Understanding Deadlocks — One of the more straightforward demonstrations of what a deadlock actually is. Essentially it’s when two transactions are waiting for each other to give up their locks and there’s a catch-22 of sorts.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

pgvector: A Vector Similarity Search Extension for Postgres — Supports L2 distance, inner product, and cosine distance.

Andrew Kane

Cockroach University: Learn to Build Cloud-Native Apps — Cockroach University is a free online learning platform in which you’ll gain distributed database skills & modern application development experience (useful skills for the resume 😉).

Cockroach Labs sponsor

When to Use NUMERIC/DECIMAL vs. Other Numeric Types — For Postgres users looking for any incremental performance improvement possible, managing the layout and use of every byte of a row can be worthwhile and numeric types provide a great example. (Last week’s Tip of the Week touched on this also.)

David Youatt

Can You Get a Value From a Dynamic Column in pl/PgSQL Triggers? — There’s a workaround (with a cost), demonstrates Hubert.

Hubert depesz Lubaczewski

Getting Started with Set Operations — For example, UNION for bringing result sets together and INTERSECT for only returning rows in common between multiple SELECT result sets.

Paul Odhiambo

A CHAR(1) to Boolean Transformation While Migrating to Postgres — Did you know Oracle Database doesn’t have a boolean type? If you’re pondering an Oracle to Postgres migration, you probably do, and here’s how to approach migrating from a CHAR(1) approach to a boolean.

Dileep Kumar

The Internals of Hash Indexes — B-trees are the most popular type of index in Postgres and hash indexes are actually ‘discouraged’ in the docs. Hamid takes a quick look at how hash indexes work, however, revealing why they still have much room for improvement.

Hamid Akhtar

[Guide] The Truth About Developer Productivity Metrics — What you need to know to avoid weaponizing metrics for performance reviews, and use them to accelerate releases instead.

Sleuth sponsor

On Database Software Bundles — No strong point here but Bruce ponders on how commercial database vendors offer a ‘full package’ but for Postgres you need to weigh up the offerings from various providers. Should the Postgres project itself provide more?

Bruce Momjian