Postgres Weekly

Three more things about Postgres 19

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#659 — July 29, 2026

Postgres Weekly

PGSimCity: How Postgres Works, in 3D — A truly novel way to explore a model of Postgres internals. It's more than a visualization, you can wander around and break stuff! It's a little 'busy' and not perfect UX-wise (you might struggle on mobile devices) but offers a fresh perspective on some otherwise opaque technical concepts.

Nikolay Samokhvalov

Three New Things in Postgres 19 — PlanetScale takes its turn to reflect on the upcoming release, focusing on REPACK, JIT being off by default, and query planner improvements.

Ahmed Darwich

Search Without a Second System — One Postgres for your application data, full-text search, vector retrieval, and aggregations. ParadeDB is an open-source Postgres extension that keeps pace with Elasticsearch.

ParadeDB sponsor

Autovacuum Tweaks Coming to Postgres 19 — Autovacuum has always worked through tables in catalog order, but Postgres 19 teaches it to triage with tables scored on factors like wraparound risk and dead tuples, so the most deserving cases get tackled first.

Shaun Thomas (pgEdge)

Postgres's MVCC is Bad, But So is Everyone Else's — Andy Pavlo's database group called MVCC the part of Postgres they hate the most, and Radim agrees, with benchmarks. But then he asks: what do Oracle, InnoDB, SQL Server, MongoDB and etcd do instead, and what does that cost?

Radim Marek

💡 Not everyone's sold, though. In this Hacker News comment, Skeema author Evan Elias pushes back on the InnoDB characterization.

The Startup's Postgres Survival Guide — A startup has opened up its internal guide distilling two years of Postgres battles, from schema rules and compound indexes to autovacuum tuning, SKIP LOCKED queues and partitioning.

Alexander Belanger (Hatchet)

The Right Way to Give a Third-Party DBA Access to Your Database — From the basics of creating a scoped role to providing safe access to monitoring, being able to cancel runaway queries, and even vacuuming and reindexing, without handing over ownership or superuser access.

Shridhar Khanal (Stormatics)

Why Your Pioneering Postgres Feature Should Start in a Fork — A Postgres planner contributor on his three attempts at parallel scans over temporary tables, undone by local buffers and read-only queries that dirty pages anyway. A fork was the place to prove it, he says, because core's 'bar is brutal'.

Andrei Lepikhov

📄 Let's Break Autovacuum: Reproducing Failures to Make It Observable Nikolay Sivko (Coroot)

📰 Classifieds

💻 MCP for Postgres from Cursor, VS Code, or Claude Desktop. Read-only default, scoped permissions, token efficient.

MyDBA: Comprehensive monitoring for your Postgres database. Kick off with a free week-long health check, then keep monitoring free.

RELEASES AND CODE:

Pagila 4: A Sample Database for Postgres — Originally a port of MySQL's Sakila example database, Pagila has been extended to support numerous Postgres-specific functions (like SQL/JSON and UUIDv7) and v4.0 (which requires Postgres 18) is much larger with a more diverse dataset.

Devrim Gündüz

pgGraph 1.0: Add Graph Database 'Superpowers' to Postgres — An extension that brings the ability to run graph search, traversal, shortest path, and relationship queries directly against ordinary tables.

Evokoa

Rainfrog 0.4: A Database Management TUI for Postgres — Think a little more structured than psql with vim-style navigation of queries, history, schemas, etc. v0.4 adds query autocompletion.

Carl Liu

Postgres Operator 2.0 – Zalando's operator to run highly-available Postgres clusters on Kubernetes.
pg_partman 5.5 – Partition management extension. Includes fixes for several CVEs.
pREST 2.4 – Go-powered RESTful server for Postgres databases.

Now Turso is building Postgres in Rust too

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#658 — July 22, 2026

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

Making 768 Servers Look Like 1 — A fun, educational animated explainer of how a petabyte of Postgres spread over 256 shards (each with a primary and two replicas) can present as one database, covering where replicas hit a wall, query-parsing routers, and load balancing.

