Postgres Weekly

pg_textsearch 1.0 brings production-ready BM25 to Postgres

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#642 — April 1, 2026

Postgres Weekly

pg_textsearch 1.0: A BM25 Search Engine Using Postgres Pages — Real BM25 scoring built in C and running on top of Postgres’s own storage layer, so you can create indexes, write queries, and get relevance-ranked results out of the box. v1.0 takes things from preview to production with parallel index builds and disk-based segments (rather than memory only, as in pre-1.0). GitHub repo.

Todd J. Green (Tiger Data)

💡 Other BM25-based options are available, including ParadeDB (which uses Tantivy behind the scenes) and VectorChord-BM25. A head-to-head comparison and benchmark of them would be great to see.

Most Teams Hit a Wall With Analytics on Postgres — Postgres can scale analytics. It just needs help. Instead of a second database, add TimescaleDB: hypertables, 95% compression, and continuous aggregates. No pipelines, no sync lag, no drift. Analytics on live data. Start building for free.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

High Memory Usage in Postgres is Good, Actually — High memory usage in Postgres is often a sign the system is simply doing its job, keeping frequently accessed data close at hand. The thing to worry about is memory pressure, and Simeon explains how to tell the two apart.

Simeon Griggs (PlanetScale)

IN BRIEF:

🇦🇹 Microsoft's Cornelia Biacsics tells the story of how she organized a Postgres meetup in Vienna last week. Might be inspirational if you want to do the same in your city.
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is now available on the AWS Free Tier.
♟️ Can you use SQL to render a chess board and move pieces around it? A neat interactive exploration of what's involved.

Postgres 19 Adding Built-in JSON Export via COPY — In the next version of Postgres, COPY ... TO ... WITH JSON will let you export query results or table data directly as a stream of JSON objects.

Hubert Lubaczewski

pg_service.conf: The Spell Your Team Forgot to Learn — pg_service.conf is a bit like ssh’s config file in that it lets you bundle together connection parameters into a single service name, so you can do things like psql service=prod. A further cute trick is to have different files for each environment and switch between them while keeping your logical names the same.

Lætitia Avrot

The Real Cost of Random I/O — Is the random_page_cost default of 4.0 still right after 25 years? Vondra runs controlled experiments with direct I/O on flash storage and finds the answer is more nuanced than “just set it to 1.0.”

Tomas Vondra

📄 The Hidden Behavior of plan_cache_mode – Did you know the query planner can change the execution plan for a prepared statement after several executions? Richard Yen

📄 A Survey of Database Schema Migration Approaches in 2026 Jeremy Schneider

▶️ How to Implement the Outbox Pattern in Go and Postgres Package Main

📰 Classifieds

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

👾 A conference for engineers who did the big rewrite - and lived to tell the story. BugBash 2026, April 23-24, Washington DC.

RELEASES AND CODE:

pgmetrics: Collect and Report Stats from Running Postgres Servers — A Go app (so no dependencies) that collects over 350 different metrics and produces reports like this one. As well as being useful at a glance, the format is perfect for LLMs to analyze too.

RapidLoop

pg_regresql: Truly Portable Postgres Statistics — An extension that forces the planner to use pg_class statistics instead of reading actual file sizes, so that injected production statistics survive intact in a small dev/test database.

Radim Marek

Multigres Operator: A Kubernetes Operator for Multigres — Multigres is a Vitess-inspired horizontally-scalable/sharded Postgres architecture and this operator brings it into Kubernetes. Note that “It is not production-ready as of today, but we’re moving fast - expect it to be ready in a few months.”

Supabase

pg_ivm 1.14 – Makes materialized views up-to-date using incremental changes.
pgschema 1.8 – Terraform-style declarative schema migrations for Postgres.
pg-boss 12.15.0 – Postgres-powered job queue for Node.js apps.

Moving one word in a query unlocks a 32x speedup

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#641 — March 25, 2026

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

Ctrl-C in psql Gives Me the Heebie-Jeebies — When you hit Ctrl-C in psql, the cancel request is sent unencrypted over a separate connection, even if your main session uses TLS. This deep dive explains how CancelRequest works at the protocol level, a potential security risk, and why it operates in this way.

