Postgres Weekly

The only scalable delete is DROP TABLE

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#653 — June 17, 2026

Postgres Weekly

Scaling Postgres to 226k TPS: A Christmas Day Retrospective — A meaty post-mortem and tactical walkthrough of how a digital photo-frame company went from having its Postgres deployment crash out during the 2024 holiday season to handling 2025 without a hitch.

Andrew Atkinson

Learn How CERN Runs 40% Faster Queries on 95% Less Storage — CERN's 800+ SCADA systems generate hundreds of GB of time-series data daily. See how their engineers achieved 95% storage reduction and 40% faster queries with TimescaleDB — inside Postgres. Jun 25, 9 AM ET.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

The Only Scalable Delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE — A reminder that large DELETE operations cost more than you think, and how refactoring to a DROP or TRUNCATE can help in some cases.

Tom Pang (PlanetScale)

IN BRIEF:

Claire Giordano presents a fantastic roundup of everything new with Postgres at Microsoft in the past year, from its hosted services to team members' Postgres 19 contributions.
📺 Microsoft's POSETTE 2026 virtual Postgres conference is taking place this week, if you want to check out the livestreams.
PgDog (an open source connection pooler/sharder) has raised $5.5m in funding.
🇺🇸 Postgres Summit US is this September 30-October 2 in NYC. They're looking for volunteers if you'd like to help.
🇬🇧 Seven spots remain for next week's London PostgreSQL Meetup Group session.

🕒 British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres — British Columbia switched to permanent daylight saving time in March, providing an illustration of a subtle timestamptz trap: future local times stored before a tzdata update come back an hour wrong! Here’s how to avoid getting caught out.

Christopher Winslett (Crunchy Data)

▶ How I Got Started Running a Postgres User Group — Jeremy Schneider joined Claire Giordano to discuss why local Postgres user groups are career “express lanes” and why the hard work of running one is worth it. Full transcript.

Talking Postgres Podcast podcast

💡 The Postgres site maintains an official list of local user groups if you want to find one in your area.

📊 Write-Heavy sysbench Tests on a Large Server: Postgres vs MySQL – Mark suspects a performance regression in recent Postgres versions and is trying to figure it out. Mark Callaghan

📄 A Thousand Postgres Branches for $1 – How Xata drastically improved their database provisioning and branching times. Tudor Golubenco (Xata)

📰 Classifieds

🧩 New in pgEdge Control Plane: deploy MCP, RAG, & PostgREST alongside your DB… + systemd preview.

When AI writes the data-layer changes, code review stops being a checklist problem. AgentField breaks down what review becomes in an AI-native engineering team. → Read the post.

RELEASES AND CODE:

pg_durable: Durable Execution Inside Postgres — Microsoft has open sourced the durable workflow engine it uses in Azure HorizonDB. There are two Docker images running on Postgres 17/18 to experiment with, and full docs here.

Microsoft

pg_ducklake 1.0: A Native Lakehouse in Postgres — An extension that brings columnar storage, vectorized execution, and lakehouse architecture (data lake with a catalog) to Postgres, built with DuckDB and DuckLake.

Relyt

Nandi 3.0 – A migration tool for Ruby on Rails that keeps routine-looking schema changes from taking your database down on large tables.
PostgreSQL Anonymizer 3.1 – Now with Local Differential Privacy (LDP) for stronger privacy 'noise'. Also includes a critical security update with all existing users directed to upgrade ASAP.
pgstream 1.1 – Schema change tracking and CDC tool built around logical replication.
🌐 osm2pgsql 2.3 – Import OpenStreetMap data into Postgres/PostGIS.

Postgres 19 Beta 1 is here

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#652 — June 10, 2026

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

PostgreSQL 19 Beta 1 Released — One of the more exciting major releases of Postgres is a step closer with graph queries, faster inserts, pg_plan_advice, parallel-worker autovacuuming, online toggling of data checksums, and more, all ready to try now. Final release will be around late September/early October.

