Postgres Weekly

MERGE/SPLIT PARTITION reverted again

Wed, 2 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#663 — September 2, 2026

Postgres Weekly

Read Your Own Writes Off the Primary: WAIT FOR Measured — Last week, we shared an item explaining what Postgres 19's WAIT FOR is. Now, Radim puts it to the test: naive replica reads were stale 992 times out of 1,000 even over loopback, but WAIT FOR gets that to zero with ~1-2ms overhead.

Radim Marek

Postgres in the Agentic Era: A Forrester Fireside — Forrester's Indranil Bandyopadhyay joins EDB's Lizzy Nguyen to unpack the multimodel data-platform market: where it's heading, what convergence unlocks, and how to map your workloads before you commit. Based on The Forrester Wave, Q2 2026.

EnterpriseDB sponsor

Introducing YeSQL: Practical Postgres, One Concept at a Time — 27 free SQL lessons (located here) covering things like NULL semantics, window frames, LATERAL joins, and reading EXPLAIN results. Queries run in your browser using PGlite with no signup needed.

Dimitri Fontaine

IN BRIEF:

⭐ Postgres 19 has dropped ALTER TABLE … MERGE/SPLIT PARTITION(S) after the release team requested a revert over unresolved design issues. It's the second time the feature has been pulled (previously in Postgres 17). Fingers crossed for Postgres 20.
Tiger Data asked several industry watchers why a '40-year-old database' is still winning in the AI era.
❓ So is Postgres 30 or 40? Both! The docs' history page dates Berkeley's "POSTGRES" to 1986, which is where Tiger's 40 comes from, while the 30th birthday we noted in July marks when Postgres95 got its first public CVS server (essentially the start of the community-run project).
🇬🇧 PGDay UK 2026 takes place next week (September 8) in London. Tickets are still available.

23x Faster Inserts with UUID v7 in Postgres 18 — Switching to uuidv7() hugely cut insert times on a billion-row table (versus the previously used v1 and v4 keys), though the ALTER TABLE needed an access exclusive lock and a jittered retry loop to complete the switchover.

Andrew Atkinson

A Look into Postgres 19's Many pg_catalog Changes — pg_catalog is a valuable source of information about the structure, objects, and inner workings of your database. pg-catalog-almanac lets you look at how the catalog's structure has changed over the years, and Richard has three highlights to share.

Richard Yen

🤩 As of beta 3, Postgres 19 has the most pg_catalog changes of any recent release, adding 12 catalogs and views plus 43 columns, so this almanac could be useful!

pg_tre and pg_re2: New Options for Regexes in Postgres — Benchmarks of two new regular expression extensions against pg_trgm on a 33GB table. ClickHouse's pg_re2 wins on speed, while pg_tre offers fuzzy matching but took hours to index.

Hubert 'depesz' Lubaczewski

📄 Postgres Isn't Slow: Your Storage Is – Writeup of a POSETTE 2026 talk on benchmarking local NVMe storage vs EBS showing how network storage's latency can compound. Sai Srirampur / ClickHouse

📄 New System Views in Postgres 19 – A look at pg_stat_lock, pg_stat_recovery, pg_stat_autovacuum_scores and pg_dsm_registry_allocations. Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek

RELEASES AND CODE:

pgterm: htop For All Your Postgres Databases — A Rust TUI with a tab per Postgres database, background health checks, and views for queries, indexes and tables. Under the hood, the diagnostics come from pgbot which we featured last week. The GitHub repo README has more info.

Alex Shapalov

pg_shmemviz: Visualize Postgres Shared Memory in Your Browser — Renders allocations, C struct fields, padding and raw bytes, reading DWARF from your own postgres binary (dev instances only). You can diff snapshots too.

Bertrand Drouvot

📊 PoWA (PostgreSQL Workload Analyzer) 5.3 — A tool for collecting and aggregating metrics from multiple instances which can then be viewed through real-time charts to help optimize your setup. v5.3 improves Postgres 19 compatibility.

PoWA Team

Doltgres 1.3 – Version-controlled Git-like database (built on top of Dolt) with Postgres wire protocol support.
Stateless Postgres Query Router (SPQR) 3.1 – Production-ready Postgres sharding solution built by Yandex Cloud.
pg_trickle 0.91.0 – Extension providing declarative stream tables with incremental view maintenance via differential dataflow.
sabiql 3.0 – TUI for browsing, querying, and editing databases atop psql.

SOME POSTGRES STATS FROM DATADOG:

The State of Postgres in 2026 — An analysis of data from Datadog's many customers running its APM and monitoring agents shows Postgres adoption keeps climbing, but only 15% of instances set statement_timeout, covering indexes make up 0.3% of all indexes, 22% of tables have a (rarely indexed!) JSONB column, pgvector is the fastest-growing non-bundled extension, and more.

Datadog

🤔 They also found Postgres backends spent 56% of sampled time idle in open transactions, apparently waiting on applications, versus just 37% doing database work.

28 CVEs and a GROUP BY ALL U-turn

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#662 — August 26, 2026

Web Version

🏖️ After a week of being Disneyed-out, I return tired, but more ready than ever to dive back into the (far less humid) waters of Postgres!
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

Postgres Weekly

Eight Years of Postgres Advice, Re-Checked Against Postgres 19 — A look back at years of advice on COPY, TOAST, BRIN, covering indexes and partitioning, checking which behaviors and practices have changed over time. Per-topic tables show which version moved each needle, so it's a useful recap whatever version you're on.

Christopher Winslett (Crunchy Data)

Coming soon: ParadeDB Cloud — We're building a fully managed ParadeDB: one Postgres for your application data, full-text search, vector retrieval, and aggregations. Our early access waitlist is open now.

ParadeDB sponsor

Postgres 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24 Released — Landing just a day after our last issue, a huge round of releases including fixes for 28 CVEs. It isn't a simple update for everyone, either. GIN users on Postgres 18 need to check reltuples values, while users of btree_gist and ltree may need to reindex (see the "Updating" section for full details).

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

💡 As part of the above wave of releases, Postgres 19 Beta 3 was also released with a large number of fixes and, notably, support for GROUP BY ALL was removed with its implementation pushed back to Postgres 20 – more details here.

IN BRIEF:

Pavel Stehule has created lua-psql, a set of patches to add experimental support for Lua into psql.
Who helped Postgres take over the world? Michael Stonebraker's surprising answer is… Oracle!
🇺🇸 Tickets for Postgres Summit US 2026, taking place in NYC this September 30-October 2, are still available. Here's the schedule.
🎧 In the latest episode of Talking Postgres, Claire Giordano caught up with Datasette creator Simon Willison to discuss how AI is changing software development.

Read Your Writes: WAIT FOR in Postgres 19 — A new SQL command (a decade in the making) that lets a session block until WAL reaches a specified position. So a read on an async replica can wait for the write it needs to see, rather than forcing every commit to wait for the standby.

Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek (ClickHouse)

Does Anyone Run Postgres Without PgBouncer? — A survey of 20 managed providers shows nearly all bundle PgBouncer (or something similar) out of the box. So, asks Brandur, isn't it time pooling was just part of Postgres?

Brandur Leach

💬 There's plenty of pushback in the Hacker News discussion, though, from those who think an app-side pool is all that's needed.

📄 Looking Forward to Postgres 19: Syntax Potpourri – A quick tour of assorted syntactic niceties. Shaun Thomas

📄 Why Postgres Breaks Kubernetes' container_memory_working_set_bytes Metric Jeremy Schneider

📄 Building Safe MCP Servers for Your Postgres Database Pamela Fox (Microsoft)

📄 Migrating Multilingual Full-Text Search from SQL Server to Postgres Zhang and Ahmed (AWS)

📰 Classifieds

Build a real-time dashboard on a live machine-data stream, on Postgres. Free workshop, Sept 9 at Noon ET. Save your spot.

❄️ GDPR deletion on archived data: one SQL, not a restore cycle. ColdFront's cold tier is writable. Open source.

RELEASES AND CODE:

pg_statviz 1.2: Time Series Analysis and Visualization of Postgres Stats — An extension and utility pairing for performing time series analysis and visualization of various statistics around I/O, locks, WAL, buffer use, and more. v1.2 adds Postgres 19 support, a blocking locks analysis module, and supports using OpenAI-compatible endpoints for AI analysis of the results.

Jimmy Angelakos

pgbot: Postgres Intelligence for AI Agents and Apps — A Go-powered, single binary read-only tool that connects to a Postgres server and prints a graded health report plus what changed since the last run. Only two weeks old, so early days. GitHub repo.

