--- title: "MERGE/SPLIT PARTITION reverted again" publication: "Postgres Weekly" issue: 663 published_at: "2026-09-02" canonical_url: "https://postgresweekly.com/issues/663" --- Plus why Postgres is both 30 and 40 years old, 23x faster inserts with UUID v7, and benchmarks of new regex extensions. #​663 — September 2, 2026 [Web Version](https://postgresweekly.com/issues/663) Together with [![EDB Postgres AI\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/c_fill,g_auto,e_trim,w_1280,h_320/e_make_transparent/co_white,e_outline:37/icdh8kliebaqxnyq5k88.png)](https://www.enterprisedb.com/resources/webinar/multimodel-data-platforms-agentic-era?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wb_ww_vcop_webinar-promotion-tai-20260828) Postgres Weekly [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60,q_auto/hfb97u0pwpy9p7faaaif.jpg)](https://boringsql.com/posts/read-your-own-writes/) [Read Your Own Writes Off the Primary: `WAIT FOR` Measured](https://boringsql.com/posts/read-your-own-writes/) — Last week, we shared an item explaining [what Postgres 19's `WAIT FOR` _is_](https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgresql-19-wait-for-read-your-writes). Now, Radim puts it to the test: naive replica reads were stale 992 times out of 1,000 even over loopback, but `WAIT FOR` gets that to zero with ~1-2ms overhead. Radim Marek [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/c_limit,w_480,h_480,q_auto/copm/4cbdc631.png)](https://www.enterprisedb.com/resources/webinar/multimodel-data-platforms-agentic-era?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wb_ww_vcop_webinar-promotion-tai-20260828) [Postgres in the Agentic Era: A Forrester Fireside](https://www.enterprisedb.com/resources/webinar/multimodel-data-platforms-agentic-era?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wb_ww_vcop_webinar-promotion-tai-20260828) — Forrester's Indranil Bandyopadhyay joins EDB's Lizzy Nguyen to unpack the multimodel data-platform market: where it's heading, what convergence unlocks, and how to map your workloads before you commit. Based on The Forrester Wave, Q2 2026. EnterpriseDB sponsor [Introducing YeSQL: Practical Postgres, One Concept at a Time](https://tapoueh.org/blog/2026/08/introducing-yesql-practical-postgresql-one-concept-at-a-time/) — 27 free SQL lessons ([located here](https://theartofpostgresql.com/yesql/)) covering things like `NULL` semantics, window frames, `LATERAL` joins, and reading `EXPLAIN` results. Queries run in your browser using [PGlite](https://pglite.dev/) with no signup needed. Dimitri Fontaine **IN BRIEF:** - ⭐ [Postgres 19 has dropped `ALTER TABLE … MERGE/SPLIT PARTITION(S)`](https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=7612ae8ed8c941985d9cbf60a0674c48f5b0abe5) after [the release team requested a revert](https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/ao8WNnQXpGUykHLA%40nathan) over unresolved design issues. It's the second time the feature has been pulled (previously in Postgres 17). Fingers crossed for Postgres 20. - Tiger Data asked several industry watchers [why a '40-year-old database' is still winning in the AI era](https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/why-40-year-old-database-still-winning-ai-era). - ❓ So is Postgres 30 or 40? Both! [The docs' history page](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/history.html) dates Berkeley's _"POSTGRES"_ to 1986, which is where Tiger's 40 comes from, while [the _30th_ birthday we noted in July](https://vonng.com/en/pg/happy-30-birthday/) marks when Postgres95 got its first public CVS server (essentially the start of the community-run project). - 🇬🇧 [PGDay UK 2026](https://2026.pgday.uk/) takes place next week (September 8) in London. Tickets are still available. [23x Faster Inserts with UUID v7 in Postgres 18](https://andyatkinson.com/postgresql-18-uuidv7) — Switching to `uuidv7()` hugely cut insert times on a billion-row table (versus the previously used v1 and v4 keys), though the `ALTER TABLE` needed an access exclusive lock and a jittered retry loop to complete the switchover. Andrew Atkinson [A Look into Postgres 19's Many `pg_catalog` Changes](https://richyen.com/postgres/2026/08/31/pg_catalog_almanac.html) — `pg_catalog` is a valuable source of information about the structure, objects, and inner workings of your database. [pg-catalog-almanac](https://richyen.com/pg-catalog-almanac/) lets you look at how the catalog's structure has changed over the years, and Richard has three highlights to share. Richard Yen 🤩 As of beta 3, Postgres 19 has the