#​426 — October 13, 2021

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

Google Cloud Spanner Adds Postgres-Compatible InterfaceCloud Spanner is a Google cloud based relational database service boasting unlimited scalability, and now you can use it from even more places with a new Postgres interface. Notably, Kelsey Hightower posited a year ago that if Cloud Spanner were to have a Postgres compatible interface, it stood a chance of becoming “the Gmail of ACID-compliant databases.” Well, now it has.

Justin Makes (Google)

Herding Elephants: Lessons Learned from Sharding Postgres at Notion — Notion is a popular cloud-based knowledge management system and they lean heavily on Postgres. So heavily, in fact, they’ve needed to engage in a lengthy migration from a large Postgres monolith to a more horizontally-partitioned approach in order to scale.

Notion

📣 Tune in to Timescale Community Day on October 28 — Join live-streamed talks (full of demos!) with topics ranging from time-series data and PostgreSQL tips to general interest database topics. Connect with fellow community members, get expert tips, advice, and more.

Timescale sponsor

How to Tune Sorting Operations with work_memwork_mem is a Postgres setting specifying how much memory to use for internal sort operations and hash tables before falling back to using temporary files. Given how common sorting is in database queries and how onerous temporary files can be, getting this setting right can yield some serious improvements.

Naga Appani (AWS)

Multirange Types in Postgres 14 — One of the new features in Postgres 14 is multirange types, essentially sets of non-overlapping ranges (e.g. 1-3 and 6-8, as a singular concept). This post demonstrates their (very) basic use.

Leo Hsu and Regina Obe

SHOW TABLES in Postgres: What's Wrong with It? — Like many, I came to Postgres after being proficient with MySQL and getting my head around not using SHOW TABLES took a while. Of course, Postgres has its own even more efficient approach.

Pavlo Golub

Installing Postgres on OpenBSD
Luca Ferrari

Tools & Code

pspg (Postgres Pager) 5.4.0 Released — pspg is a tool we’ve linked to numerous times over the years. It’s a ‘pager’ tool for working with table data from Postgres but continues to add new features, this time including customization of its color theme.

Pavel Stěhule

Psycopg 3.0 Released: A Postgres Adapter for Python — Back in issue 390 we featured an interview with Psycopg’s creator on his aims for Psycopg 3, the next generation of Python-Postgres adapters, which is now here in its final form. The docs will probably give you the best impression as to why to consider using it.

Daniele Varrazzo

Build Internal Tools in Minutes with Retool, Where Visual Programming Meets the Power of Real Code

Retool sponsor

pgAdmin 4 v6.0 Released — The popular Web-based interface for Postgres gets a big upgrade and, notably, switches to using React to power its front end.

pgAdmin Team

pg_partman: Partition Management Extension — Provides a way to automate the creation and maintenance of table partitions.

Crunchy Data

Sequelize 6.7.0: Easy-to-Use Multi SQL Dialect ORM for Node.js — Supports PG, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, & SQL Server and is fully promise-based.

Sequelize