#​530 — November 15, 2023

Web Version
Together with  pgAnalyze

Postgres Weekly

Postgres 16.1, 15.5, 14.10, 13.13, 12.17, and 11.22 Released — Every release line of Postgres from 11 through 16 gets an update to fix three security issues, but Postgres 16 also gets many bug fixes in its first minor update. The team notes this is the final release of Postgres 11 and it is now considered ‘end of life’ having been first released five years ago 👋

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Two Exciting Postgres Features to Improve NULL Handling — Covers UNIQUE NULLS NOT DISTINCT (introduced in Postgres 15) and the ability to create a constraint that ensures there is only one non-NULL value among a set of columns.

Paul Gross

Free eBook: Advanced Database Programming with Rails and Postgres — Learn about subqueries, materialized views, and custom data types in Postgres and Rails. We walk through realistic real-life examples, translating first into SQL, and then into Rails code. Every example comes with source code so you can follow along.

pganalyze sponsor

Top 8 Postgres Extensions to Know About — Timescale engineers share a selection of extensions they use and are excited by, running the gamut from large, popular ones like PostGIS through to the lesser spotted pgpcre.

Sewrathan and Clark (Timescale)

IN BRIEF:

Fun with Postgres Floats, Positioning, and Sequencing — Greg continues to amaze with his PL/pgSQL-based solutions to 2022’s Advent of Code. This outing deftly brings together several pieces of functionality in one place.

Greg Mullane

▶  PostgreSQL Takes a New Turn — A 20-minute chat between Alex Williams (of The New Stack) and Jonathan Katz, a core contributor to Postgres. They tackle Postgres 16, how some features can take so long to develop, and Jonathan’s community work.

The New Stack

Boosting Query Performance with Incremental Materialized Views!

Epsio sponsor

kill -9 Explained for Postgres — If you want to kill a Postgres process in the most abrupt way possible, hold that thought until you see how kill -9 works versus a normal process kill and how Postgres handles it.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Building a Streaming Platform in Go for Postgres
Kaushik Iska (PeerDB)

Code and Tools

WiltonDB: A Drop-in for SQL Server on Windows, Powered by Postgres — Babelfish is an Amazon project that lets Postgres understand the SQL Server wire protocol and the T-SQL language. WiltonDB packages Babelfish together with Postgres and provides it on Windows itself to act as a drop-in replacement for SQL Server.

WiltonDB Software

💡 On a related tangent, Ryan Booz recent spoke on ▶️ 10 key differences between Postgres and SQL Server. It's a good overview of Postgres generally, too.

PGMQ: A Lightweight Message Queue on Postgres with No Background Worker — Three months ago, Adam introduced PGMQ for the first time, but now explains how PGMQ can keep a message queue working cleanly without any external watcher, all thanks to FOR UPDATE and SKIP LOCKED.

Adam Hendel

RisingWave 1.4: 'Postgres-Like' Distributed SQL Stream Processing — Not Postgres but a project that opens itself to the Postgres ecosystem with wire protocol compatibility.

RisingWave Labs