#​596 — April 10, 2025

Web Version

🥚 We're taking next week off due to the Easter break and will be back on Thursday, April 24. See you then!
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Together with  Blacksmith

Postgres Weekly

🕒 Time to Better Know the Time in Postgres — If you’ve ever been guilty of just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best when working with times in Postgres, this is for you. Packed with examples and advice, Radim looks at how different time data types work, how to work with time zones, intervals, time ranges, and more.

Radim Marek

A Roadmap to Scaling Postgres — An experienced Postgres specialist presented an ordered list of steps to think through when scaling up a Postgres deployment from first getting your data model right, through to indexing, hardware, tuning, and sharding.

Kaarel Moppel

2x-40x Faster Docker Builds with Blacksmith — With a one-line code change, Blacksmith can make your Docker builds incremental by mounting your Docker layer cache into your GitHub Actions runner. Blacksmith is used by 350+ companies like Ashby, Clerk, and Mintlify.

Blacksmith sponsor

📈 Making Postgres Better with OrioleDB — OrioleDB is an alternative storage engine for Postgres that extends the table access method framework to optimize performance on modern hardware. But by how much? Brian runs some tests.

Brian Misachi

IN BRIEF:

Creating Histograms with Postgres — A histogram visualizes data distribution by grouping values into bins and displaying the frequency of each bin. Postgres has a width_bucket to help you do this, and Elizabeth shows off some fantastic queries here.

Elizabeth Christensen

📄 Waiting for Postgres 18: Docker Containers 34% Smaller – “The minimal (CloudNativePG) image for Postgres 18 is 262MB – that’s 34% smaller than the minimal CNPG image for Postgres 17 of 413MB.” Jeremy Schneider

📄 A Case Where SQL Joins Struggle But MongoDB Documents Shine – Franck works for MongoDB but is also a Postgres fan so it’s interesting to see him making a detailed comparison. There are some good comments too. Franck Pachot

📄 Importing Wikipedia into Postgres with pgai – If you want to experiment with pgai’s vector embedding features, Wikipedia provides a huge dataset to get started with. Hans-Jürgen Schönig

📄 TimescaleDB to the Rescue: Speeding Up Statistics – TimescaleDB’s power at rapidly handling analytical time series workloads wowed this engineer who's more familiar with the MySQL ecosystem Kamil Ruczyński

🛠 Code and Tools

pg_auto_failover 2.2: Automated Failover Extension — An extension and service that monitors and manages automated failover for a Postgres cluster. Now supporting Postgres 17.

Microsoft

🤖 Postgres Pro: An MCP Server to Let AI Agents Tune and Improve Your Database Usage — I suspect it’ll need to be renamed (so as not to confused with the company of the same name?), but this is an interesting first step at providing a bridge between modern AI models and agents and Postgres by way of an MCP server that lets AI agents interrogate your Postgres database to tune indexes, make changes, run SQL, etc.

Crystal Corp.

  • FerretDB 2.1 – A database that acts like MongoDB but uses Postgres for storage.

  • BemiDB 0.48 – Single binary Postgres read replica optimized for analytics.

  • pgroll 0.11 – Zero-downtime, reversible schema migrations for Postgres.

  • pg-boss 10.2 – Postgres-based job queuing system for Node.js.

  • pg_dumpbinary v2.19 – Dumps a database to a binary format.

  • Martin 0.16 – Fast Rust-powered PostGIS map tile server.

  • Prisma 6.6 – Popular ORM for Node.js and TypeScript.