---
title: "Workloads, acceleration, and making Postgres better"
publication: "Postgres Weekly"
issue: 353
published_at: "2020-04-29"
canonical_url: "https://postgresweekly.com/issues/353"
---

This week's Postgres news, views, and tools.       

#353 — April 29, 2020 

[Read on the Web](https://postgresweekly.com/issues/353)   

Postgres Weekly 

[![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/v1588091899/qkhoqcyk2wvhp9cjvhre.jpg)](https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/things-could-be-improved-postgresql/)  

[7 Things That Could Be Improved in Postgres](https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/things-could-be-improved-postgresql/) — As 1990s dance pop group _D:Ream_ sang in 1994, _Things Can Only Get Better.._ including Postgres 😂 Luckily these are all ‘nice to have’s but I dare say we’ll see some of them (such as automatic tuning and auto-vacuuming improvements) appear over time. 

Kaarel Moppel   

[How The Citus Distributed Query Executor Adapts to a Postgres Workload](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2020/04/27/how-citus-distributed-query-executor-adapts-to-postgres-workload/) — Citus is the popular extension for horizontally scaling Postgres and its query executor has seen some huge updates lately. 

Citus Data (Microsoft)   [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/95618ec7.png)](https://pganalyze.com/ebooks/monitoring-postgres-logs?utm_source=PostgresWeeklyPrimary04292020) 

[eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs](https://pganalyze.com/ebooks/monitoring-postgres-logs?utm_source=PostgresWeeklyPrimary04292020) — In this pganalyze eBook, we are looking at the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime. 

pganalyze sponsor   

[Swarm64 DA 4.0: A Database Acceleration Extension for Postgres](https://swarm64.com/post/announcing-swarm64-v4/) — Swarm64 started life as a FPGA-driven way to accelerate Postgres performance, but can now work without FPGAs too. This is not a free product but if you want to give it a run, there’s a trial or it can be spun up from the AWS Marketplace. 

Yana Krasteva   

[Postgres Performance Goalposts](https://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2020.html#April_22_2020) — An interesting heuristic from Bruce here on what to do if you expect your connections, queries, or write queries to be above/below certain levels. 

Bruce Momjian   

[A Tale of Password Authentication Methods in Postgres](https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/password-authentication-methods-in-postgresql/) — _“Let’s say you want to implement a password authentication method in a client/server protocol..”_ Here’s the story of how Postgres came up with its approaches. 

Peter Eisentraut   

[How to Set `application_name` When Using `psql`](https://elephas.io/how-to-set-application_name-in-psql-command-line-utility/) — As [Craig says](https://twitter.com/craigkerstiens/status/1255154806773223424): _“Setting your application name in Postgres is SO USEFUL. It will help a lot for debugging when you’ve got multiple different apps/services connecting to the same database.”_ 

Denish Patel   

[How to Upgrade Postgres from v11 to v12 on Ubuntu 20.04](https://www.paulox.net/2020/04/24/upgrading-postgresql-from-version-11-to-12-on-ubuntu-20-04-focal-fossa/) — Now that Ubuntu 20.04 is out, this might be on your mind! 

Paolo Melchiorre   

[Working with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL: What Happened to the Stats?](https://elephas.io/685-2/) — Apparently there’s a bug with numerous versions of Aurora PostgreSQL that causes certain stats to be lost on restart. 

Michael Vitale   

[Postgres Vision 2020 - Free Online Conference (June 23-24)](https://www.postgresvision.com/?utm_source=Cooperpress&utm_medium=ad) — Learn how today’s IT leaders are using Postgres. Join from anywhere in the world and listen from 30+ Postgres experts. 

EnterpriseDB sponsor   

[A Deep Dive into PostGIS Nearest Neighbor Search](https://info.crunchydata.com/blog/a-deep-dive-into-postgis-nearest-neighbor-search) — Take a deep dive into the Postgres and PostGIS internals to find out how K-nearest neighbor accelerates local search. 

Martin Davis   

[My Favorite Postgres Extensions: Part One](https://severalnines.com/database-blog/my-favorite-postgresql-extensions-part-one) — A basic high level look at `pg_partman` and `postgres_fdw`. 

Nawaz Ahmed   

[Kanel: Generate TypeScript Types from Postgres](https://github.com/kristiandupont/kanel) 

Kristian Dupont   

[Postgres.app: The Easiest Way to Get Started with Postgres on the Mac](https://postgresapp.com/) — I’ve used this for years, it’s super popular, _but_ if there’s just a handful of developers out there who’d benefit from it and _don’t_ know about it, this reminder will be worth it :-) It continues to get very frequent updates. 

Jakob Egger, Chris Pastl, and Mattt Thompson     

🗓**Upcoming Events** 

All in-person events we had listed are cancelled or postponed due to the COVID outbreak, so we're now linking to webinars, livestreams, and similar online events. 

If you have any, just hit reply and if it's Postgres related (and either free or not too expensive) we'll include it in a future issue. Just one this week: 

- 🔐 [Postgres Vision 2020](https://www.postgresvision.com/) on June 23-24. A full attempt at an online Postgres conference across multiple days with multiple tracks. 

🔐 – requires e-mail address or registration
💵 – costs money to participate         

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