--- title: "Citus goes deep in its technical README" publication: "Postgres Weekly" issue: 527 published_at: "2023-10-25" canonical_url: "https://postgresweekly.com/issues/527" --- Plus giving Postgres deployments a lift with pglift. | #​527 — October 25, 2023 [Web Version](https://postgresweekly.com/issues/527) Together with [![EDB\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/c_fill,g_auto,e_trim,w_308,h_100/e_make_transparent/co_white,e_outline:7/vrltbo1rhou91lmjw2rl.png)](https://www.enterprisedb.com/accounts/register/biganimal?utm_source=postgresweekly&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=GL-DS--BigAnimal-DSS) Postgres Weekly [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60,q_auto/j8vxxgc7so046ubvmylp.jpg)](https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/introducing-pg_timetable-v5-6-delayed-chains-and-error-handling/) [Introducing pg_timetable v5.6](https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/introducing-pg_timetable-v5-6-delayed-chains-and-error-handling/) — `pg_timetable` ([GitHub repo](https://github.com/cybertec-postgresql/pg_timetable)) is a powerful standalone job scheduler for Postgres. v5.6 adds a feature to asynchronously initiate task chains with a time delay. Pavlo Golub [Citus's New Technical README for Distributed Postgres](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2023/10/19/new-citus-technical-readme-for-distributed-postgres/) — The Citus team at Microsoft has produced [a Citus technical README](https://github.com/citusdata/citus/tree/main/src/backend/distributed#citus-technical-documentation) that goes deep into the technical details of how Citus transforms Postgres into a distributed database, detailing the underlying mechanisms and optimizations – details that may be also of value to developers of _other_ Postgres extensions. Onder Kalaci (Microsoft) [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/59317b79.png)](https://www.enterprisedb.com/accounts/register/biganimal?utm_source=postgresweekly&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=GL-DS--BigAnimal-DSS) [The Flexibility and Power to Run Postgres DBaaS on Any Cloud.. Start for Free with $300 in Credits](https://www.enterprisedb.com/accounts/register/biganimal?utm_source=postgresweekly&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=GL-DS--BigAnimal-DSS) — Innovate faster with fully managed Postgres now available with high availability and distributed capabilities – with access to top-tier Postgres experts whenever you need them. EDB BIgAnimal sponsor [Versioning Data in Postgres: Testing a 'git'-Like Approach](https://www.specfy.io/blog/7-git-like-versioning-in-postgres) — Sam explores a way to manually model git-esque data versioning in Postgres. However, this is a common enough requirement that there are a lot of out-of-the-box solutions if you need them, ranging from solutions like [Neon’s branching feature](https://neon.tech/docs/introduction/branching), an extension like [temporal_tables](https://pgxn.org/dist/temporal_tables/), [Postgres.ai](https://postgres.ai/), or the PL/pgSQL-based [Temporal Tables approach.](https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables) Samuel Bodin **IN BRIEF:** - Amazon clearly doesn't want to miss out on all those new LLM and RAG-related workloads, so [Amazon Aurora now supports pgvector v0.5.0 with HNSW indexing.](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/10/amazon-aurora-postgresql-pgvector-v0-5-0-hnsw-indexing/) More about [what that means here.](https://supabase.com/blog/increase-performance-pgvector-hnsw) - In other Aurora news, [Aurora now supports Postgres 15.4, 14.9, 13.12, 12.16, and 11.21.](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/10/amazon-aurora-postgre-sql-15-4-14-9-13-12-12-16-11-21-versions/) - And finally for Amazon Postgres news, [`pgactive`, an active-active replication extension for RDS, is now generally available.](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/10/pgactive-active-active-replication-extension-postgre-sql-amazon-rds/) Here's [a tutorial on its use.](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/using-pgactive-active-active-replication-extension-for-postgresql-on-amazon-rds-for-postgresql/) - It's always interesting when someone who's experienced but has little exposure to Postgres enters the Postgres world and shares their observations and [VC Zain Rizavi has done just that.](https://indiscretemusings.substack.com/p/the-postgres-renaissance-a-modern) It's a reasonable high level analysis of the space. - 📅 [The PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2023 schedule](https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfeu2023/schedule/) has been released. It takes place this December in Prague, with Simon Riggs giving the opening keynote on _"The Next 20 Years of PostgreSQL."