Alex Shapalov

🔎 pg_textsearch 1.4 – Tiger Data's BM25 ranked text search extension now supports Chinese and has big speedups for top-K queries that use WHERE filters.
pgGraph 1.2 – Graph indexing, search and traversal over ordinary tables. No longer has a 254 label ceiling; graphs can now contain up to 1 million distinct types.
pg_stat_ch 0.4 – Captures per-query execution telemetry and exports it to ClickHouse for analysis in real-time.
🌐 PostGIS 3.7.0 RC1 – The popular geospatial data extension. Fixes bugs and targets Postgres 19 Beta 3.
pgBackRest 2.59.1 – Popular reliable backup and restore solution. It, too, now supports Postgres 19 Beta 3.
PGSync 7.3 – Middleware for syncing data from Postgres to Elasticsearch.
PostgREST 16.2 – Serve a fully RESTful API from an existing database.

A gofmt-style formatter for SQL

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#661 — August 12, 2026

Web Version

🏖️ We're taking a summer break next week, so the next issue will be on August 26.
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

Postgres Weekly

Introducing sqlfmt: An SQL gofmt-Style Formatter — Postgres contributor Dimitri has developed his own way to style SQL over time (as used in his book, The Art of PostgreSQL) and built a Go tool to apply it automatically. Better still, you can use it on the Web, so if you're prepping a presentation or blog post, give it a try on your queries.

Dimitri Fontaine

Coming Soon: ParadeDB Cloud — We're building a fully managed ParadeDB: one Postgres for your application data, full-text search, vector retrieval, and aggregations. Our early access waitlist is open now.

ParadeDB sponsor

The Dangers of Postgres Subtransactions — A transaction with more than 64 subtransactions can bring a cluster to a crawl. A pgbench run shows throughput falling from 7,200 TPS to 160 TPS, and it gets worse: a new read replica can refuse connections entirely.

Nidzwetzki and Berube (PlanetScale)

IN BRIEF:

⏰ Postgres's quarterly minor releases are expected tomorrow, August 13. Nothing has been announced as we go to press, but since we're away next week you'll want to check the release notes yourself — expect updates across every supported branch.
Electric, the team behind PGlite (Postgres compiled to WASM) and the Electric sync engine, is joining the Neon team at Databricks. Here's Electric's side of the story.
QUICK RELEASES: pg_clickhouse 0.10.0, PostgREST 16.0 (and 16.1), Citus 14.2, Doltgres 1.0, pgAdmin 4 9.17, E-Maj 5.0

Rebuilding Postgres for 300x Faster Analytics — The creator of pgrust, an attempt to rewrite Postgres in Rust, reflects on the power of batching, operator fusion and SIMD in a query engine.

Michael Malis

Introducing pg-java: A New Postgres Driver for the JVM — A long-time pgjdbc maintainer explains why he created a from-scratch, Postgres-first JVM driver built on virtual threads: pg-java. It's still considered pre-release though.

Sehrope Sarkuni

📄 Modelling State Transitions in Postgres – When an attribute changes over time and those changes matter, model it as a separate table of timestamped rows. Thiago Araújo Silva

📄 Choosing the Right Postgres Partition Key – You can partition a huge table 'perfectly', yet still have the slow queries stay just as slow… Umair Shahid (Stormatics)

📄 Making Postgres's Documentation Even Better – The practical elements of landing a docs fix in Postgres. Oli Sennhauser

📄 Multi-Tenant BYOK Encryption in Postgres with pgcrypto Tudor Golubenco

📰 Classifieds

Turn a live stream of machine data into real-time dashboards, all on Postgres. Free hands-on workshop, Sep 9. Save your spot.

🚀 Triple your Postgres productivity. pgEdge AI DBA Workbench: AI monitoring & diagnostics for ANY Postgres v14+. Open source.

HITS OF THE YEAR SO FAR:

As we're taking a week off, this is a natural moment to reflect and shine a spotlight on some of the best items of 2026 so far. We know not everyone has time to read every issue, so there are likely to be some highlights you missed… :-)

A small selection from the top items (by clicks):

Postgres is Enough – A useful directory of how Postgres can replace other systems including Redis, Elasticsearch and Kafka.
work_mem: It's a Trap! – An enjoyable tale of two experienced Postgres developers digging into just how a server with 2TB of RAM (and a work_mem setting of just 2MB) got taken down by a badly written query.
How Moving One Word Can Speed Up a Query 10–50x – One of those "but… how?" moments where two logically equivalent queries led to a 32x difference in performance.
Postgres Locks Explained – "It's the resource I wish existed when I first started learning about locks", said the author of this site focused on explaining the different types of lock used in Postgres in an easy-to-understand way.
Life Altering Postgresql Patterns – Twelve bite-size tips and insights from using UUIDs as primary keys and table naming to the use of schemas and views. This one snuck in from issue 630's look at the best items of 2025 but I think we can get away with running it just one… more… time…

