Postgres Weekly

#634 — February 4, 2026

Together with

Hackorum: A Forum-Like View of pgsql-hackers — pgsql-hackers is the mailing list where Postgres gets built. Essential reading, but painful to browse on the Web, at least. Hackorum fixes that with a modern forum-style UI with threading, user profiles, stats, one-click patch downloads, and more.

Kai Wagner (Percona)

💡 Kai shares more background on Hackorum here.

Repurposing SECURITY LABELS: Custom Postgres Metadata Without Core Patches — A practical and delightfully crafty technique for attaching custom metadata to database objects using a Postgres feature I’d never encountered before: SECURITY LABEL. Very clever!

Andrei Lepikhov (pgEdge)

You Don't Need a Second Database for Analytics — Pipelines, backfills, sync lag, data drift. That's the cost of splitting analytics from your operational database. TimescaleDB extends Postgres so analytics runs on live data without a second system. Stay on Postgres. Scale on Postgres. Start building for free.

Tiger Data sponsor

500 Milliseconds on Planning? How Statistics Slowed Down a Query 20 Times Over — Learn how a query can run in 2ms yet take 500ms to plan, with the suboptimal operation of Postgres’s optimizer to blame. Luckily, there are solutions.

Andrei Lepikhov

The Companies Behind Postgres 18 Development — I loved learning that Sophie Alpert recently fixed a Postgres bug dating back to 1999! Just one gem from this analysis of who worked on Postgres 18. EnterpriseDB wins in commits, while Postgres Professional brings the biggest team (30 of ~260 contributors).

Phil Eaton (The Consensus)

The Importance (and Benefits) of Checkpoint Tuning — Armed with hard benchmark data, Jobin gives a practical demonstration of why and how it’s worth spreading Postgres checkpoints over a longer period of time.

Jobin Augustine

▶ How to Work with Other Postgres People — What makes a team click? At PGConf.EU 2025, Jimmy Angelakos, Floor Drees, Karen Jex, and Boriss Mejias dug into the human side of tech—team dynamics, neurodiversity, and some small shifts that can make a big difference.

Jimmy Angelakos et al.

Replacing Protobuf with Rust to Go 5 Times Faster — Aiming for speed, the creator of the PgDog Postgres scaling proxy tore out the Protobuf mechanism pg_query.rs uses for interfacing with the C-based libpg_query library and wrote 6,000 lines of direct C-to-Rust bindings. The result: 5-10x faster query parsing.

Lev Kokotov

📄 Same SQL, Different Results: A Subtle Oracle vs Postgres Migration Bug – Hard-earned lived-experienced knowledge valuable for migration work. Deepak Mahto

📄 10 Elasticsearch Production Issues (and How Postgres Avoids Them) – Rather biased to Postgres, but we do love pg_textsearch. Raja Rao DV (Tiger Data)

📰 Classifieds

💬 Connect LLMs to any standard Postgres database with the pgEdge MCP server. Beta 2 out now: https://github.com/pgEdge/pgedge-postgres-mcp

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RELEASES AND CODE:

Pigsty v4.0 Released — Major release of the 'batteries-included' PostgreSQL distribution, bringing Postgres 18 readiness, a return to the Apache 2.0 license, and the inclusion of even more ready-to-go Postgres extensions.

Ruohang Feng

pg_textsearch 0.5: BM25-Ranked Text Search Extension — Brings BM25 ranking to full text search in Postgres. The big addition in v0.5 is parallel index building. Multiple workers == faster indexing of large tables.

Tiger Data

Reshape 0.8: A Zero-Downtime Schema Migration Tool — During a migration, Reshape ensures both the old and new schema are available at the same time, allowing you to gradually roll out your app.

Fabian Lindfors

pgagroal 2.0 – The high-performance connection pool now has a new I/O framework that's even faster.
🌐 Martin 1.3 – Generate and serve vector tiles on the fly from PostGIS, or PMTile and MBTile files.
IvorySQL 5.0 – Oracle-compatible Postgres.