced topics needed for successful PostgreSQL administration. Join Bruce and learn from his tips and techniques in this live on-line session in July. 20% off promo code COMB-WEB-01.

Generates PostgreSQL databases on the fly for a limited time, allowing people to test their code against an actual PostgreSQL database.

Materialized views can make complex/long-running reports much snappier by actually writing out a table equivalent of the resulting view. With a little bit of manoeuvring you can even have your app directly take advantage of them as highlighted here with ActiveRecord.

PgCon, the annual conference for Postgres hackers, is now underway. Each year there’s a variety of talk and coordination on upcoming parts for Postgres. Take a look at some of the meta issues around release schedules and coordination for year ahead within their meeting notes.

JSON has been an exciting topic for a few years now in databases. In large part this is due to the rise of attempting to get more flexibility in the app dev process my not being constrained to a specific schema. Here’s a rundown of the support that’s available across a variety of databases.