---
title: "Why The European Space Agency Uses Postgres"
publication: "Postgres Weekly"
issue: 276
published_at: "2018-10-03"
canonical_url: "https://postgresweekly.com/issues/276"
---

The latest Postgres news, articles, tools, and projects.       

#276 — October 3, 2018 

[Read on the Web](https://postgresweekly.com/issues/276)   

Postgres Weekly 

[![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/gjjwfo5zjhvjmuwihu1r.jpg)](http://blog.dataegret.com/2018/10/pgcenter-stress-free-postgres-stats.html)  

[pgCenter: Stress Free Postgres Stats](http://blog.dataegret.com/2018/10/pgcenter-stress-free-postgres-stats.html) — An open-source CLI admin tool for working with Postgres activity statistics. Now newly written in Go. 

Alexey Lesovsky   

[Sequence Caching: Oracle vs. Postgres](https://seiler.us/2018-10-02-sequence-caching-oracle-vs-postgresql/) — Sequence caching is when a DB pre-generates sequence values in advance making them quicker to provide when needed. Don reflects on how they differ between Postgres and Oracle. 

Don Seiler   [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/be8c5079.png)](https://www.enterprisedb.com/news/alibaba-cloud-expands-technical-partnership-enterprisedb-provide-enhanced-postgres-cloud) 

[News: Alibaba Cloud Expands Technical Partnership with EnterpriseDB](https://www.enterprisedb.com/news/alibaba-cloud-expands-technical-partnership-enterprisedb-provide-enhanced-postgres-cloud) — ...to provide enhanced Postgres cloud database capabilities on Alibaba Cloud. 

EnterpriseDB sponsor   

[Why The European Space Agency Uses Postgres](https://blog.timescale.com/european-space-agency-postgresql-geospatial-time-series-9cced899c41d) — A look into the world of space exploration and time-series and geospatial data and how it all comes together in the ESA’s use case for Postgres and TimescaleDB. 

Andrew Staller   

[Scaling Postgres using Connection Poolers and Load Balancers for an Enterprise Grade Environment](https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/10/02/scaling-postgresql-using-connection-poolers-and-load-balancers-for-an-enterprise-grade-environment/) 

Avinash Vallarapu et al.   

[`SELECT DISTINCT ON`: Not Your Normal `DISTINCT`](https://www.geekytidbits.com/postgres-distinct-on/) — _“perfect when you have groups of data that are similar and want to pull a single record out of each group, based on a specific ordering”_ 

Brady Holt   

[The 'O' in ORDBMS: Postgres's Inheritance Support](https://severalnines.com/blog/o-ordbms-postgresql-inheritance) — Postgres’s support for inheritance opens up interesting database design possibilities and if you’re not familiar with it, this is a gentle intro. 

Achilleas Mantzios   

[5x Faster Spatial Joins with this One Weird Trick](http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/09/postgis-external-storage.html) — _“For a 50% storage penalty, on a table that has far more large objects than most spatial tables, we achieved a 500% performance improvement. Maybe we shouldn’t apply compression to our large geometry at all?”_ 

Paul Ramsey   

[Per-Table Autovacuum Tuning](https://www.keithf4.com/per-table-autovacuum-tuning/) — A lot of Postgres administrators are familiar with tweaking their vacuuming setup, but what about on a table-by-table basis? 

Keith Fiske   

[A History Lesson on SQL Joins in Postgres](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/09/25/history-on-joins-in-postgres/) — Since widely different SQL queries can yield the same result, Postgres’s query planner works hard to find the most efficient way to execute JOINs. 

Dimitri Fontaine   

[Why Do We Install Postgres as `root`?](https://postgresrocks.enterprisedb.com/t5/Postgres-Gems/Why-do-we-install-as-root/ba-p/1951) — Ever wonder why Postgres installs as the root user? Well here is your answer. 

pgSnake   

[Speed Up UPDATEs & DELETEs Across All Cores in a Distributed Cluster](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/07/25/high-performance-distributed-dml/?utm_source=PG_Weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sponsor_blog) — By using high performance distributed DML with subqueries. Benchmarking data included: Citus vs. others. 

Citus Data sponsor   

[PL/R: R Procedural Language Support for Postgres](https://github.com/postgres-plr/plr) — PL/R lets you write Postgres functions using R, the popular statistical computing language. A [new version](https://github.com/postgres-plr/plr/releases/tag/REL8_3_0_18) has just been released which introduces Postgres 11 support. 

Joseph E. Conway  

🗓 Events  

[PostgresConf South Africa 2018](https://postgresconf.org/conferences/SouthAfrica2018) — **October 9-10 (Johannesburg, South Africa)** An opportunity for the database administration and developer community to exchange ideas and learn about current features and upcoming trends.    

[2Q PGConf 2018](http://www.2qpgconf.com/) — **December 4-5 (Chicago)** A conference dedicated to exchanging PostgreSQL knowledge.   

[PGCONF.ASIA 2018](https://www.pgconf.asia/EN/2018/) — **Decemeber 10-12 (Tokyo, Japan)** PGConf.ASIA 2018 is an international conference for PostgreSQL. Come and join this one of the largest PostgreSQL conference held in Asia.          

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