--- title: "Now we're even using SQL to cheat at Wordle" publication: "Postgres Weekly" issue: 445 published_at: "2022-03-09" canonical_url: "https://postgresweekly.com/issues/445" --- Plus a Postgres optimization story, and the Postgres Europe conference is back in October. | #​445 — March 9, 2022 [Web Version](https://postgresweekly.com/issues/445) 🇺🇦 We stand with Ukraine, have been donating to the cause, and encourage all to consider the victims of this war in thoughts and actions. [This blog post](https://zverok.space/blog/2022-03-03-WAR.html) from a Rubyist trapped in Kharkiv says it better than we could. — _PC_ Postgres Weekly [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/wd66s8joho9jki6c3h62.jpg)](https://t.co/eS1HubaGG9) ['How We Optimized Our Postgres Queries 100x'](https://t.co/eS1HubaGG9) — When it comes to optimizing Postgres queries “the rabbit hole is deep”, says Vadim who ran into some very specific pain points. This is a good look at how he tackled a few performance problems and got some reasonably easy wins. Vadim Markovtsev [Awesome Postgres: A Curated List of 200+ Libraries, Tools, and Resources](https://dhamaniasad.github.io/awesome-postgres/) — It’s been four years since we’ve linked to this handy resource but it continues to get updates. It covers all areas from backups to GUI clients, managed services to Docker images, blogs, and more. You can also contribute your own suggestions via [the repo](https://github.com/dhamaniasad/awesome-postgres). Asad Dhamani and Contributors [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/abc89cce.png)](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDV_1Dz2Ixgl1nT_3DUZVFw) [5 Mins of Postgres - A Weekly Video Series by pganalyze](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDV_1Dz2Ixgl1nT_3DUZVFw) — Every Thursday, we publish a short, bite-sized video on YouTube to walk you through noteworthy Postgres updates and content that we came across in the previous 7 days. Check out the first 7 episodes and feel free to subscribe to our YouTube channel. pganalyze sponsor **In brief:** - 📅 The [12th annual PostgreSQL Conference Europe](https://2022.pgconf.eu/) is taking place this October in Berlin, Germany. - SQLite has [picked up some neat JSON querying improvements](https://tirkarthi.github.io/programming/2022/02/26/sqlite-json-improvements.html) in its latest 3.38.0 release that make JSON queries somewhat more like Postgres's ones. 🟩 [How to Cheat at WORDLE with Postgres](https://blog.crunchydata.com/blog/how-to-cheat-at-wordle-with-postgresql) — I’m glad to see someone admitting that using code to help you play Wordle is cheating, but nonetheless it’s also neat to see Postgres getting a piece of the action. You might pick up a handy SQL technique or two from this too, so we’re all winners really. Jean-Paul Argudo [Creating Checksums for Tables](https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/postgresql-creating-checksums-for-tables/) — A look at an approach to hashing table data in aggregate in order to create a checksum for comparing the equality of different groups of data (e.g. tables). Hans-Jürgen Schönig [Introducing the Elastic CI Stack for EC2 Mac](https://buildkite.com/blog/introducing-the-elastic-ci-stack-for-ec2-mac) Buildkite sponsor [Automating RDS and Aurora Postgres Log Exports to Amazon S3 with Extensions](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/automate-postgresql-log-exports-to-amazon-s3-using-extensions/) — A walkthrough of using the `pg_cron` extension (now supported on AWS’s Postgres services) to automatically run exports of logs to S3 using `log_fdw` and `aws_s3`. Heavily AWS oriented but you could adapt a similar approach to other places too. Sanaba, Bedi, and Bessette (AWS) [Pl/Perl Recursion](https://fluca1978.github.io/2022/03/02/PlPerlRecursion.html) — [PL/Perl](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/plperl.html) enables you to write Postgres functions in Perl (which opens up a lot of succinct string manipulation options). This is a dig into a particularly obscure part. Luca Ferrari [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/y06qgqmwmvuvoitubcqu.jpg)](https://sqlnotebook.com/) [SQL Notebook 1.1: A Windows App for Casual Data Exploration with SQL](https://sqlnotebook.com/) — Import your data from CSV, Excel, SQL Server, Postgres or MySQL and then use a lightweight Jupyter-style notebook interface for exploratory queries. Brian Luft [SQLreduce: Reduces Verbose Breaking SQL Queries to Minimal Examples](https://www.credativ.de/en/blog/postgresql/sqlreduce-reduce-verbose-sql-queries-to-minimal-examples/) — [SQLsmith](https://github.com/anse1/sqlsmith) is a tool for generating random SQL queries with an aim at finding bugs in database systems, but its ‘successful’ (i.e. ones that break Postgres!) queries can often be more verbose than they need to be. SQLreduce resolves this. [GitHub repo.](https://github.com/credativ/sqlreduce) Alas, this will not be of immediate use if you merely want to simplify _working_ queries.. Credativ [Bun 1.1: A Simple Go(lang) SQL Database Client for Postgres and More](https://github.com/uptrace/bun) — A client library that provides an ‘ORM-like’ experience with Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, and SQLite. The [querying approach](https://github.com/uptrace/bun#why-another-database-client) is quite idiosyncratic but very fluent (in the chainable sense). Uptrace [rails-pg-extras 4.0: Postgres Performance Insights for Rails Devs](https://github.com/pawurb/rails-pg-extras) — Ruby on Rails developer? This plugin lets you get quick info about locks, index usage, buffer cache hit ratios, vacuum stats and more. Paweł Urbanek **Got a new email?** You can [change your address here](https://postgresweekly.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*). --- **Bored of us?** [Click here to stop getting Postgres Weekly](https://postgresweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*). --- **Got a link for us?** Reply and tell us. We can't include everything but we'll look at anything you send. Thanks! --- Published by Cooper Press Ltd. Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom Postgres, PostgreSQL and the Slonik Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada. [Stop getting this newsletter.](https://postgresweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*)