Postgres Weekly Issue 590: February 27, 2025

#590 — February 27, 2025

Together with

(Ab)using pgRouting to Use Postgres as a Graph Database — pgRouting is an extension for providing geospatial routing functionality, commonly along with PostGIS. But, surprisingly, its graph and path searching mechanisms can be used to navigate any data structured in a graph-like form.

Paul Copplestone (Supabase)

Postgres 17.4, 16.8, 15.12, 14.17, and 13.20 Released — This makes two bumps to all maintained release lines in as many weeks (this is an 'out of cycle' release – explained here). As before, the focus is bug fixes. Postgres 17 gets fixes for a memory leak in pg_createsubscriber and a tweak to quoting function behavior in libpq.

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Don’t Let Postgres Maintenance Slip Through the Cracks & Let Performance Fall Off a Cliff — Secure your spot to learn the proactive maintenance & monitoring practices to uncover hidden performance risks in your database, such as slow queries, checkpoint behavior, and connection issues, before they escalate, & ensure your database reliability.

pganalyze sponsor

QUICK BITS:

🌍 Have you ever wondered what goes on in the life of Bruce Momjian as he travels around the world evangelizing Postgres? EDB's Caroline Pickens recaps Bruce's recent tour of several Postgres events – he certainly has more energy (and better dress sense) than me!
The next version of Postgres is gaining the ability to transfer statistics during pg_upgrade.
Laravel Cloud is a new, official hosting platform for apps built with the popular PHP framework. Its database layer? Serverless Postgres!
EDB commissioned an independent benchmark to put its Postgres-based database up against Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB and MySQL in areas like price-vs-performance and raw speed. Unsurprisingly (since they released the results), EDB's Postgres was faster and cheaper.
🇩🇪 Registration for the 9th annual PostgreSQL Conference Germany is open. It takes place in Berlin this May.

While Postgres Redlined, Robinhood Sharded to Scale — A short write up, from an engineer who used to work at Robinhood, about Postgres scaling problems the company encountered and how sharding was their savior.

Tom Linford

EdgeDB is Now Gel (and Postgres is the Future) — Gel (formerly EdgeDB) is an ‘integrated data platform on top of Postgres’ that provides its own query language in an attempt to work around SQL’s perceived flaws (better explanation here).

Elvis Pranskevichus (Gel)

📄 Use PASSING with JSON_TABLE() to Make Calculations Dave Stokes

📄 Building RAG Systems in Go with Ent, Atlas, and pgvector Rotem Tamir (Ent)

📄 How Postgres' Aggregate FILTER Will Spoil You Dave Stokes

🛠 Code and Tools

pg_activity 3.6: top-Like Activity Monitoring Tool — Much as you might use top or htop to monitor processes and CPU usage, pg_activity gives you a similar look behind the scenes of Postgres with views over running queries, up to date performance stats, and more.

Dalibo

BemiDB: Zero-ETL Data Warehouse for Postgres — Open source (GitHub repo) but with a commercial angle for more enterprise-y features, BemiDB, written in Go, acts as a Postgres read replica (so all your data is synced in automatically) optimized for analytics workloads.

Bemi Technologies, Inc.

rsql 0.16 – Modern Rust-based psql-esque CLI for working with Postgres, DuckDB, MySQL, Redshift, SQLite3, SQL Server, and other databases.
PostgreSQL Embedded 0.18 – A mechanism to distribute and embed Postgres into other apps "similar to what you would have with SQLite."
River 0.18 – Fast & reliable Postgres-powered background jobs for Go.
pgrx 0.13 – A way to build Postgres extensions with Rust.