George MacKerron (Neon)

Digging into pg_plan_advice: Query Plan 'Hints' for Postgres 19 — We featured Robert Haas's explainer recently, but Hubert goes further with examples using his explain.depesz.com dataset, showing how this new module lets you capture, replay, and override key planner decisions.

Hubert Lubaczewski

Security Gateway for Postgres – Inspect Queries and Results — Protect your sensitive data with a second layer of defense in front of your PostgreSQL. Whitelist queries, inspect results, enforce SQL policies, and isolate your database network. Full bidirectional audit trail. No app changes required.

Signando GmbH sponsor

IN BRIEF:

Corey Quinn covers AWS's recent ending of support for Postgres 13 on RDS. If you upgrade, take care: it can break AWS Glue.
📘 Supabase and Manning Publications have published Mastering Postgres: Accelerate Your Weekend Projects and Seamlessly Scale to Millions, a free ebook (though it's behind an email wall).
PlanetScale has introduced a Database Traffic Control feature to manage database workflows according to a budget on the fly. Here's how it works at a technical level.

EVENTS IN APRIL:

🇩🇪 Looking for a Postgres event to attend in April? Head over to PostgreSQL Conference Germany 2026 taking place in Essen on April 21-22.
🇨🇳 Meanwhile in China, the HOW2026 Postgres and IvorySQL Conference is taking place April 26-28 in Jinan.
🇦🇲 Last but not least, registration for PGDay Armenia opens this week. It takes place in Yerevan on April 30.

How Moving One Word Can Speed Up a Query 10-50x — Two logically equivalent queries (one using EXISTS ... AND NOT deleted, the other NOT EXISTS ... AND deleted) lead to a 32x difference in performance. It comes down to a difference in how indexes are used, and is the sort of thing that could bite you one day too.

Boguk & Samokhvalov (PostgresAI)

Postgres 19's New, Built-In REPACK Command — "REPACK absorbs the functionality of VACUUM FULL and CLUSTER in a single command. Because this functionality is completely different from regular VACUUM, having it separate makes it easier for users to understand..." Hubert, who is very excited about this development, shows us how it works in practice.

Hubert Lubaczewski

Waiting For Postgres 19: Allow Table Exclusions in Publications — Logical replication publications using FOR ALL TABLES will be able to exclude specific tables with a new EXCEPT TABLE syntax.

Hubert Lubaczewski

▶ Building Postgres Services on Azure with Charles Feddersen — Charles leads production management for Postgres on Azure at Microsoft and joined Claire Giordano to explain just what Microsoft builds on top of Postgres, why, and how they respect and get involved with the open source community.

Talking Postgres podcast

📄 EXPLAIN's Other Superpowers — A look at commonly overlooked options like BUFFERS, MEMORY (new in PG18), WAL, SETTINGS, and VERBOSE. Richard Yen

📄 Debugging RDS Proxy Pinning: How a Hidden JIT Toggle Created Thousands of Pinned Connections Richard Yen

📄 A Postgres 17 to 18 Upgrade Guide Ilya Kosmodemiansky (Data Egret)

📰 Classifieds

📌 pgedge-postgres-mcp: an open source bridge between AI assistants & your data with prod-ready performance.

👾 A conference for engineers who did the big rewrite - and lived to tell the story. BugBash 2026, April 23-24, Washington DC.

Build & share your dev journey using Aiven's free tier to compete for $1,000. Share your project using #AivenFreeTier by March 31. Enter here.

TOOLS, RELEASES AND CODE:

TigerFS: A Filesystem Backed by Postgres — A new project out of Tiger Data that provides a FUSE/NFS filesystem where every file is a table row, writes use transactions, and multiple users can read/write concurrently with full ACID guarantees. Designed for agent coordination or any tool that works with files.

Tiger Data

pg_jitter 0.2: Alternative JIT Backends for Postgres 14-18 — Brings extra JIT backends to Postgres for faster compilation of queries (benchmarks here). v0.2 adds SIMD acceleration for string and JSON ops, acceleration of regexes and LIKE, binary search for CASE, Windows support, and more.

Vladimir Churyukin

Introducing pgtui: A Postgres TUI Client — A new Rust and Ratatui-powered TUI for doing basic work on Postgres databases. The unique idea is you use your own editor for data entry and edits, with TOML as the interchange format.