Ben Dicken (PlanetScale)

VACUUM Wasn't Made for Append-Only Time-Series — TimescaleDB extends Postgres with hypertables that partition automatically as data grows, columnar compression that cuts storage up to 95%, and continuous aggregates that keep rollups fresh. Same Postgres, same SQL. Get $1000 credit to start.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Don't Add a Read Replica Until You've Read This — A common issue with read replicas is stale reads, which can surface in unexpected places. incident.io explains the approach they used while moving most of their reads off their primary, including LSN stamping and query routing strategies.

Johanna Larsson

IN BRIEF:

⭐ Postgres 19 Beta 2 has been released focused on fixing bugs found in the first beta. Keep testing and reporting, so the final v19 in Sep/Oct is solid.
Supabase Pipelines is now in public alpha. It's designed to replicate Supabase databases to external analytical systems in near real-time.
Neon is expanding beyond Postgres into offering a full backend platform with object storage, functions, and an AI gateway, now in beta.

Postgres 19 Compression: From pglz to LZ4 — In v19, TOAST compression switches by default from pglz to LZ4 (an option since Postgres 14). Christopher covers the history, but also the fun stuff: the decision tree for what gets compressed or TOASTed, and how indexes compress oversized keys.

Christopher Winslett

Turso: 'We're Building Postgres in Rust' — We've recently featured pgrust but now Turso, known for rewriting SQLite in Rust, is having a go too with an LLVM-inspired approach: a single database core that presents via multiple frontends, of which Postgres is the second.

Costa and Enberg (Turso)

▶ Working on Postgres After 13 Years on SQL Server — Microsoft's Panagiotis Antonopoulos discusses his transition from 13 years on SQL Server to Postgres, why Postgres has become the default choice for many workloads, and Azure HorizonDB's shared-storage architecture.

Talking Postgres podcast

📺 Making Iceberg Walk and Talk Like Postgres – A 5 minute lightning talk at DuckCon about pg_lake. Marco Slot

📄 How Much Do You Really Need to Know About Databases? Karen Jex

📄 Building the OAPE PostgreSQL Certification Cornelia Biacsics

📰 Classifieds

See what really breaks in an Oracle migration, from stored procedures to edge cases, and how AI agents handle it. Run it in your browser.

MyDBA: Comprehensive monitoring for your Postgres database. Kick off with a free week-long health check, then keep monitoring free.

RELEASES AND CODE:

pgBackRest 2.59.0 Released with Postgres 19 Support — The first release of the popular backup and restore tool since the project briefly died and came back to life. Getting ready for Postgres 19 is the focus, but some handy S3 and Azure enhancements have been added too.

David Steele

pg_timetable 7.0: Advanced Job Scheduling for Postgres — A mature, stand-alone job scheduler that stores its state in your database and lets you schedule tasks and chain them together. v7 adds OpenTelemetry tracing, arm64 support to the Docker image, and a way to enable/disable tasks.

CYBERTEC PostgreSQL International GmbH

💡 pgAdmin is working on a UI for working with pg_timetable tasks.

Puffgres: Keep Postgres Entities Synced with Turbopuffer — Ever heard of A24, the distributor of movies like Backrooms and Uncut Gems? Their first open source release is a Rust tool that uses logical replication to mirror Postgres entities to Turbopuffer, the cloud vector/full-text search service.

A24 Films

Nano ID for Postgres 3.0 – Tiny, secure, URL-friendly, unique string ID generator as a Postgres function. v3.0 has breaking changes and supports optional prefixes.
PGSync 7.2 – Middleware for Postgres to Elasticsearch/OpenSearch syncing.
pgstream 1.2 – Postgres replication with DDL changes. v1.2 adds a check command for preflight validation.
node-pg-migrate 9.0 – Schema migration management for Node.js apps.
🌐 PostGIS 3.7.0 Beta 1 – Works with Postgres 14 through 19 beta 2.

Partition pruning without the partition key

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#657 — July 15, 2026

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

The Four Horsemen Behind Thousands of Postgres Outages — Two weeks ago we mentioned pgrust, an AI-assisted rewrite of Postgres in Rust (which now passes 100% of Postgres's regression tests). Here, its creator outlines the biggest Postgres pain points he set out to conquer with the rewrite.

Michael Malis

🗣️ In the meantime, Hacker News discovered pgrust and discussed it at length, with Michael answering numerous questions about its creation and goals.

