#​602 — May 29, 2025

Web Version

🖊️ Just a quick note that we're taking a break next week, so we'll be back on Thursday, June 12 – see you then. Submissions still welcomed as always.
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Your editor, Peter Cooper

Together with  Microsoft logo

Postgres Weekly

How OpenAI Scales Postgres to the Next Level — A writeup of a talk given by OpenAI engineer Bohan Zhang at PGConf.dev about how OpenAI manages to scale with an unsharded approach using just one writer and multiple readers despite Postgres being ‘the backbone of [its] most critical systems’. If it’s good enough for them…

PixelsTech / Lao Feng

Don’t Miss POSETTE 2025: June 10 – June 12 — Learn from 45 experts in the Postgres ecosystem as they present 42 unique talks via 4 livestreams with live chat on Discord. POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is a free & virtual developer event organized by the Postgres team at Microsoft. Save the date.

Microsoft sponsor

PostgresqlCO.NF: Postgres Config Settings for Humans — A helpful online reference guide to Postgres’ various parameters from basics like log_statement and application_name through to things added in the very latest versions (including v18, currently in beta).

OnGres, Inc.

Using pg_test_fsync for Testing Low Latency Writespg_test_fsync is a tool that comes with Postgres for determining the fastest wal_sync_method option to use on your hardware.

Tanel Poder

IN BRIEF:

Debugging Memory Leaks in Postgres via Heaptrack — A Linux-only walk through an artificial example of introducing memory leaks into Postgres and then debugging them using the heaptrack memory profiler.

Phil Eaton

How to Run Cron Jobs in Postgres Without Extra Infrastructurepg_cron might be your go-to if you want to keep everything in Postgres itself, but if you’re building a Node app (such as with Wasp, as in this tutorial) then the pg-boss job queue offers an alternative option.

Andrei Gaspar

📄 Recreating S3 in Postgres using PostgREST – An interesting way to serve arbitrary binary files from your database. Sam Harrison (Neon)

📄 How to Build Postgres with Zig: A Drop-In GCC/Clang Alternative Alvaro Hernandez

📄 Understanding Logical Replication in Postgres Garth Goodson

📄 Benchmarking Random (v4) and Time-Based (v7) UUIDs Umang Sinha

📄 Backfilling Postgres TOAST Columns in Debezium Data Change Events Gunnar Morling

🛠 Code and Tools

A Dockerfile to Build Postgres 18 Beta from Source — A handy way to get playing with Postgres 18 beta 1 quickly, since betas don’t get official container images.

Michael Crawford

📊 PG Exporter 1.0: Advanced Postgres + Pgbouncer Metrics Exporter for Prometheus — Exposes 600+ metrics covering core internals as well as popular extensions, all through a single, fully customizable exporter. v1.0 offers some initial Postgres 18 support too.

Ruohang Feng

pgfdb: Making Postgres Distributed with FoundationDBpgfdb is an experimental extension to turn Postgres into a stateless layer that sits atop FoundationDB, a distributed, multi-model data store.

Fabian Lindfors

📰 Classifieds

How Notion’s engineering team tackled viral user growth to run PostgreSQL at scale on Amazon RDS with pganalyze.


Discover how to master PostgreSQL with an 'Introduction to PostgreSQL for the Data Professional' by Ryan Booz and Grant Fritchey – a comprehensive guide for data professionals looking to enhance their database skills.

⚙️ A Handy Golden Oldie

Why Upgrade Postgres? Here's Why — A perennially useful resource that lets you pick ‘from’ and ‘to’ versions and see what Postgres gained in the interim. Even this 17.4 to 17.5 example is packed with details.

Hubert depesz Lubaczewski