Getting a Query 'Progress Bar' in Postgres — This has one of the best opening graphics of any post in this newsletter, and the end result is pretty interesting too. The idea is to use a sequence as a sort of counter to track the progress of a query. It’s a bit of a hack but you’ll learn something here.

Brian Likes Postgres

A Brief Summary of 2021 in the Postgres Ecosystem — Our last issue rounded up some of the most popular links of 2021, but in this piece Avinash of MigOps reflects on Postgres’ DB Engines ranking, the Postgres 14 release, and some of the new extensions that arrived in 2021. A useful look back!

Avinash Vallarapu

🐘 The Developer Experience You Always Wanted for Postgres — Database as a service for Postgres as it should be. Cloud agnostic, superuser access, performance tuned instances, and packed with all the extensions you need. From the Crunchy Data team that’s 100% focused on Postgres at any scale. Try it today.

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Postgres in 2021: An Observer's Year In Review — Another look back at 2021 but perhaps from an even more technical angle than that above. Lukas of pganalyze focuses on performance, autovacuum improvements, extended statistics, and more.

Lukas Fittl (pganalyze)

PostGIS 3.2.0 Released — This release dropped just after our final regular issue last year, but it’s been out for a few weeks now. The popular geospatial extension is aimed at Postgres 14 users (but will work with 9.6+) and is named after the late Olivier Courtin, a long time contributor to the project.

PostGIS Developers

Five Tips for a Healthier Postgres Database in the New Year — Craig Kerstiens does his own 2021 end of year wrap-up by presenting five ideas for things you can do for a ‘healthier’ Postgres database in 2022.

Craig Kerstiens

How to Get Started with Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL — Amazon has been working for the past 18 months on so on an (open source) compatibility layer for Postgres so that SQL Server users can run their existing T-SQL queries upon Postgres instead. Here’s an introductory tutorial for Aurora users.

Gupta and Venkatraman (AWS)

Learn How to Write SQL Recursive CTEs in Five Steps — Franck reminds us that you don’t need a graph database to be able to follow a tree of nodes in a database like Postgres: recursive CTEs are what you need. In this post he starts from the basics and works up to a recursive CTE as they’re not always obvious to understand in one jump.

Franck Pachot

Free eBook: Effective Indexing in Postgres

pganalyze sponsor

Why Give a Conference Talk (or, Why Give a Postgres Talk) — Claire is one of the organizers of the forthcoming Citus Con event so is keen to encourage folks to speak and provides a lot useful encouragement and motivation here.

Claire Giordano (Citus Data)

Finding Customer Names with Interesting Unicode Characters — This post ends up with a useful SQL query for finding rows containing ‘interesting’ characters like emojis and symbols.

Jon Jensen

Fixing a Postgres Cluster That Has No Superuser — Normally there’s an administrative ‘superuser’ you can use to get yourself out of trouble, but what can you do when there isn’t?

Jon Jensen

Setting Up a Kubernetes and Postgres Cluster from Scratch on Rocky 8 — Rocky Linux is a Linux distro designed to be ‘bug for bug compatible’ with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Joe Conway

Defining 'High Availability' in a Postgres World — What does High Availability actually mean when discussing Postgres clusters?

Shaun Thomas (EDB)

pgsodium 2.0: A Postgres Extension for Using libsodium — libsodium is a crypto library for encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing and more. v2.0 adds support for various extra standards including XChaCha20-SIV.

Michel Pelletier