Postgres Weekly Issue 24
August 21, 2013
Featured
Postgres Open Conference September 16-18, 2013
Postgres Open, the premiere Postgres conference for end users, is just around the corner. Tickets are still available, the room block is closing soon, and you now can create your agenda for the conference. We’ll be there and we’d love to talk to you if you make it there.
From our sponsor
Heroku Postgres - Fully managed Postgres on EC2
There's a lot to worry about when building your application; ensuring your database is secured, backed up, available shouldn't have to be part of that. Let Heroku Postgres focus on keeping your database running so you can take advantage of all the awesome features within Postgres.

Heroku Postgres is the worlds largest provider of Postgres as a Service, offering fully managed databases on top of EC2. Get started today for free and scale easily as your application needs to.
The rest
PostgreSQL Warm-up
In observing performance on your database its essential to allow it time to ‘warm up’. While the intricacies of how it does so can get pretty detailed here’s a great overview of it as well as how you can reduce the time required for such.
PostgreSQL Basics by Example
As more and more people switch over to Postgres from other databases having a 101 guide is essential. While the Postgres tutorial still needs much improvement we have other resources such as Postgres Guide and resources such as this to stand in.
100x faster Postgres performance by changing 1 line
Here’s a super specific but great case of optimizing performance for a PostgreSQL query. By moving from the ARRAY syntax to VALUES they gained two orders of magnitude in performance. And while specific in this case the principles of examining and refining your queries can apply quite broadly.
Understanding Window Functions
Window functions are a great and powerful feature within Postgres, but often a source of great confusion as well. Here’s yet another attempt at simplifying and explaining them.
Use UUIDs as Keys
Using integers as primary keys in your database is an invitation for problems assuming you data grows large enough. Here’s a great look at using UUIDs as keys instead.
The PostgreSQL JDBC Driver is now PgBouncer compliant
PgBouncer is one of a few solid options for connection pooling in Postgres. Now the JDBC driver has good built in support for playing friendly with it.