'Region': A Lesson in Data Integrity — One of Lætitia's coworkers added a free-text region column and planned to validate it in app code, but Lætitia wouldn't approve it. Here she makes a case for keeping rules in the database with a look at domains, enums, CHECK constraints and lookup tables, and how to add constraints on large tables without blocking traffic.

Lætitia Avrot

CREATE INDEX on 100M Vectors in Under Two Hours — HNSW indexes on large pgvector tables use lots of memory and can take days to build. Meet pg_vectorsearch: an open-source alternative for existing vector columns. At 100M vectors: a 25 GB index and 6 ms queries at 95% recall. See the benchmarks.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

📖 PostgreSQL 18 Query Optimization: A Free 199-Page Book — Postgres Pro's query tuning course, reshaped into a compact book that's now in English. It covers how the planner works, access methods, join strategies, statistics, reading execution plans and tuning approaches. Here's the PDF.

Pavel Tolmachev (PostgresPro)

Why I Don't Trust ON DELETE CASCADE — One big cascading DELETE plus a routine migration can freeze writes to a table. Tom explains the lock queue behind it, some replication traps, and why he prefers soft deletes.

Tom Pang (PlanetScale)

How a Read Replica Almost Took Down Its Primary Database — Google Cloud grows disks automatically so Photoroom wasn't worried about space. Then a backfill left a BI replica so far behind that the primary held 31.7TB of WAL for it. The disk grew close to a hard limit, and shrinking it meant downtime.

Marek Zaremba-Pike (Photoroom)

Moving 74GB Off RDS with a Week-Long Rollback Window — Prisma moved its console's database off RDS with logical replication and no write pause, then ran replication in reverse so it could fall back to RDS for a week.

Siket and Datta (Prisma)

pgVolvra: Flashback-Style 'Undo' for Bad UPDATEs and DELETEs — Trigger-based row history that lets you preview and reverse a bad statement or migration by transaction ID. Plain SQL with no superuser needed, so it works on managed Postgres too. GitHub repo.

Muhammad Aqeel (pgEdge)

pgrust 0.4 Beta: The Rust Rewrite of Postgres Opens Up — The experimental Rust reimplementation of Postgres adds a new JIT engine, transactional columnar tables and automatic memory sizing (no more work_mem tuning?).

Michael Malis

pg_pinecone: Pinecone's Vector Index for pgvector Columns — A new extension that indexes existing pgvector columns using IVF and RaBitQ quantization, applying filters during the search. Its native engine runs locally on Postgres 17 and 18, and Pinecone reports a 136MB index vs 2GB for HNSW on 1M vectors. GitHub repo.

Daddala and Mahanna (Pinecone)