Postgres Weekly Issue 581: December 11, 2024

#581 — December 11, 2024

Together with

Electric: A Postgres Sync Engine, Now in Beta — It’s always nice to see a new project we casually mentioned a year ago come to fruition, and this real-time engine for syncing data between Postgres and numerous other services (over HTTP) has come a long way since then. GitHub repo.

Kyle Mathews

💡 If Electric seems familiar to you, the same team created PGlite, a way to run a full Postgres database via WebAssembly. (Yes, you can run Postgres in the browser.)

Running Durable Workflows in Postgres using DBOS — A look at DBOS, a ‘durable workflow’ engine built by a team including none other than one of the founders of the Postgres project.

Paul Copplestone (Supabase)

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

▶ 7+ Million Postgres Tables — Firmly in the space of “you might not wanna do this, but it’s certainly interesting”, an engineer shares an interesting approach to large scale analytics that involves creating a colossal amount of tables (which Postgres has no problem with).

Kailash Nadh

QUICK BITS:

Peter Eisentraut wonders where are all the Postgres users? Postgres clearly has a lot of users, but where are they all hanging out and are the communities available good enough?
🎤 Microsoft's VP of Engineering for Postgres, Affan Dar, went on the Talking Postgres podcast to talk both about his background and the strategy behind Microsoft’s investments into Postgres.
Cary Huang shares highlights from Postgres Conference 2024 in Seattle which took place at last month's PASS Data Community Summit.
The DevClass blog spoke to the Amazon Aurora DSQL team about why DSQL currently lacks so many core Postgres features. Ultimately, it's a work in progress.
🇫🇷 The 9th pgDay Paris takes place in France next March and their Call for Papers is now open (until December 31). Other open CFPs include those for PGConf.dev 2025 and Nordic PgDay 2025.
Ben Nadel reviews Aaron Francis' new Mastering Postgres course.
🎄 If solving Advent of Code's challenges in SQL isn't for you, how about trying out Advent of SQL?

🤯 Explaining the ABI Breakage in Postgres 17.1 — A few weeks ago, Postgres 17.1 was released and some changes caused problems for a few popular extensions. Postgres 17.2 was rapidly released to resolve the problem, but here we get a bit more of the story and technical detail behind what happened. Certainly stuff to be aware of if you’re an extension developer.

Pavan Deolasee (EDB)

Smarter Postgres LLM with Retrieval Augmented Generation — A quick, easy to digest introduction to the concept of ‘RAG’ where the results from large language models are improved by providing added context sourced from extra data sources.

Paul Ramsey (Crunchy Data)

📄 Achieving a Zero-Downtime Postgres Major Version Upgrade Matt Long (Medplum)

📄 Iceberg Ahead! Analyzing Shipping Data in Postgres Marco Slot (Crunchy Data)

📄 Performing ELT Operations Using DOMAINs Robert Bernier (Percona)

📄 Understanding Wait Events in Postgres Umair Shahid (Stormatics)

📄 Implementing Time Travel in Postgres Stefanie Janine Stölting

🛠 Code and Tools

pgBadger 13.0: A Postgres Log Analysis Tool — A performance-focused log analyzer that produces detailed usage reports. Here’s an example report to get a feel for it. GitHub repo.

Gilles Darold

pg_worker_pool: Extension to Create a Pool of Background Workers — A simple extension that leans on Postgres’s background worker process mechanism to make it easy to distribute queries across a number of workers.

Krzysztof Leśniak

pgtt-rsl 2.0 – Create & manage Oracle / DB2 style global temporary tables.
pgRoll 0.8 – Zero-downtime, reversible schema migrations for Postgres.
pgwire 0.28 – The Postgres wire protocol implemented in a Rust library.
pgai 0.3 – Timescale's tools to work with RAG and LLMs in Postgres.
bb8 0.9 – Full-featured async Postgres connection pool for Rust.
DoltgreSQL 0.15 – Version-controlled Postgres-a-like.