ParadeDB sponsor

How to Achieve Pruning When Querying by Non-Partitioned Columns — If a non-partition key column correlates strongly with your partition key (e.g. sequential session IDs in time-partitioned data), CHECK constraints can enable pruning on that column too. Includes a BRIN-inspired approach for handling outlier values.

Haki Benita

IN BRIEF:

🎂 Pigsty creator Ruohang Feng celebrates Postgres's 30th birthday based on the first public Postgres CVS server going live on July 8, 1996.
📘 Dimitri Fontaine's The Art of PostgreSQL book has been updated for 2026, a significant update that "modernises the text from PostgreSQL 11 to the 17/18 landscape".
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Jimmy Angelakos shares a summary of the recent PostgresEDI meetup in Edinburgh, Scotland, and an invitation to join the next one on August 13.
The Google Cloud team shares an update on its recent participation at several Postgres events.

How SQL/PGQ Rewrites to Joins on Postgres 19 — Behind the scenes of Postgres 19's support for graph queries and how the graph query syntax compiles down to plain joins.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

▶ Fixing Bad SQL in Postgres with Jimmy Angelakos — A 55-minute talk of concise explanations of common SQL anti-patterns paired with live psql demos.

Jimmy Angelakos

📄 The Version Number is Not the Territory – A story of a server claiming to be Postgres 14 outputting an error Postgres 14 doesn't even have. Christophe Pettus

📄 Waiting for Postgres 20: min() and max() Aggregate Support for uuid Hubert depesz Lubaczewski

📄 COUNT(*) After a JOIN Counts Rows, Not Things Dimitri Fontaine

📄 How We Scale PgBouncer in ClickHouse Managed Postgres Kaushik Iska (ClickHouse)

📰 Classifieds

You already run Postgres. TimescaleDB extends it for time-series: hypertables, native columnar compression, faster queries.

🔁 Spock: Open-source multi-master Postgres replication w/ active-active writes, conflict resolution, logical slot failover.

🐘 PostgreSQL 19 preview: PGQ graph workloads, REPACK CONCURRENTLY, pg_plan_advice & more. EDB hackers on what's coming this fall.

RELEASES AND CODE:

plx: Write Stored Functions in PHP, JavaScript, Python, and More — Hot on the heels of last week's PL/Ruby comes a more general extension that transpiles JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby and even COBOL to PL/pgSQL!

Command Prompt Inc.

pg_re2: Fast, RE2-Powered Regular Expressions in Postgres — Google's re2 offers more predictable execution time on regexes than the traditional backtracking approach. ClickHouse shows off its use in Postgres here.

David Wheeler and Philip Dubé

@neon/sdk: Neon's New TypeScript Client Library — For Neon users who want to work with the Postgres platform's specific features to manage projects, branches, and databases.

Andre Landgraf (Neon)

pgsavvy: A Vim-Style TUI for Working With Databases — A Go-powered TUI app for browsing and querying Postgres databases from the terminal, complete with Vim-style navigation, SQL completions, and interactive EXPLAIN plan navigation.

Dave Savic

Pigsty 4.4 – An "everything but the kitchen sink" Postgres distribution that's now based on Postgres 18.4, with a Postgres 19 beta template available to try. Now includes 531 extensions ready to go.
plpgsql_check 2.10 – PL/pgSQL linter that uses Postgres's own parser/evaluator to detect errors and improve code quality.
pgCodeKeeper 15.0 – Java-powered Eclipse IDE plugin to diff database schemas and generate migration scripts.
PostgREST 14.15 – Serve a fully RESTful API from any Postgres database.

Postgres vs. everything else

Wed, 8 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#656 — July 8, 2026

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

Postgres is Enough: How Postgres Can Replace Other Things — A perennial topic in the Postgres world is figuring out just how many other systems (like Redis, Elasticsearch and Kafka, say) Postgres can step in for. This directory rounds up 89 extensions and tools that help Postgres do just that.

Goodway

ParadeDB sponsor

Postgres Transactions are a Distributed Systems Superpower — Should workflow state live in a separate orchestrator, or in Postgres alongside your data? DBOS argues the latter: each step's checkpoint and database updates commit in one transaction, giving exactly-once semantics for those updates with no idempotency bookkeeping.

Kraft and Li (DBOS)

💡 DBOSify puts the idea above into practice as a drop-in replacement for Temporal's Python SDK that uses Postgres with no Temporal server needed.

Why PgDog Built Yet Another Postgres Connection Pooler — Reducing user tradeoffs and providing a seamless experience, largely. For example, unlike PgBouncer, it keeps SET and LISTEN/NOTIFY working in transaction mode.

Lev Kokotov

🚨 A Replication Deadlock Bug in Current Postgres 14-16 Releases — A report that v14.23, v15.18, and v16.14 introduced a regression that can lead to a MultiXactOffsetSLRU deadlock during transaction log replay in some circumstances.

Credativ

Waiting for Postgres 20: Add Backend-Level Lock Statistics — Postgres 19 isn't here yet, but Hubert's looking forward to v20 and its forthcoming per-backend lock statistics, which will show which connections are stuck waiting on locks, and for how long.

Hubert 'depesz' Lubaczewski

📄 Understanding Postgres 19 Property Graphs – A deeper look at mapping relational schemas onto property graphs, gotchas included. Rimas Silkaitis

📄 Looking Forward to Postgres 19: Split Personality – ALTER TABLE is gaining SPLIT PARTITION and MERGE PARTITIONS options. Shaun Thomas

📄 Using Postgres as a Temporal Database Gulcin Yildirim Jelinek (Xata)

📄 Some More Thoughts on random_page_cost Tomas Vondra

RELEASES AND CODE:

pREST 2.0: Serve a RESTful API From a Postgres Database — Turn a Postgres database into a RESTful API. Covers similar ground to PostgREST but built in Go rather than Haskell. v2.0 adds support for multiple databases.

pREST Team

PL/Ruby 2.5: Ruby as a Procedural Language for Postgres — Lets you write functions, triggers, event triggers, and procedures for Postgres in Ruby.

Joshua D. Drake (Command Prompt Inc.)

PL/CBMBASIC: Commodore 64 BASIC for Postgres — I like to slip a fun item in every now and then, and it doesn't get more fun than writing Postgres functions in a 44-year-old programming language.. does it? 😅

Thom Brown

Tinbase: A Supabase-Compatible Backend in a Single Binary — An experiment that provides a local Supabase-like dev experience without Docker using a pure-JS backend built on PGlite and pg-mem. A sort of mini, local-only Postgres wrapped in the same APIs as Supabase proper, so supabase-js works unchanged.

Sanket Sahu

pglayers: Postgres Extensions as Docker Layers — The official Postgres Docker images ship with few extensions and adding more can become tricky. pglayers tries to make this easier by layering extensions atop the official image.

Ismaël Mejía

pgcopydb 0.18 – Copy a Postgres database to a target server (a turbocharged pg_dump | pg_restore, if you will).
PostGIS 3.7.0 Alpha 1 – ST_DWithin gets a major speed boost, Postgres 12/13 support is dropped, address_standardizer and tiger_geocoder are spun out into their own repos.
River 0.40 – Job processing system for Go using Postgres. Contains a schema cleanup migration and adds JobStuckHandler as a hook for handling stuck jobs.

📰 Classifieds

📊 OSS observability for any Postgres 14+. Tiered anomaly detection, historical metrics. Natural-language chat optional.

No more sales calls for Postgres. Pick your product, check out, and scale on your own terms. No waiting on a quote.

🗓 Upcoming Postgres Events

🇲🇬 PostgreSQL Madagascar Conference 2026 (July 18) — The second in-person Madagascar Postgres conference, with talks in Malagasy, French, and English.
🇬🇧 PGDay UK 2026 (September 8 in London) — The fourth annual PGDay UK, run in partnership with PGDay Lowlands.
🇪🇺 PGConf.EU 2026 (October 20-23 in Valencia, Spain) — The biggest Postgres event in Europe.
🇦🇺 PG Down Under 2026 (October 30 in Sydney) — The sixth annual conference for Postgres folks in Australia and New Zealand. Its CFP is open until next week (July 15).
🇭🇰 PGCONF.ASIA 2026 (November 17-18 in Hong Kong) — A leading conference in Asia. The CFP is currently open.
🇵🇱 PGConf.PL 2026 (November 24 in Gdańsk) — The inaugural PostgreSQL conference for Poland and Central Europe.

Note: This list is not exhaustive, and we will continue to mention and promote other events over time.