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The Pain and the Real Constraint

Your dashboard queries are timing out at 30 seconds. Your BI tool is showing spinners. Your users are refreshing the page, wondering if something’s broken.

You’ve indexed everything. You’ve tuned shared_buffers. You’ve rewritten the query three times. The problem isn’t bad SQL – it’s that you’re forcing PostgreSQL to aggregate, join, and scan millions of rows every single time someone opens that report.

The topic of checkpoint tuning is frequently discussed in many blogs. However, I keep coming across cases where it is kept untuned, resulting in huge wastage of server resources, struggling with poor performance and other issues. So it’s time to reiterate the importance again with more details, especially for new users. What is a checkpoint? […]

When you are planning database migrations to PostgreSQL, it is usually the small things that cause the biggest production bugs. One of the most common traps for developers is how different databases handle NULL and empty strings ('').

The Nordic PGDay 2026 Call for Paper Committee met to finalize the talk selection:

• Georgios Kokolatos
• Louise Leinweber
• Liisa Hämäläinen
• Thea Stark

PGDay Paris 2026 schedule has also been announced — talk selection was made by:

The new major release of the fast connection pooler for PostgreSQL has been released!

pgagroal 2.0.0 is available!

It took quite a lot of time to get from version 1.6.0 to the new major version 2.0.0, but the new pgagroal is finally here! The project went thru two Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2025 and 2024) before this new great release was completed, but the project decided to prefer the code stability over the rush in releasing, and I think you are going to be amazed by how much improvements have been collapsed in this new version.

Last year at pgconf.dev, there was a discussion about improving the user interface for the PostgreSQL hackers mailing list, which is the main communication channel for PostgreSQL core development. Based on that discussion, I want to share a small project we have been working on:

https://hackorum.dev/

The Honor Part (That I’m Still Processing) 🔗Let me start with the big one: I was invited to the European Open Source Awards ceremony on Thursday evening. Not “bought a ticket” invited—actually invited. If you know the European Union, you know this is invitation-only, and honestly, I’m still a bit stunned. So, picture me, finally seated in my seat on the train, ready to go and checklisting everything. I have the dress, the belt, the purse, the jewels, even the hair accessories.

Read time: ~6 minutes

A real-world deep dive into operator precedence, implicit casting, and why database engines “don’t think the same way”.

The Database Migration Mystery That Started It All

You migrate a perfectly stable Oracle application to PostgreSQL.

I have to apologise — it's been months since PGConf.EU 2025 in Riga, and I'm only now publishing this video. The delay was due to wanting to create accurate captions for the recording, which unfortunately took longer than expected.

In this session, Floor Drees, Karen Jex, and I joined host Boriss Mejias to examine how diverse minds work together in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. We touched upon the psychology of teamwork and the importance of accommodating neurodiverse conditions like ADHD and ASD.

PostgreSQL can scale extremely well in production, but many deployments run on conservative defaults that are safe yet far from optimal. The crux of performance optimization is to understand what each setting really controls, how settings interact under concurrency, and how to verify impact with real metrics.

This guide walks through the two most important memory parameters:

The rise of agentic AI is transforming how we build applications, and databases are at the center of this transformation.

A query executes in just 2 milliseconds, yet its planning phase takes 500 ms. The database is reasonably sized, the query involves 9 tables, and the default_statistics_target is set to only 500. Where does this discrepancy come from?

I just gave a new presentation at Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day titled What's Missing in Postgres? It's an unusual talk because it explains the missing features of Postgres, and why. One thing I learned in writing the talk is that the majority of our missing features are performance-related, rather than functionality-related. I took many questions:

Legacy Sybase ASE/SAP ASE databases are still powering mission-critical OLTP workloads, but modernization pressure keeps rising. Witness the differences between SAP ASE and PostgreSQL, and the migration path to PostgreSQL.

If Darth Vader existed and decided to do to Earth what he did to Alderaan, everyone would lose data. I love this quote from Robert Haas because it’s a reality check we all need. In the database world, we’re constantly sold the dream of “Five Nines” (99.999% uptime) and “Zero Data Loss” (RPO1 0). We spend months building complex clusters to achieve it. Let’s be honest: these are fairy tales. Beautiful to imagine, but they don’t exist in production.

Indexes exist to speed up data access. They allow PostgreSQL to avoid full table scans, significantly reducing query execution time for read-heavy workloads.

From real production experience, we have observed that well-designed, targeted indexes can improve query performance by 5× or more, especially on large transactional tables.

However, indexes are not free.

And in this blog, we are going to discuss what issues unused indexes can cause and how to remove them from production systems with a rollback plan, safely

This question appeared on IRC, and while I wasn't there while it happened, it caught my eye: » Can I not render this with timezone offset: select ‘2026-01-09 04:35:46.9824-08'::timestamp with time zone at time zone ‘UTC'; » Returns ‘2026-01-09 12:35:46.9824' which is without the offset. Let's see what can be done about it. First, let's … Continue reading "How to render timestamp with a timezone that is different from current?"

 I am not intentionally trying to upset anyone with this blog post or minimize the efforts of many brilliant people whom I admire. However, I connected with several people over the 2025 holidays who all had the same question: What is the future of MySQL? At the upcoming FOSDEM conference, several events will discuss this subject and push a particular solution.  And in several ways, they are all wrong.

As we prepare for the upcoming release of PostgreSQL Anonymizer 3.0, I took some time to check which platforms now support the extension. What I discovered brought me a sense of achievement that I wanted to share with the community.

More and More Platforms Are Embracing Data Anonymization

Over the past months, several major Cloud Service Providers have adopted the PostgreSQL Anonymizer extension, making it easier than ever for organizations to protect sensitive data.

The new adopters include:

Today I released v1.7.0 of the pgxn-tools OCI image, which simplifies Postgres extension testing and PGXN distribution. The new version includes just a few updates and improvements: