#​537 — January 10, 2024

Web Version
Together with  Neon

Postgres Weekly

🏆  PostgreSQL: The DBMS of the Year 2023 — DB-Engines is a long-established site that collects information about (480 and counting) database systems, tracks their relative popularity, and shares which database gained the most relative popularity over the prior year. This time, it’s Postgres!

Gelbmann and Andlinger (DB Engines)

Thoughts on Postgres in 2024 — Postgres is in a good place, says Jonathan, who touches on a vast array of topics that relate to Postgres’s short term future, including feature gaps in replication, non-blocking schema changes, the ability to replay changes in parallel, as well as community building efforts.

Jonathan Katz

Change Data Capture on Neon Serverless Postgres — Standard Postgres CDC via logical replication is now available on Neon. Sync changes to OLAP databases, stream updates to Kafka, the possibilities are, like the WAL, endless!

Neon Serverless Postgres sponsor

Postgres 17 Adds Support for Incremental Backup — Postgres 17 is still several months away, but it’s great to see features like this being committed. Robert Haas shares some thoughts on use cases.

Hubert (depesz) Lubaczewski

IN BRIEF:

  • 🇮🇳 PGConf India has just shared its schedule for 2024 and opened ticket sales. It takes place at the end of February in Bengaluru.

  • 🇪🇺 The schedule for FOSDEM PGDay 2024 has been released. It's on February 2 in Brussels, Belgium – tickets are available.

  • 🇧🇪 Also in Belgium, there's a 'save the date' for PGConf.BE taking place on May 7.

  • 📅 If you're looking to speak at a Postgres event, Claire Giordano wrote in to tell us that PGDay Chicago and PGConf.dev both have CFPs closing next Monday.

  • Peter Eisentraut shares his experiences with using clangd with Emacs to work on the Postgres codebase.

  • pgAnalyze has created a VACUUM simulator. It's part of their commercial offering, but the writeup is interesting on its own.

  • AWS has announced that Amazon Aurora Serverless v1, which notably can scale down to zero, will no longer be supported after 2024.

  • The Register has a feature on Postgres pioneer Michael Stonebraker about how he 'promises to upend the database' once more.

My Postgres Wishlist — We love Postgres, but it could always be better [citation needed] 😏. Ryan wants to start a conversation around some ideas for improvements he’s had – there’s not much that'll be controversial here, it’s a solid and interesting list.

Ryan Guill

How to 'Copy-and-Paste' a New Postgres Dev Env in 5 Minutes — Mostly aimed at folks who want to check out the Postgres source and get it up and running fast, particularly on EC2.

Jeremy Schneider

The Best pg_dump Compression Settings in 2024
Kaarel Moppel

📰 Classifieds

🍐 Tuple will change the way you think about pair programming. Try it with your team free for 14 days, no card required.

🛠 Code and Tools

pg_rman: Backup and Restore Management Tool — There are numerous Postgres backup and restore tools, but pg_rman’s features include support for point-in-time recovery (PITR) and the way it can manage and catalog multiple backup versions. Full documentation.

NTT OSS Center DBMS Development and Support Team

pg_savior: Extension to Prevent Dangerous DELETEs — Prevents accidental data loss caused by DELETE queries without a WHERE clause limiting the scope. The implementation is very simple (if a little naive in how it works) but it’s a cute idea and could be inspirational for your own similar extensions.

Vignesh Ravichandran

🤖 gptsql: LLM Chat with Your Postgres Database — An experimental tool that brings together OpenAI’s GPT models and your Postgres database in order to ask questions about/'to' it in real time (well, real time-ish). There’s a demo video in the README that shows off the idea.

Tatari

Introducing prometheus_fdw: Seamless Monitoring in Postgres — "What you have: all your monitoring data and analytics stored over there in Prometheus. What you’d like to have: all of that data over here in your Postgres database…"

Owens and Ankenman (Tembo)