#​587 — February 6, 2025

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Postgres Weekly

Just Because You’re Getting an Index Scan, Doesn't Mean You Can’t Do Better — If you see index scans when reviewing query plans, you might think you’re on the right path to a high performing query, but there’s more juice left for the squeezing, says Michael. Useful tips here.

Michael Christofides

DocumentDB: Microsoft Brings More NoSQL to Postgres — Not to be confused with the proprietary Amazon DocumentDB, this DocumentDB is an MIT-licensed document-based NoSQL engine built on top of Postgres that Microsoft use internally for Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB.

Microsoft

POSETTE 2025: Call for Proposals (CFP) Closes February 9! — POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, a free & virtual developer event, is happening June 10-12. The CFP closes Feb. 9 at 11:59 PM PST. New and experienced speakers are encouraged to submit! See suggested topics, speaker resources and submission details.

Microsoft sponsor

💡 Relating to the above, Microsoft's Claire Giordano has separately published a guide to talk proposal ideas if you're looking for inspiration.

QUICK BITS:

  • FOSDEM PGDay 2025 took place last week and Stefanie Janine Stölting shares a brief slice of how it went including a photo with a real life Slonik! 🐘

  • 📊 JSONBench is an attempt at benchmarking different databases (including Postgres) for working with JSON at scale.

🤖 Automating Data Summarization in Postgres with Claude — Timescale shows how to bring pgvector together with their pgai tooling to have Postgres reach out to Anthropic’s Claude AI for summarization tasks without any external scripting.

Timescale

commit_delay for Better Performance: A Postgres Benchmark — Laurenz shares benchmark results highlighting the performance wins gained by using the commit_delay and commit_siblings parameters to group WAL flushes and ultimately optimize transactional workloads.

Laurenz Albe

Replacing Oracle Hints: Best Practices with pg_hint_plan — Oracle Database users can use ‘hints’ to guide the query optimizer’s decision making process, and you can reproduce the idea in Postgres with pg_hint_plan. Lukas explains when you might use hints and how Oracle hints can be mapped to Postgres.

Lukas Fittl

📄 Building a Semantic Movie Search Demo with pgvector and Next.js Fatih Altinok

📄 Avoiding the WAL Archives Retention Trap in pgBackRest Stefan Fercot

📄 Indexing Materialized Views in Postgres Elizabeth Christensen

📄 Debugging Deadlocks in Postgres Louis Heath

🛠 Code and Tools

DB Fiddle: An Online SQL Database Playground — It’s been a couple of years since I linked to this useful tool that offers numerous database systems in an online sandbox of sorts (including Postgres versions 9.4 through to 17). While a local database is always better for big experiments, if you want to check syntax changes before versions or test queries against older Postgres versions quickly (or even against MySQL), it’s a quick and easy way to do so.

Status200

💡 RunSQL is a new, neat Postgres-only alternative we've just discovered too.

ChartDB: Open Source Database Schema Diagram Editor — Create a new schema from scratch or quickly import your existing one. Supports Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, and more, and is built in TypeScript. You can deploy it for yourself or try an online demo here. AGPL licensed.

ChartDB Team

  • PeerDB 0.24 – Stream data from Postgres to data warehouses, queues and storage engines.

  • PG Back Web 0.4 – PostgreSQL backups with a user-friendly web interface.

  • 🤖 pgai 0.8 – Timescale's tools to work with RAG and LLMs in Postgres.