#​554 — May 8, 2024

Web Version

Together with  Microsoft

Postgres Weekly

Hacking on PostgreSQL is Really Hard — Robert has consistently been in the top ten committers to Postgres for many years, but reflects on just how intimidating the process of contributing to Postgres can be, even for experienced developers. This post has a lot of fascinating insights.

Robert Haas

What's New in pgvector v0.7 — We mentioned pgvector’s rather exciting v0.7 release last week, but here’s a proper roundup of its new features, including extra vector types and new distance functions.

Pavel Borisov

The Schedule Is Out for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024! — The POSETTE schedule is out & full of Postgres–4 keynotes & 38 talks delivered by 44 amazing speakers from the community & our Postgres team. POSETTE is a free & virtual event organized by the Postgres team at Microsoft. Save the date: Jun 11-13!

Microsoft sponsor

Understanding Postgres Schemas and search_path — The developers of the Dolt database have a lot of experience with MySQL but have moved into building Doltgres as a version controlled database that offers Postgres compatibility. This has meant learning about about Postgres’ schemas. This is a good primer, and also shows off search_path, somewhat akin to the OS’s PATH variable when resolving unqualified names in queries.

Zach Musgrave

IN BRIEF:

How Not to Change Postgres Column TypeALTER TABLE .. ALTER COLUMN is fine in certain situations but has some limitations to be aware of, particularly in production. Luckily, there are some alternative routes.

Radim Marek

The Notifier Pattern for Apps That Use Postgres — Brandur is a big fan of Postgres’s built-in pub/sub features.

Brandur Leach

cursor_tuple_fraction and PostgreSQL JDBC — Laurenz had me at the first sentence: “This article is a kind of failure story.”

Laurenz Albe

📄 13 Tips to Improve INSERT Performance – The first five are general to Postgres, with the remainder being specific to the TimescaleDB time series data extension/system. Michael Freedman (Timescale)

📄 Bringing IvorySQL to the Neon Autoscaling PlatformIvorySQL is a Postgres-powered database that offers Oracle compatibility. David Zhang

📄 Conversion Gotchas: Implicit Conversion in an Oracle to Postgres Migration Deepak Mahto

📄 Using Automatic DDL Replication with pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL Cady Motyka (pgEdge)

📄 (Bi)Temporal Tables, PostgreSQL and the SQL Standard Henrietta Dombrovskaya

📰 Classifieds

Thinking about your career in 2024? Explore our State of Database Landscape to find out which skills you should be looking at to stay ahead.


▶️ How Figma scaled out their Postgres installation by 100x over 4 years, and switched to horizontal sharding using their DBProxy query proxy.


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🛠 Code and Tools

Saturation Arithmetic with a Postgres Extension — Saturation arithmetic is the concept of bounding the results of arithmetic functions to within a certain range, thus preventing overflows. The folks at Adjust have built pg-saturated_int, an extension that provides an integer type adhering to this concept.

Artur Zakirov

pg_back 2.3.0: A Simple, Thorough Backup Tool for Postgres — A Go-powered tool for dumping your databases to files, including roles, server parameters, and more, in the format of your choice.

Nicolas Thauvin

pgdsat: A Postgres Database Security Assessment Tool — Checks around 70 security controls on your clusters including all recommendations from the CIS compliance benchmark.

HexaCluster

⚙️ PG Slot Notify Bot – Notify slot growth to a Slack channel. PeerDB

⚙️ pgAdmin 4 v8.6