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The archiver only runs when a WAL segment is complete. On a busy database that happens constantly; on a quiet one it might not happen for hours or days. archive_timeout exists to prevent the resulting “our database has been accepting writes all afternoon but none of them are in the archive …

Hello everyone, here comes a series of my annual posts about the Chicago Postgres Conference, and what I am most excited about. And I want to start with the training sessions we offer. All three training sessions are presented by my favorite people, and I can’t wait to tell you more about them!

First in a series of dispassionate surveys of the major managed-Postgres offerings. This post is about Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL — what AWS calls “traditional RDS,” as distinct from Aurora PostgreSQL, which is a separate product with a separate architecture and will get its own post. …

In the previous article we watched every UPDATE leave dead tuple behind. The same copy-on-write behaviour shows up from the operational angle in DELETEs are difficult. That's the tradeoff of MVCC and on the heap alone it's tolerable. The problem is the indexes.

PostgreSQL 19 ships with parallel autovacuum. The new GUC autovacuum_max_parallel_workers caps the cluster-wide pool, and the per-table storage parameter autovacuum_parallel_workers lets you tune individual tables. Workers come out of the existing max_parallel_workers budget. Off by default. Good…

Stephen O’Grady’s State of Open Source Licensing in 2026 at RedMonk is essential reading. The headline finding — that the long shift from copyleft to permissive licensing has continued, with Apache and MIT consolidating their dominance among the survivors — surprises no one who has be…

pgBackRest is an open source backup and restore tool for PostgreSQL. It’s fair to say it’s one of the most popular options, widely used across the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

PGConf Germany 2026 took place on April 21 and April 22 2026 in Essen, Germany

Organized by:

• Andreas Kretschmer
• Andreas Scherbaum
• Cornelia Biacsics
• Daniel Westermann
• Danilo Endesfelder
• Dirk Krautschik
• Julia Gugel
• Kai Wagner
• Sascha Spettmann

Speaker:

Yesterday, David Steele announced the end of life of pgBackRest — a PostgreSQL backup tool he maintained for thirteen years. The reasons are structural, not personal, and they are a reminder of a pattern we see too often in open-source infrastructure. This article reflects on what that means, on the architectural rivalry between pgBackRest and Barman, and on why CloudNativePG users can take confidence from both the project’s CNCF governance and the virtuous cycle of commercial support that sustains it.

archive_mode is the master switch for WAL archiving. With the last three posts under our belts — archive_cleanup_command, archive_command, archive_library — we now get to the parameter that decides whether any of that machinery runs at all. Three values: off (default), on, and always. Context is …

Yesterday David Steele announced that he is stepping away from pgBackRest. After thirteen years, the most widely-deployed dedicated backup tool in the PostgreSQL ecosystem is no longer maintained. The current release, v2.58.0, is the last release. Steele asks that any forks pick a new name, which…

For thirty years, the answer to “how do I get the DDL for this object?” in PostgreSQL has been: shell out to pg_dump -s and grep. Every tool that has ever needed to reconstruct an object definition — migration tools, schema diff utilities, \d replacements, every ORM that has tried to …

For about fifteen years the answer to “can I turn on data checksums without an initdb?” has been “not really.” pg_checksums showed up in PostgreSQL 12 and made the job survivable, but you still had to shut the cluster down. For anyone running 24×7 production, that has left…

Introduction

When people first start reading PostgreSQL execution plans, they quickly learn a few common scan types: Seq Scan, Index Scan, Index Only Scan. But eventually another one appears that is less obvious: Bitmap Heap Scan, which is almost always accompanied by Bitmap Index Scan.

Before getting into this one, an errata against the previous post. I said backup tools “can register as an archive_library and bypass archive_command entirely” on PostgreSQL 15+. That is what the feature was designed to enable. It is not what the ecosystem has actually shipped. More o…

I have been recommending pgBackRest as the best backup tool for PostgreSQL for years. I even wrote a blog post about it. My students at Université Lyon I were able to backup, restore, and perform PITR in four hours with zero prior knowledge of the tool. That is how good it was. I say “was” because David Steele, the sole maintainer of pgBackRest, has announced on the project’s GitHub page that he is stopping all work on the project.

Last post’s deferred party has arrived. archive_command is how WAL segments leave the primary and travel somewhere durable — the substrate on top of which point-in-time recovery, warm standbys, and every serious backup tool are built. It is also, in the classic formulation, a shell command …

Alphabetical order delivers our first casualty. archive_cleanup_command is a standby-server knob that exists entirely to tidy up after archive_command, which the alphabet insists on deferring until the next post. So we will describe how to sweep up a party we have not yet thrown. The briefest-pos…

Last year’s acquisitions have now shipped products, and for the first time it is possible to compare the Snowflake and Databricks “Postgres-in-the-lakehouse” strategies as real things rather than as marketing decks. The acquisitions: Snowflake bought Crunchy Data in June 2025 (a…

The previous post on the Linux 7.0 pgbench regression ended with the same instruction every other Postgres performance post ends with: set huge pages. This post is the long version. If you have read the Postgres docs on huge_pages and you’re still not completely sure what /proc/meminfo is t…