Postgres Weekly

#647 — May 6, 2026

Together with

Postgres 19 Features I'm Excited About — An opinionated run-through of some v19 highlights, including pg_plan_advice, DDL extraction functions, online REPACK/REPACK CONCURRENTLY, and observability improvements.

Tianzhou (Bytebase)

The Potential Consequences of Using Postgres as a Job Queue — At “small scale” it’s fine, but when do the wheels start to fall off, and what are the alternatives? Richard has some pragmatic pointers.

Richard Yen

Azure HorizonDB at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 — Explore 44 talks about Azure HorizonDB, PostgreSQL-backed app development, Postgres performance & AI, Postgres 19 and more at POSETTE 2026, a free & virtual developer event, happening 16-18 Jun. Don’t miss your favorites - use Add to Calendar.

Microsoft | AMD sponsor

A PGBACKREST INTERLUDE:

Last week, pgBackRest was 'dead', but a week is a long time in Postgres, and maintainer David Steele received such an outpouring of support that "it appears all but certain that [he] will be able to secure enough funding to continue the project." 🎉
Even if Steele's funding falls through, PGX Inc. has stepped up to provide 'continuity support' with pgxbackup, a fork of pgBackRest.
Vibhor Kumar uses the pgBackRest story to reflect on the role of open source when it goes beyond merely being a project to becoming infrastructure.

How Figma Built the Bouncer It Needed for Postgres — Figma outgrew PgBouncer, evaluated PGCat, and ended up building its own pooler (PGKeeper) with Go and PGX. It’s not public, but they go deep into the design: it exposes gRPC to clients rather than acting as a PG wire-protocol pooler, so each query has metadata to use for priority-based admission control, load shedding & fair sharing.

He, Goh, and Baid (Figma)

Two Hundred and Twelve Things — With 212 entries in the draft Postgres 19 release notes being potentially overwhelming, Christophe boiled it down to the “load-bearing” items, while explaining that while v19 has no single "marquee user-facing feature", it’s “exactly what a good database release looks like.”

Christophe Pettus

How Are Postgres Committers Selected? — A Postgres committer explains how people are selected to join this distinguished group.

Tomas Vondra

It Depends: Using Session Variables in Postgres — You’ve probably used SET to tweak configuration parameters, but did you know you can use it to store your own session variables?

Shaun Thomas

📄 Building an MCP Server Using Postgres – Another fine presentation slide deck from Bruce. Bruce Momjian

📄 Why Sell the Idea of Contributing to Postgres to Your Employer Valeria Kaplan

Classifieds

🔎 Elastic-quality search for Postgres as an extension. BM25, analytics & vectors — no Elasticsearch required.

🐘 AppSignal pinpoints the slow Postgres query, the deploy that broke it, and the fix. Free 30-day trial. 2-min install.

🤖 Meet Ellie — Your 24x7 Postgres AI co-pilot. Monitors, detects & fixes issues on ANY Postgres database. Free & open source.

RELEASES AND CODE:

pg_column_tetris: Enforce Optimal Column Alignment to Minimize Row Padding Waste — Postgres aligns columns to specific byte boundaries for efficiency, inserting ‘padding’ to fill the gaps. This extension can show how many bytes are being lost to padding in existing tables or can warn/block against creating tables with inefficient column ordering.

Roger Welin

💡 If you're looking for best practices, Ordering Table Columns in PostgreSQL provides a guide to how GitLab designs its tables to avoid wasteful padding.

pg_graphql 1.6 – Add GraphQL support to a Postgres database. Notably GraphQL introspection is now disabled by default to reduce the potential for API enumeration.
PostgREST 14.11 – Serve a fully RESTful API from a Postgres database.
postgresparser 1.2 – ANTLR-based PostgreSQL query parser for Go.