Kris Warner

🔎 SlowQL: A SQL Static Analyzer — An SQL static analyzer that identifies dangerous query patterns before they reach production, offering over 250 rules covering security, performance anti-patterns, and compliance. It works completely offline and includes dialect-aware analysis for Postgres.

makroumi

🕒 TimescaleDB 2.26.0 – The popular time-series database extension gets a few key performance improvements.
🔒 safesession 0.1 – Extension to lock a session as read-only. Once loaded, every transaction in the session is forced read-only. Targeted at AI agent and automated use cases.
River 0.32 – High-performance Postgres-powered job processing for Go.
Knex.js 3.2 – Powerful SQL query builder for Node.js.
squawk 2.44.0 – Linter for Postgres migrations.
pg_clickhouse 0.1.5

How one query ate 2 TB of RAM

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#640 — March 18, 2026

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

work_mem: It's a Trap! — With 2 terabytes of RAM and work_mem set to 2MB, you wouldn’t expect your Postgres server to get taken down by the OOM (Out-Of-Memory) killer. Nonetheless, a badly written query did cause that very situation, and two expert Postgres developers uncovered the surprising reason behind it.

Lætitia Avrot and Henrietta Dombrovskaya

💡 I enjoyed when Lætitia said "twenty years of Postgres and I learn something new every week" in regards to pg_log_backend_memory_contexts() – you can learn more about its use in tuning work_mem here.

SELECT COUNT(*) Shouldn't Take 8 Seconds — Tables grow. Queries slow down. Most teams add a second database. But Postgres can handle it. TimescaleDB adds hypertables, 95% compression, and continuous aggregates. Analytics on live data, same SQL you already write. Start building for free.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

IN BRIEF:

🤖 Bruce Momjian says the COMMENT command could be particularly useful for MCP use cases by providing extra metadata for LLMs to use (or as a way to store their own).
EDB's Floor Drees shares a sneak preview of the topics coming up at PGConf.dev in Vancouver this May.
The PGCA (PostgreSQL Community Association) has significantly updated its site and explains its role in defending Postgres's various trademarks and how you can help support it.
Pavel Luzanov rounds up the latest CommitFest and a myriad of features set to land in Postgres 19 because of it.

How Netflix Automated Its RDS Postgres to Aurora Postgres Migration — Back in 2024, Netflix decided to migrate hundreds of Postgres clusters from RDS to Aurora, a challenging task with zero data loss and minimal downtime as must-haves. This is a detailed write-up of the process, and while it was an intra-AWS migration, most of the techniques have universal applicability.

Kannan, Akintayo, Bharadwaj, et al. (Netflix)

We Skipped the OLAP Stack and Built Our Data Warehouse in Postgres — As a Postgres service, Xata wanted to eat its own dogfood, so here’s how they built their own data warehouse approach on top of vanilla Postgres.

Noémi Ványi (Xata)

Waiting for Postgres 19: Add Non-Text Output Formats to pg_dumpall — A deeper look at a welcome Postgres 19 change: “pg_dumpall can now produce output in custom, directory, or tar formats in addition to plain text"..

Hubert 'depesz' Lubaczewski

📄 Postgres is the Gateway Drug — Three companies, $1.5B+ in Postgres-related acquisitions in eighteen months. What's going on? Vignesh Ravichandran

📰 Classifieds

👾 No success theater. Just engineers sharing what actually broke and how they fixed it. BugBash 2026, April 23-24 in Washington, DC.

Build & share your dev journey using Aiven’s free tier to compete for $1,000. Share your project using #AivenFreeTier by March 31. Enter here.

🤖 Love Claude? Leverage natural language database operations with the MCP server for Postgres.

RELEASES AND CODE:

pg_turret: Stream Structured Postgres Logs to HTTP or Kafka Endpoints — Hooks into Postgres's emit_log_hook to capture events and stream them as structured JSON to HTTP (or Kafka) endpoints in real time without any log file parsing.

lasect

pg_stat_ch: Export Per-Query Postgres Telemetry to ClickHouse — The ClickHouse team built a Postgres extension that captures per-query execution telemetry and exports it to ClickHouse in real-time.

ClickHouse

pg_duckpipe: Real-Time CDC for Your Lakehouse — A new Postgres extension that continuously syncs regular heap tables into DuckLake columnar tables (a Parquet-backed format) via WAL-based CDC.