Before I leave, I want to thank all of you who have sent in submissions recently. I've amassed quite a queue to go through, and I'm not exactly sure how long it'll take. Rest assured, though, I read every single one and will be including some in future issues :-)

👋 We're now off for a week – see you again on August 26!

What if Claude were your Postgres server?

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#660 — August 5, 2026

Web Version

Lots of videos from this year's PGConf.dev are now on YouTube and I've rounded up some highlights at the end of the issue!
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

Postgres Weekly

COUNT(DISTINCT) Too Slow? A Guide to Fast Approximations — A thorough, hands-on look at Postgres's powers of approximation and sampling, covering the pros, cons, and performance profiles of approaches including TABLESAMPLE, hll, and Apache DataSketches, on a 10 million row test table.

Elizabeth Garrett Christensen (Snowflake)

Model the Cost of an Oracle-To-Postgres Move — Weighing a move off Oracle? EDB's free calculator lets you model the cost by database tier and support level. Pressure-test the migration in a few minutes, before you commit to anything.

EDB sponsor

SQL Improvements in Postgres 11–18: A Personal Selection — Eight releases' worth of SQL features, picked by a longtime contributor and grouped by topic. The part on modelling band membership over time with tstzmultirange and range_agg() alone is worth a look, but there's much to enjoy.

Dimitri Fontaine

Unveiling a 13-Year-Old Postgres Bug in Cascading Replication — A guard added to streaming replication in Postgres 9.3 could lock a cascading standby out of streaming from its upstream after falling back to archive recovery. It's been fixed and will land in the next minor releases: 18.5, 17.11, and so on.

Gabriele Bartolini (EDB)

🤖 'Turning Claude into Postgres So I Can Raise a Series A' — What happens when you stick an LLM behind the Postgres wire protocol and just let it deal with queries however it wants? This, apparently. Yes, it's a bit of fun, but he really did implement actual storage APIs for it to use! 😅

Jacob Jackson

Waiting for Postgres 19: SQL Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ) — If you've wondered what SQL property graph queries buy you over just using normal joins, you're not alone!

Hubert depesz Lubaczewski

📄 Andy Pavlo Joins ClickHouse to Establish ClickHouse Labs – "One larger question we will investigate is how DBMSs like ClickHouse and PostgreSQL fit into emerging AI and agentic technologies." Andy Pavlo (ClickHouse)

📄 Hybrid Search Patterns with Postgres and pgvector – What iterative index scans bring to the party. Christopher Winslett

📄 TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) Performance in Postgres Zsolt Parragi (Percona)

📺 THE PGCONF.DEV VIDEOS:

PGConf.dev 2026 took place in Vancouver this May, and there are a whopping 47 videos in this YouTube playlist to enjoy, if you didn't attend. Some highlights:

▶️ 30 Years of PostgreSQL Retrospective with Momjian, Wieck, Chen, Lockhart, Lane and Mikheev – A panel (above) of Postgres pioneers revisits technical decisions, defining moments, and lessons from over the years. Moderated by Melanie Plageman and Jonathan Katz.
▶️ What's Missing in Postgres? with Bruce Momjian – A look at 'missing' features including sharding, TDE, global indexes, and multi-master replication. The slides are available, if you prefer.
▶️ Building the Next Generation of Postgres Contributors with Claire Giordano – The Talking Postgres host reflects on what it takes to get more people involved with the project.
▶️ Real-Time Postgres Patch Idea Evaluation with Freund, Linnakangas, Lane, and Haas – Leading committers evaluate 'surprise patch ideas' live, with Robert Haas moderating.
▶️ Why is Postgres Terrible? with Christophe Pettus – First admitting Postgres isn't terrible, Christophe nonetheless examines real-world pain points, mitigations, and opportunities for improvement.
▶️ Profiling Postgres Perils with Andres Freund – A tour of misleading benchmarks, profiling traps, and counterintuitive performance results.

Alternatively, check out the playlist for anything that catches your eye – there's a lot more than just the above.