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

💡 Ready to give Postgres 19 a spin? Here's how to get it running in Docker or on a Kubernetes cluster.

Come for Great PostgreSQL Talks, and Yes, There’s Swag — POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is around the corner (16-18 Jun). Pick & attend your must-sees. Join the Hallway Track on Discord for limited, exclusive event swag for attendees to the live event from anywhere in your slippers. Last call: Register now.

Microsoft | AMD sponsor

IN BRIEF:

📘 The official Postgres 19 documentation is now taking shape, such as this page on property graphs and the draft release notes.
💰 Supabase has raised a $500m Series F round at a valuation of $10bn.
Spectral Core has unveiled SQL Tran, a (commercial) tool for automating Oracle to Postgres migrations.

⚾ Comparing the Graph Capabilities of Postgres, DuckDB, and LadybugDB — A baseball-oriented comparison of how three databases fare (both in terms of developer experience and raw performance) with making graph-style queries across millions of rows of player, venue, and game data.

John Nevin

EXPLAIN Prettier (or Post-Processing Query Plans) — EXPLAIN output can be tricky to read at the best of times and it can also change subtly between machines and versions. Andrei shows off explain_prettier, which makes EXPLAIN output cleaner and simpler by stripping away unnecessary info.

Andrei Lepikhov

📄 The Postgres Developer's Guide to Vector Index Tradeoffs – Find out what HNSW, IVFFlat, DiskANN, and SPFresh indexes are and when to pick each of them. Hien Phan (Tiger Data)

📄 SQL’s ORDER BY Has Come a Long Way – A feature tour from the 80s through to the ISO-specified SQL:2023 present. Markus Winand

📄 Does pgBackRest Work with pg_tde? – Can pgBackRest handle encrypted WAL segments transparently? Mostly, yes! Stefan Fercot

📄 File Descriptors: The OS Limit That Takes Down Postgres Warda Bibi

📰 Classifieds

🧮 Build a full RAG stack inside Postgres. Docloader, Vectorizer, RAG, & MCP. 100% open source.

🐘 AI wrote the migration. Who reviews it? Open-source multi-agent PR review - a custom review lens per PR, cents per run. Star & deploy →

RELEASES AND CODE:

Absurd: A Postgres-Native Durable Workflow System — Described as “the simplest durable execution workflow system you can think of”, Absurd is an SQL file that implements a multi-step task/queue/worker system on regular Postgres. There are SDKs to make it easy to use from TypeScript, Python, and Go.

Armin Ronacher (Earendil)

Multigres v0.1 Alpha: An 'Operating System' for Postgres — A year ago, Supabase announced it was hiring the co-creator of Vitess to work on a Vitess-like horizontally-scaling database clustering system but for Postgres. This alpha is an early public look at what they’re building.

Sugu Sougoumarane

TimescaleDB 2.27 – Tiger Data's time series extension continues its focus on performance with more efficient operations on compressed data in particular.
pg_clickhouse 0.3 – FDW for querying ClickHouse databases from Postgres. The underlying C++ library gets switched out for a faster, more robust C alternative.
pg_background 2.0 – Run SQL in background workers. Now works with Postgres 19.
Kanel 4.0 – Generate TypeScript types from a live Postgres database.
pgrls – Static analyzer for RLS (Row-Level Security) to catch common policy bugs.
NeonD – Open-source Neon-based control plane daemon for Postgres that runs as a single Docker container.
pgcheck – A lightweight Postgres health-check CLI written in Go.

A chat with the creator of Postgres

Wed, 3 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#651 — June 3, 2026

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

Handling Graphs with SQL/PGQ in Postgres 19 — Postgres 19 is adding support for SQL/PGQ, so you can declare a property graph over tables and pattern-match with Cypher-like MATCH (a IS person)-[IS knows]->(b IS person) queries. It’s all handled by the query rewriter, so a graph pattern becomes a normal relational query.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

💡 Want graph queries on today’s Postgres? Elizabeth Garrett Christensen shows how the Apache AGE extension brings openCypher to current versions.

