#​528 — November 1, 2023

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Postgres Weekly

Making Postgres Tick: New features in pg_cron — pg_cron is an extension that makes it easy to run periodic jobs within Postgres, with no external scheduler required. It’s not quite as advanced as pg_timetable (featured last week) but its simplicity may suit your use case better. Here, Marco shows off how pg_cron can run jobs at a granularity as fine as every second.

Marco Slot (Citus Data)

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Nile: A New Serverless Postgres Platform — Neon is perhaps the best known serverless Postgres platform right now, but some fresh competition is on the way. Nile’s angle is a focus on SaaS usage, supporting multi-tenant setups with seamless tenant isolation and scaling. It’s behind a waitlist, but this post goes into technical depth on their approach.

Sriram Subramanian (Nile)

🗣 Nile's announcement provoked extensive discussion on Hacker News oriented heavily around the pros and cons of their multi-tenant focus.

SQL Identity Columns — You might also call them autoincrementing, or serial columns, but such identity columns were (eventually) standardized in SQL:2003 and Postgres has supported their GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY syntax since Postgres v10.

Peter Eisentraut

IN BRIEF:

▶  Storing and Querying LLM Embeddings with Django, Postgres and pgvector — We’ve mentioned pgvector a lot recently, and here’s a look at a practical use case for it – building an LLM embeddings based search system that enables searching over job descriptions using an unstructured, English-language description of a potential job seeker. GitHub repo.

William Huster

GDB Debugging Essentials with Postgres — Explore the essentials of debugging with GDB, using Postgres as a practical example. (Note: This is not needed by day-to-day Postgres users, but if you’re a C/C++ developer or working on Postgres internals, you’ll find it useful.)

Cary Huang

📅  Webinar on Nov 15: Automating Index Selection Using Constraint Programming

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What Is TOAST (and Why It Isn’t Enough for Data Compression in Postgres)
Carlota Soto (Timescale)

How to Understand Explain Plans
Muhammad Ali (Stormatics)

Code and Tools

PL/Haskell 3.1: Use Haskell in Your SQL Functions — Haskell is a functional language but you can, nonetheless, use it to define procedures in such a way that Postgres can play nicely with.

Edward F. Behn, Jr.

pg_graphql 1.4.2: Bring GraphQL Support to Postgres — Reflects a GraphQL schema from the existing SQL schema, letting any GraphQL client query the database via GraphQL with no additional servers, processes, or libraries.

Supabase