#​573 — October 9, 2024

Web Version

It's been a quiet week in the Postgres world – perhaps because everyone's busy playing with Postgres 17! While things are quiet, can we ask a favor? We're cleaning up our list in the coming months, so if you could click on at least one link in the next few issues, we'll avoid removing you by accident :-) Thanks!
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Together with  Timescale logo

Postgres Weekly

Optimizing Postgres Table Layout for Maximum Efficiency — The alignment of data within broader data structures has long been an important factor for optimization in low level programming, but it can affect your Postgres tables too. Renato looks at how table layout can impact both storage efficiency and query performance due to how data is arranged and padded on disk.

Renato's Runtime Reflections

The Value of 'VALUES -> ANY' Transformations? — The authors ponder if an RDBMS should optimize a query before trying to make a plan for it, particularly in a landscape where we’re running fewer hand crafted queries than ever.

Lepikhov and Rybakina

Building AI Apps on Postgres? Start with pgai — pgai is a PostgreSQL extension that brings more AI workflows to PostgreSQL, like embedding creation and model completion. pgai empowers developers with AI superpowers, making it easier to build search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications.

Timescale sponsor

▶  Hands on Postgres 17: What's New and How It Impacts Performance — An hour long webinar that takes a performance-oriented look at Postgres 17’s numerous enhancements (and there are a lot of them!)

Lukas Fittl (pganalyze)

QUICK BITS:

How We Built a Content Recommendation System with Pgai and Pgvectorscalepgvectorscale is an extension for pgvector that adds StreamingDiskANN index support and improved quantization.

Andreas Nigg (Timescale)

▶  Building a Private RAG System with Llama 3, Ollama, and Postgres — Leaning on external providers like OpenAI or Anthropic might not satisfy your data protection policies, but luckily you can go a long way with local, open models.

Hervé Ishimwe (Timescale)

📄 Failover Slots in Postgres 17: Ensuring High Availability with Logical Replication Amit Kapila

📄 An AI-Assisted Experiment: Number of Partitions vs. Planning Time Nikolay Samokhvalov (Postgres AI)

📰 Classifieds

Announcing MongoDB 8.0 - over 30% faster than before. Learn how MongoDB 8.0 was built to exceed the most stringent security, availability, and performance requirements.


Flyway Pipelines has arrived for PostgreSQL! Log in today to collect free insights into the health and history of your database changes. 🚀

🛠 Code and Tools

TimescaleDB 2.17.0: Time-Series Extension for Postgres — The popular extension implementing features and optimizations for working with time-series data at scale introduces full Postgres 17 support with this release. New, extra SIMD optimizations also increase performance for real-time analytical queries over compressed hypertables.

Timescale

🤖 dbx: A Forthcoming AI-Powered SQL Editor and Database Client — We rarely link to tools that aren’t openly available, but as one of our readers asked so nicely, their landing page is certainly worth a look and you can register for early access if you like what you see.

Jordi Hermoso

IvorySQL 3.4: Open Source Oracle-Compatible Postgres — There are numerous approaches for migrating from Oracle to Postgres and IvorySQL’s approach is to add compatibility elements to Postgres, like support for Oracle’s PL/SQL syntax and Oracle XML functions.

IvorySQL

  • rsql 0.14 – Modern Rust-based psql-esque CLI for working with Postgres, DuckDB, MySQL, Redshift, SQLite3, SQL Server, and other databases.

  • Ruby PG Extras 5.4 and Rails PG Extras – Get more insight into Postgres instances from Ruby and Rails apps.

  • QuestDB 8.1.2 – Java-powered time-series database with Postgres wire protocol compatibility.

  • River 0.13 – Fast and reliable Postgres-powered background jobs for Go.

  • Good Job 4.4 – Postgres-backed job queue for Ruby on Rails.