95% Less Storage. 40% Faster Analytics. CERN on Postgres — CERN's Large Hadron Collider generates hundreds of GB of time-series data daily. In this live webinar, their engineers walk through how they modernized a legacy archiving stack with TimescaleDB. June 25, 9 AM ET.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

🔓 Why Postgres Lacks Transparent Data Encryption — Many other databases have it, but in Postgres you need to lean on third party services or the pg-tde extension. Why? Shaun digs into old discussions about the feature, and finds the biggest problem is defining what problem that TDE actually needs to solve.

Shaun Thomas

IN BRIEF:

Postgres 19 Beta 1 has been tagged on the official repo by Tom Lane. There's little to see yet, but a beta announcement seems to be imminent.
Microsoft has made its VS Code extension for Postgres available on the Open VSX registry (an independent extension store for VS Code compatible editors) so that tools like Cursor can now use it directly.
Postgres managed by ClickHouse is now in beta.

Helping the Planner Help You — When two columns are correlated, Postgres assumes they’re independent and the planner’s row estimates go badly wrong. A practical tour of CREATE STATISTICS and the better query plans it unlocks.

Valerie Parham-Thompson

Egress Problems and Where to Find Them — If your database is running in someone else’s datacenter, data egress and associated costs are important to control. Simeon shares tips on how to get the numbers down, along with some PlanetScale-specific advice.

Simeon Griggs (PlanetScale)

📄 The Night Our Tables Wouldn’t Stop Growing – A production whodunit: a stray statement_timeout quietly broke logical replication and tables ballooned. Semab Tariq

📄 Postgres Outages That Aren’t Postgres Bugs – Three OS-level failures that show up as database outages. Payal Singh

📄 Same Query, Three Results – One query, three benchmark passes, three very different verdicts between ParadeDB and Postgres FTS. A lesson in how methodology colors the answer. James Blackwood-Sewell (ParadeDB)

📄 When is a Function LEAKPROOF? Laurenz Albe

📰 Classifieds

Spot N+1 queries before your users do. AppSignal auto-monitors Postgres performance with real-time alerts. Try free.

🔎 Introducing pg_search, a Postgres extension for Elasticsearch-quality full-text, vector and hybrid search in Postgres.

🐘 Spock 5.0.7: PG18 slotsync integration, add-node data race fix, apply-worker recovery. Open source multi-master Postgres.

RELEASES AND CODE:

DeltaX (δx): Fast Time-Series Extension for Postgres — A new columnar storage extension for time-series data from Xata that uses only regular Postgres tables, so things like replication, crash recovery, backups, and pg_dump work as they usually would. Here’s how it works.

Xata

Streambed: Stream Postgres to Iceberg on S3 — Streams WAL via logical replication, writes Parquet to S3, and commits Iceberg metadata. You can then query with plain psql thanks to a built-in wire-protocol server.

viggy28

ingestr v1: Copy Data to and from Databases in One Command — A Go-powered tool to move data (with incremental append/merge support) between a myriad of sources and destinations (Postgres included) without writing code.

Bruin Data

🔎 pg_textsearch 1.3 – Tiger Data's extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search. v1.3 includes revisions for compatibility with disaggregated storage architectures.
SeaQuery 1.0 – Dynamic query builder for Postgres/MySQL/SQLite in Rust.

📺 ONE LAST THING — WORTH A WATCH:

Postgres at 30: A Chat With Its Creator — With Postgres turning 30 this year, here’s a treat: a wide-ranging interview with Mike Stonebraker, the man who started the Postgres project. He covers how Postgres came to be, where he thinks Google and Amazon get databases wrong, and what he’s building next.