most `pg_catalog` changes of any recent release, adding 12 catalogs and views plus 43 columns, so this almanac could be useful! [pg_tre and pg_re2: New Options for Regexes in Postgres](https://www.depesz.com/2026/08/25/new-things-for-regular-expressions-in-postgresql-pg_tre-and-pg_re2/) — Benchmarks of two new regular expression extensions against [pg_trgm](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgtrgm.html) on a 33GB table. ClickHouse's [pg_re2](https://github.com/clickhouse/pg_re2/) wins on speed, while [pg_tre](https://codeberg.org/gregburd/pg_tre) offers _fuzzy_ matching but took hours to index. Hubert 'depesz' Lubaczewski 📄 [Postgres Isn't Slow: Your Storage Is](https://clickhouse.com/blog/posette-talk-recap-postgres-isnt-slow-your-storage-is) – Writeup of [a POSETTE 2026 talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7by8IKtJG0) on benchmarking local NVMe storage vs EBS showing how network storage's latency can compound. Sai Srirampur / ClickHouse 📄 [New System Views in Postgres 19](https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgres-19-new-system-views) – A look at `pg_stat_lock`, `pg_stat_recovery`, `pg_stat_autovacuum_scores` and `pg_dsm_registry_allocations`. Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek **RELEASES AND CODE:** [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60,q_auto/sj8mvqfrsfjkudthhf5r.jpg)](https://pgterm.dev/) [pgterm: `htop` For All Your Postgres Databases](https://pgterm.dev/) — A Rust TUI with a tab per Postgres database, background health checks, and views for queries, indexes and tables. Under the hood, the diagnostics come from [pgbot](https://pgbot.dev/) which we featured last week. The [GitHub repo](https://github.com/pgrundev/pgterm) README has more info. Alex Shapalov [pg_shmemviz: Visualize Postgres Shared Memory in Your Browser](https://bdrouvot.github.io/2026/08/20/welcome-to-pg-shmemviz-postgresql-shared-memory-visualizer/) — Renders allocations, C struct fields, padding and raw bytes, reading DWARF from your own `postgres` binary (dev instances only). You can diff snapshots too. Bertrand Drouvot 📊 [PoWA (PostgreSQL Workload Analyzer) 5.3](https://powa.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) — A tool for collecting and aggregating metrics from multiple instances which can then be viewed through real-time charts to help optimize your setup. v5.3 improves Postgres 19 compatibility. PoWA Team - [Doltgres 1.3](https://github.com/dolthub/doltgresql/releases/tag/v1.3.0) – Version-controlled Git-like database (built on top of [Dolt](https://www.dolthub.com/)) with Postgres wire protocol support. - [Stateless Postgres Query Router (SPQR) 3.1](https://github.com/pg-sharding/spqr/releases/tag/3.1.0) – Production-ready Postgres sharding solution built by Yandex Cloud. - [pg_trickle 0.91.0](https://github.com/trickle-labs/pg-trickle/releases/tag/v0.91.0) – Extension providing declarative stream tables with incremental view maintenance via differential dataflow. - [sabiql 3.0](https://github.com/riii111/sabiql) – TUI for browsing, querying, and editing databases atop`psql`. **SOME POSTGRES STATS FROM DATADOG:** [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60,q_auto/h7seqwjyy4nrsrvxqgwl.jpg)](https://www.datadoghq.com/state-of-postgres/) [The State of Postgres in 2026](https://www.datadoghq.com/state-of-postgres/) — An analysis of data from Datadog's many customers running its APM and monitoring agents shows Postgres adoption keeps climbing, but only 15% of instances set `statement_timeout`, covering indexes make up 0.3% of all indexes, 22% of tables have a (rarely indexed!) JSONB column, `pgvector` is the fastest-growing non-bundled extension, and more. Datadog 🤔 They also found Postgres backends spent 56% of sampled time _idle_ in open transactions, apparently waiting on applications, versus just 37% doing database work. **Got a new email?** You can [change your address here](https://postgresweekly.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*). --- **Bored of us?** [Click here to stop getting Postgres Weekly](https://postgresweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*). --- **Got a link for us?** Reply and tell us. We can't include everything but we'll look at anything you send. _Thanks!_ --- Published by Cooper Press Ltd. Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom Postgres, PostgreSQL and the Slonik Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada. [Stop getting this newsletter](https://postgresweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*).