Postgres Weekly Issue 586: January 30, 2025

#586 — January 30, 2025

Together with

A Major Aurora Postgres Upgrade with Zero Downtime — Inspired by an earlier blog post from the Lyft database team, two engineers set out to upgrade their small but heavily used Aurora Postgres instance without affecting their app – here’s the full story along with the problems encountered. (Note that the database does go down for a few seconds, but their app didn’t need to drop any requests.)

Parunashvili and Woelfel

A New Postgres Block Storage Layout for Full Text Search — pg_search is a Postgres extension providing BM25-powered full text search but has required the use of external, non-Postgres files till now. No more. It’s now fully using Postgres block storage – here’s the why and how.

Ming Ying (ParadeDB)

PostgreSQL Performance Monitoring Cheatsheet — Start tracking vital resource and activity metrics from your PostgreSQL databases with our handy cheatsheet. You’ll have useful psql commands at your fingertips, and get a quick-start guide on using Datadog to monitor PostgreSQL performance.

Datadog sponsor

QUICK BITS:

The PostgreSQL project is once again participating in Google Summer of Code. Pavlo Golub shares some info on how to get involved.
🤖 Bruce Momjian has shared the PDF slides for his latest talk, 📄 Databases in the AI Trenches. It covers vectors, text embeddings, semantic search, transformers, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and more.
The PostgreSQL Contributors Team has unveiled 24 new individuals recognized for their work in the Postgres community and on the codebase.
🎤 Postgres contributor Daniel Gustafsson went on the Talking Postgres podcast to discuss how he got into programming and into Postgres in particular.
🇩🇪 The CFP for PostgreSQL Conference Germany (this May in Berlin) closes this Saturday so submit your proposals now if you want to speak.
Tembo Cloud now supports Postgres 17.

Logon Triggers in Postgres — In Postgres 17 you can create a trigger that occurs upon login which you could use for auditing or even securing databases in creative ways.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

VACUUM (INDEX_CLEANUP OFF) Considered Harmful — “Unless you are sure you know what you are doing (that is, you are in a wraparound-point emergency), please pretend this option doesn’t exist. Really.”

Christophe Pettus

📄 A Partitioned Table Indexing Disaster – If you’ve ever encountered index naming conflicts then this post will likely be of interest. Henrietta Dombrovskaya

📄 Waiting for Postgres 18: Allow Changing autovacuum_max_workers Without Restarting Hubert depesz Lubaczewski

📰 Classifieds

Introducing Query Tuning Workbooks in pganalyze! Safely benchmark, experiment, and optimize your Postgres queries on production.

🐘 POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is June 10-12. The call for proposals closes Feb. 9. New and experienced speakers are encouraged to submit!

🛠 Code and Tools

Mathesar: A Spreadsheet Interface to Postgres Databases — An open source (GPLv3) tool providing a table-style interface to a Postgres database of your choice with the aim being to enable developers to open up databases more directly to end users. We first linked to it two years ago but v0.2 has just landed. GitHub repo.

Mathesar

pgwatch 3.0: A Flexible Postgres Monitoring Solution — v3.0 adds support for Postgres 17 (including new metrics), Windows support, improved Docker support, updated docs, support for parallel sinks, and more. GitHub repo.

CYBERTEC

pg_squeeze 1.8: Extension to Automate Table Bloat Cleanup — While not a replacement for vacuuming, this extension goes a step further to gain even more space improvements in-situ and now supports Postgres 17.

CYBERTEC