--- title: "AWS RDS and Heroku now support Postgres 11" publication: "Postgres Weekly" issue: 298 published_at: "2019-03-27" canonical_url: "https://postgresweekly.com/issues/298" --- The latest Postgres news, articles, tools, and projects. #298 — March 27, 2019 [Read on the Web](https://postgresweekly.com/issues/298) Postgres Weekly [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/fslxzjzgirumeh4bnk9v.jpg)](https://severalnines.com/blog/benchmarking-managed-postgresql-cloud-solutions-part-two-amazon-rds) [Benchmarking Postgres Cloud Solutions: Amazon RDS](https://severalnines.com/blog/benchmarking-managed-postgresql-cloud-solutions-part-two-amazon-rds) — Two weeks ago [they benchmarked Amazon Aurora](https://severalnines.com/blog/benchmarking-managed-postgresql-cloud-solutions-part-one-amazon-aurora), now it’s RDS’s turn. _Spoiler: Aurora clearly beats RDS performance-wise when it comes to Postgres, although Aurora is quite [a different beast](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-the-aurora-storage-engine/)._ Viorel Tabara [PostgreSQL 11 Generally Available on Heroku (and AWS)](https://blog.heroku.com/postgresql-11-general-availability) — Heroku, the cloud application platform, have been _huge_ champions of Postgres over the years and now they’ve made Postgres 11 support generally available across their entire service. Hurrah. In related news, [Postgres 11 is supported on AWS RDS](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/postgresql11-now-supported-in-amazon-rds/) too! Becky Jaimes (Heroku) [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/dfb2e687.png)](https://pganalyze.com/ebooks/optimizing-postgres-query-performance?utm_source=PostgresWeeklyPrimary) [Free eBook: How to Get A 3x Performance Improvement On Your Postgres Database](https://pganalyze.com/ebooks/optimizing-postgres-query-performance?utm_source=PostgresWeeklyPrimary) — Learn our best practices for optimizing Postgres query performance for customers like Atlassian and how to reduce data loaded from disk by 500x. pganalyze sponsor [Speeding Up `GROUP BY`](https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/speeding-up-group-by-in-postgresql/) — SQL’s `GROUP BY` is used to group records in a result set together often for summary/aggregation purposes and there’s a way to speed them up and gain some ‘free’ extra performance, claims the author! Hans-Jürgen Schönig [Indexes in Postgres: A Look at B-Trees](https://habr.com/en/company/postgrespro/blog/443284/) — The latest in [a series of extensive posts](https://habr.com/en/company/postgrespro/blog/441962/) digging into how indexes work in Postgres. There’s more here than you absolutely _need_ to know but it’ll help you understand why indexes sometimes behave the way they do. Egor Rogov [Pivotal Launches Its Own Supported Version of Postgres](https://content.pivotal.io/blog/pivotal-postgres) — [Pivotal](https://pivotal.io/) is a well known cloud development company and they’ve created [their own commercially supported package](https://pivotal.io/pivotal-postgres) of Postgres 11 (for RHEL 7) along with enterprise-style add-ons like a replication manager. Pivotal [The Best Way to Count Distinct Indexed Things](https://www.peterbe.com/plog/best-way-to-count-distinct-indexed-things-in-postgresql) — It’s significantly more efficient to do a count of a subquery’s results than to try to do a count with `DISTINCT` in a single query. Peter Bengtsson [Monitoring PostgreSQL WAL Files](https://pgdash.io/blog/postgres-monitor-wal-files.html) — Monitoring Postgres WAL files can lead to a more performant PostgreSQL deployment. Find out why & how to go about it. pgDash sponsor [Comparing Postgres Clients: SQLPro vs Table Plus vs Postico](https://spin.atomicobject.com/2019/03/26/postgresql-database-client/) — One developer’s very brief overview of what she liked and disliked about three different GUI apps for working with Postgres and why you might pick each. Meredith Lind [Barman V2.7 Released: The Backup and Recovery Management Tool](https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1930/) — Use this to implement disaster recovery solutions for those all critical production databases. [Project homepage](https://www.pgbarman.org/). 2ndQuadrant [wal2json: A JSON Output Plugin for Changeset Extraction](https://github.com/eulerto/wal2json) — A JSON object is produced per transaction containing both the new and old tuples for updates. Euler Taveira de Oliveira supported by [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/v1545062952/na5isnukkrtglivbcqvs.png)](http://www.strongdm.com/product?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2019-03-08%20-%20%5BNL%5D%20-%20%5BSchD%5D%20-%20%5BSDM%5D%20-%20COMPANY-LIST) 💡 Tip of the Week Improve your `psql` experience with `.psqlrc` Unless you've found a GUI tool you really love, you're likely to be using Postgres's default `psql` client a _lot_ while working with your Postgres databases. `.psqlrc` is a user-level configuration file (though there _is_ a system-wide `psqlrc` file too) you can create in your home directory to set a variety of default options for `psql` and make it behave in a way that better suits you. Create a `.psqlrc` file in your home directory and paste in these commands merely to get started: \timing \pset null 'ø' We're keeping it _very_ simple here, just to show off the basic concept! `\timing` turns on query timing which shows you how long a query took to run (it was [our tip in issue 292](https://postgresweekly.com/issues/292)). `\pset null 'ø'` makes `psql` show null values as the `ø` character (similar to the 'empty set' symbol) instead of as an easily missed blank space. ![](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/utt8rsg6s07hrv31ax0p.jpg) Want to learn a little more? Check out [An Explained psqlrc](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/an-explained-psqlrc) and [Customizing My Postgres Shell](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/07/16/customizing-my-postgres-shell-using-psqlrc/) for some more ideas. This week's tip is sponsored by _[strongDM](http://www.strongdm.com/product?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2019-03-08%20-%20%5BNL%5D%20-%20%5BSchD%5D%20-%20%5BSDM%5D%20-%20COMPANY-LIST)_. Teams at Hearst, SoFi, and Peloton trust strongDM to manage engineers’ access to everything. 🗓 **Upcoming Postgres Events** - [pgconf.de 2019 (May 10 in Leipzig, Germany)](https://2019.pgconf.de/) — The latest edition of the highly successful German-speaking PostgreSQL conference. - [PGDay.IT 2019 (May 16 in Bologna, Italy)](https://2019.pgday.it/en/) - [PGCon 2019 (May 28 in Ottawa, Canada)](https://www.pgcon.org/2019/) — An annual conference for users and developers to meet and discuss all things Postgres. - [Postgres Vision 2019 (June 24 in Boston, MA)](https://postgresvision.com/) Curated by [Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/) and [Craig Kerstiens](https://twitter.com/craigkerstiens). 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