The Peterman Pod

💡 Prefer to read? There’s a full transcript too.

Postgres turns 30 (with cake)

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#650 — May 27, 2026

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

PGConf.dev 2026: Why It Remains My Favorite Postgres Conference — A fantastic trip report from last week’s PGConf.dev event in Vancouver. Along with many pictures of the fun, Cary has detailed summaries of the talks he attended, topics raised at the unconference sessions, and even what happened at a 30th birthday for Postgres, complete with cake!

Cary Huang (High Go)

💡 Jeremy Schneider and Ashutosh Bapat have detailed trip reports too. “I’m very glad that I decided to go,” says Jeremy.

Your Agent Needs Better Context, Not a Bigger Prompt — Memory Engine stores engineering facts, decisions, and instructions in PostgreSQL so agents pull what's relevant before each task. No more loading the whole codebase. Semantic, keyword, temporal search. Inspectable, MCP-native. Free to start.

Memory Engine sponsor

🕒 How Soon is now()? — Did you know now() isn’t the 'current time' but when the transaction started? When that distinction matters, as it did for Oskar when a retry loop kept seeing the same frozen timestamp and never made progress, reach for clock_timestamp() instead.

Oskar Dudycz

💡 now() is equivalent to transaction_timestamp(). More on that in the docs.

5 Postgres Locking Behaviors That Trip People Up — Postgres’s lock manager is correct by design, but that correctness can still surprise you. A Postgres engineer walks through five counterintuitive locking behaviors that have caused real production outages, and how to avoid them.

Shinya Kato

XID Wraparound's Equally-Evil Twin — Monitoring transaction ID wraparound is a Postgres admin’s bread and butter, but MultiXact IDs, as consumed by concurrent row locks and foreign key checks, can fly completely under the radar. Richard explains how MXIDs accumulate, why they need freezing too, and shares queries to monitor them.

Richard Yen

💡 For a deeper dive into MultiXact internals and tuning, AWS has an in-depth guide.

📄 TOAST: Where Postgres Hides Big Values – Even more Postgres bread and butter. But crispier. Radim Marek

📄 How I Manage Persistent Multiplayer State Without Chaos – Keeping a multiplayer game consistent with “PostgreSQL holding the truth and Redis doing the fast work.” Julien Singler

📄 How to Profile a pgrx-Based Postgres Extension – pgrx is a framework for building Postgres extensions in Rust. Raynor Elgie

📰 Classifieds

🐘 Not enough time to watch 44 Postgres talks? Use the Ultimate Guide to POSETTE: An Event for Postgres & pick your favorites. Microsoft | AMD.

🚀 Join us live: pgEdge AI DBA Workbench walkthrough with Postgres Core Team Member Dave Page. Register now.

🔎 Introducing pg_search, a Postgres extension for Elasticsearch-quality full-text, vector and hybrid search in Postgres.

RELEASES AND CODE:

pgGraph: Graph Database Capabilities for Normal Postgres Tables — An ‘early alpha’ extension that adds a graph querying layer to ordinary relational tables without a separate database or new query language (no Cypher to learn). It’s early days but has some interesting ideas. GitHub repo.

Evokoa

🔎 plpgsql_check 2.9: A PL/pgSQL Code Checker — A specialized tool to find errors lurking in PL/pgSQL functions.

Pavel Stehule

pg_parse: A Postgres-Compatible SQL Parser for Rust — Leans on libpg_query so you get the same internal parse tree for SQL queries that Postgres itself does.

Paul Mason

PgQue 0.2 – Zero-bloat Postgres queue. One SQL file to install, pg_cron or pg_timetable to tick. v0.2 introduces first-party clients for Python, Go and TypeScript, cooperative consumers, pg_tle packaging, and more.
📊 pg_statviz 1.1 – Minimalist extension and utility for time series analysis and visualization of Postgres internal statistics. (We love the new logo!)