Postgres 13 Released — Just shy of a year after Postgres 12 was released, 13 is here focused on evolutionary steps forward for our favorite database. The release notes provide the required laundry list of new and tweaked features, but we'll cover some of the bigger things here with links to relevant articles:

• Deduplication in B-tree indexes
• Parallelism for VACUUM
• Trusted extensions
• Use SELECT gen_random_uuid() without needing an extension
• CREATE STATISTICS can now help with plans with IN/ANY operations
• postgres_fdw now supports certificate authentication
• TLS improvements generally
• ..and other hidden gems!

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

🏆 Top 5 PostgreSQL Extensions — We round up a few of our & TimescaleDB community members’ must-have PG extensions, complete with why we 💛 them, install instructions, sample queries & pro tips to get you started.

Timescale sponsor

A Quick Look at Postgres 13 RC1's Query Performance — These benchmarks were done before the final Postgres 13 release (and took three days to run!) but should continue to stand up. The results are broadly (but not unanimously) positive for the new release versus 12.4.

Kaarel Moppel

Operating Postgres at Scale: Saving Space (Basically) for Free — With over 100 terabytes of data in play on their Postgres clusters, any efficiency gains possible are a big win for Braintree. Here’s the story of how they saved around 10% of disk space with ‘very little effort’ by re-ordering table columns.

James Coleman (Braintree)

When to Deploy or Upgrade to a New Major Postgres Release — It’s rarely practical to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of something (cough, cough, Postgres 13) as soon as it comes out but how should you approach the inevitable future upgrade?

Andrew Dunstan

Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQL — “Using some high school level statistics and a fair knowledge of SQL, I implemented a simple anomaly detection system that works.”

Haki Benita

Using Postgres and pgRouting To Explore The Smooth Waves of Yacht Rock — pgRouting is a powerful geospatial routing extension for Postgres and PostGIS usually used for pathfinding/mapping/direction applications. This post creatively attempts to use it to find the most influential Yacht rock artist.

John Porvaznik

We Look at What’s New in Postgres 13: Better Performance, Monitoring & More — Smaller indexes with B-Tree Deduplication, Extended Statis Improvements, Parallel VACUUM, improved WAL Usage Stats, and more.

Pganalyze sponsor

Debugging PL/pgSQL with GET STACKED DIAGNOSTICS — GET STACKED DIAGNOSTICS makes debugging PL/pgSQL code a lot easier but isn’t super well known. This post will show what it does and how you can make use of it.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

How to Configure SCRAM and MD5 Authentication in Pgpool-II — Pgpool-II is a popular Postgres connection pooler.

Bo Peng

DuckDB: An Embeddable SQL OLAP Database System — Built in C++, DuckDB bills itself (geddit?) as ‘SQLite for Analytics’ and has bindings for C/C++, Python, and R. We’ve mentioned this in our Database Weekly several times, but it’s just struck me that it may complement use cases you have for Postgres too.

CWI Database Architectures Group