Postgres Weekly Issue 287: January 9, 2019

#287 — January 9, 2019

We're back! We hope you enjoyed your holiday break and are looking forward to this year's Postgres developments as much as we are.

No huge Postgres news from over the break (so no new releases to be upgrading to, then - phew!) but we have launched our new Tip of the Week feature - it's at the bottom of this issue. Thanks to those who've submitted tip ideas, we'll be in touch soon, and if you want to submit your own, reach out here.

🐘 Peter Cooper and Craig Kerstiens, editors

PostgreSQL is DB-Engine's 'DBMS of the Year 2018' — DB-Engines is a popular ranking of database system popularity and they’ve given their annual “DBMS of the Year” accolade to Postgres for the second year in a row. MongoDB and Redis take the silver and bronze.

Paul Andlinger and Matthias Gelbmann

The Guardian: 'Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres' — In April, popular British newspaper The Guardian switched off their MongoDB cluster and completed a migration to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS. Here’s the full story.

Philip McMahon

▶ Will Postgres Live Forever? — Join the team at EDB as they discuss the innovation that goes into keeping Postgres 30 years young.

EnterpriseDB sponsor

An Overview of Just-in-Time Compilation (JIT) for Postgres — Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation is the process of compiling interpreted code into faster native code at runtime in order to improve repeat performance. Postgres added a JIT feature in version 11 although it’s not on by default as it doesn’t benefit everything.

Viorel Tabara

8 Anonymization Strategies with Postgres — GDPR may have seemed like a 2018 panic but the demand for improved privacy in data systems is only going to increase, so considering ways to anonmyize data is a good idea.

Damien Clochard

Fun with SQL: Self Joins — Self joins are a simple but occasionally handy notion within SQL allowing you to join a table to itself when some relationship is defined within a single row to another row within that table.

Craig Kerstiens

Postgres's 14 Authentication Methods — Did you know it supported so many? They come in six types.

Bruce Momjian

Dealing with a Case of Stuck TransactionIDs — What to do if you see “oldest xmin is far in the past” and “close open transactions soon to avoid wraparound problems” popping up in your logs.

Richard Yen

Complete Free Quest for Cloud SQL — Creating instances and querying data. Cloud SQL will give you the knowledge you need to start integrating this service.

Google Cloud sponsor

Configuring Vim for Postgres Development — A new page on the official Postgres wiki.

Nikolay Shaplov

HypoPG 2.0 Beta Release — HypoPG is an extension which supports hypothetical indexing and recommendations for Postgres. The 2.0 version is now here which adds support for hypothetical partitioning in Postgres 10 and above.

PostgreSQL GLobal Development Group

supported by

💡 Tip of the Week

Welcome to our newest feature for 2019 - a handy, weekly Postgres-related tip. We're starting out with something simple — a way to look at your Postgres server's settings that's better than trawling through postgresql.conf.

First, head into psql or any client where you can issue a query. Then run this query:

SHOW ALL;

You'll get a (pretty long) response beginning like so:

Not only do you get to see the setting names and their values, but also a description of what the setting is for or does.

This Tip of the Week is sponsored by Citus Data, the creators of worry-free Postgres that is built to scale out. Learn more in the Citus Data blog.

If you have any ideas for your own tips, reach out here - we'll pay $50 for your tip if we use it in an issue.