_ [Prepared Statements in Transaction Mode for PgBouncer](https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/prepared-statements-in-transaction-mode-for-pgbouncer) — Last week, we mentioned that [PgBouncer now supports prepared statements.](https://github.com/pgbouncer/pgbouncer/releases/tag/pgbouncer_1_21_0) This post digs further, breaking down the performance gains of prepared statements and why they have traditionally posed a challenge. Greg Sabino Mullane [How to Use Psycopg2: The Postgres Adapter for Python](https://www.timescale.com/blog/how-to-use-psycopg2-the-postgresql-adapter-for-python/) — A quick review of some of the most popular Postgres libraries for Python, before focusing on the long standing and highly popular [psycopg2.](https://pypi.org/project/psycopg2/) (It’s worth bearing in mind that there’s [psycopg3](https://www.psycopg.org/psycopg3/) too which offers `asyncio`support.) Anber Arif (Tailscale) [A Simple Query Optimization: Avoiding the Sequential Scan](https://databaseengineering.substack.com/p/simple-postgres-query-optimization) — _“Optimizing Postgres queries can seem complicated, let’s make it simple.”_ Jason Zucchetto [Postgres 101 Webinars – A Series of Key Topics for New Postgres Users](https://www.red-gate.com/hub/events/series/postgresql-101?utm_source=postgresweekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=postgres&utm_content=101_series) Redgate sponsor [You Don't Need a Dedicated Cache Service: Using Postgres as a Cache](https://martinheinz.dev/blog/105) Martin Heinz [Deploying Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes in a Multi-Zone Cluster](https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/deploying-crunchy-postgres-for-kubernetes-in-a-multi-zone-cluster) Bob Pacheco (Crunchy Data) [High CPU Usage in Postgres: How to Detect and Fix It](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/high-cpu-usage-postgres/) Charlie Custer (Cockroach Labs) Code and Tools [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60,q_auto/ozyuvbmyyotf5qdr3wmw.jpg)](https://blog.dalibo.com/2023/10/17/pglift-intro_en.html) [pglift: A New Way to Deploy Postgres at Scale](https://blog.dalibo.com/2023/10/17/pglift-intro_en.html) — [pglift](https://pglift.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) is a CLI tool and Ansible collection for deploying production-ready Postgres clusters complete with optional ancillary services for doing backup and monitoring. DALIBO [Making an Anonymized Dump of Your Postgres Data](https://tembo.io/blog/anon-dump/) — Instead of installing an extension in your production database, this approach relies upon making a copy in a local database then using [PostgreSQL Anonymizer](https://gitlab.com/dalibo/postgresql_anonymizer) from _that._ Steven Miller - [FerretDB 1.13](https://github.com/FerretDB/FerretDB/releases/tag/v1.13.0) – MongoDB alternative using Postgres for storage. (There's now an online [FerretDB playground](https://codapi.org/ferretdb/) to play with, too.) - [Pigsty 2.5](https://github.com/Vonng/pigsty/releases/tag/v2.5.0) – Open source RDS-a-like Postgres distro bundled with lots of extensions. Now uses Postgres 16 and supports Ubuntu/Debian. - [Piccolo 1.0](https://github.com/piccolo-orm/piccolo) – User friendly Python ORM and query builder. - [pgAdmin 4 v7.8](https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgadmin-4-v78-released-2738/) – Popular Web-based Postgres management tool. - [pg_cron 1.6.2](https://github.com/citusdata/pg_cron) – Run periodic jobs. Simpler than `pg_timetable`. - [Prisma 5.5](https://github.com/prisma/prisma/releases/tag/5.5.0) – Next-gen ORM for Node.js & TypeScript. - [sqlc 1.23](https://github.com/sqlc-dev/sqlc) – Generate type-safe Go code from SQL. - [pg-parquet-py](https://github.com/spapas/pg-parquet-py) – Python script to write Postgres data to Parquet. **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|*).