Relyt

Tansu 0.6 – Drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka with Postgres, libSQL/SQLite, S3 or memory storage engines.
PostgreSQLCopyHelper 3.0 – Bulk-inserting data with binary COPY for .NET.
pg_timetable 6.3 – Advanced standalone job scheduler.

Robert Haas proposes pg_plan_advice for Postgres 19

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#639 — March 11, 2026

Web Version

Postgres Weekly

pg_plan_advice: Plan Stability and User Planner Control for Postgres? — Prolific Postgres contributor/committer Robert Haas proposes an “ambitious” patch set for Postgres 19 to let admins control query planner behavior system-wide, without touching application code, by storing and automatically applying “plan advice” strings to specific queries.

Robert Haas

Production Query Plans Without Production Data — Postgres 18 has two new functions that make optimizer statistics portable, meaning it's possible to export stats from a production database and inject them into a test database so you can reproduce production query plans locally without the actual data!

Radim Marek (boringSQL)

Enterprise Grade Postgres for Agentic AI, High Availability and More — pgEdge delivers open-source, 100% Postgres infrastructure for Agentic AI and enterprise apps that demand high availability, reliability, and data sovereignty. We make it easy to build, deploy and manage enterprise‑grade Postgres apps at scale.

pgEdge sponsor

Migrating a Production Database from Heroku to AWS — A practical post covering the techniques behind migrating a 300GB database from Heroku to RDS. An interesting detail is the use of a temporary EC2 instance as a bridge, necessary because Heroku’s restrictions meant WAL archives were the only escape hatch, and RDS can’t receive physical WAL replication directly.

Greg Bergé (Argos)

IN BRIEF:

Supabase has added log drains as a feature for Pro users so you can send logs to your own logging backend.
Bruce Momjian has shared the slide deck for his new talk, The Wonderful World of WAL.

Fixing Connection Pooling on Serverless with PgDog — When Circleback's serverless workloads hit PgBouncer's single-threaded limitation, deploy-time traffic spikes caused connection issues. PgDog, a multi-threaded pooler, resolved their problem.

Stephen van Son (Circleback)

Using Rust & Postgres for Everything — Practical patterns, distilled from years of production use, for building backend services with Rust and Postgres "which may be particularly handy in a world where hardware prices are skyrocketing."

Sylvain Kerkour

📄 Just Use Postgres (Taken to the Extreme) – Think Heroku, except everything is the database. Andrew Nesbitt

📄 The MySQL Shadow – Bruce reflects on the long, slow decline of MySQL. Bruce Momjian

📄 Building a High-Performance Postgres Time Series Stack with Iceberg Christensen and Slot (Snowflake)

📄 How ParadeDB Optimized Top K in Postgres Ming Ying (ParadeDB)

TOOLS, RELEASES AND CODE:

pg_plan_alternatives: Tracing Query Plan Alternatives with eBPF — EXPLAIN shows you the final chosen plan, not what was considered. This tool uses eBPF to instrument Postgres' optimizer and trace alternative plans and cost estimates during the planning phase. The catch is it's Linux only and the Postgres binary needs debug symbols, but it's a fascinating read nonetheless.

Jan Nidzwetzki

Using json_schema_validate to Validate the Shape of Your JSON — Andrew explores the topic of validating JSON at the database level and shares his new json_schema_validate extension that's designed to make it both easy and fast versus pg_jsonschema.

Andrew Dunstan (EDB)

pgconsole: A Minimal Self-Hosted Postgres Editor for Teams — An attractive Web-based Postgres editor with built-in access control, audit logging, and AI assistance that you can quickly deploy via Docker. There’s a live demo here if you want to see how it looks. Note that it's source available, rather than open source.

Bytebase

Marten 8.23 – .NET library providing a document database and ACID-compliant event store atop Postgres.
Databasus 3.19 – Self-hosted backup tool for Postgres, MySQL and MongoDB.
psql-wire 0.18 – Pure Go implementation of the Postgres server wire protocol.
PgBulkInsert 9.0 – Java library for efficient bulk inserts using binary COPY.
PostgREST 14.6 – Serves a fully RESTful API from a Postgres database.