Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

The work around RegreSQL led me to focus a lot on buffers. If you are a casual PostgreSQL user, you have probably heard about adjusting shared_buffers and followed the good old advice to set it to 1/4 of available RAM. But after we went a little bit too enthusiastic about them on a recent Postgres FM episode I've been asked what that's all about.

PostgreSQL has many small “hidden gem” features included (not to mention ~1K extensions adding a bunch more) waiting for someone to notice them. Some are useful every day, some are niche, and some (e.g. debug_* settings) exist only so that core developers could troubleshoot things without losing too much hair....

When we released the first beta of the pgEdge Postgres MCP Server back in December, we were excited to see the community's response to what we'd built. Since then, the team has been hard at work adding new capabilities, refining the user experience, and addressing the feedback we've received. I'm pleased to share what's landed in Beta 2 (now available) and what's coming in Beta 3 (currently in QA).

As part of its automated migration solution, HexaRocket, to simplify Enterprise-grade Oracle to PostgreSQL database migrations, HexaCluster is pleased to announce pg_utl_smpt PostgreSQL extension to create Oracle UTL_SMTP compatibility.

In 2025 we started a program to help colleagues who show promise for PostgreSQL Development to become contributors. In this post we highlight Florin's journey, a Staff SDE at EDB based in Italy.

If you’re located near Western Switzerland and the Geneva region (or you just want to visit!), you might find it well worth your time to attend CERN PGDay 2026. It’s an annual gathering for anyone interested in learning more about PostgreSQL that takes place at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.

Partitioned tables are a core PostgreSQL feature, but one area still causes regular confusion—even for experienced users:

How exactly does ALTER TABLE behave when partitions are involved?

Does an operation propagate to partitions? Does it affect future partitions? Does ONLY do what it claims? Why do some commands work on parents but not on partitions—or vice versa?

2026 Thursday February 19th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Please note the new meeting location. And please RSVP on MeetUp as space is limited.

Location: Multnomah Arts Center – The front desk can guide you to the meeting room.

7688 SW CAPITOL HWY • PORTLAND, OR  97219

Speaker: Mark Wong

Lots of us started with a Postgres database that incremented with an id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY. This was the Postgres standard for many years for data columns that auto incremented. The SERIAL is a shorthand for an integer data type that is automatically incremented. However as your data grows in size, SERIALs and INTs can run the risk of an integer overflow as they get closer to 2 Billion uses.

If your organization is standardizing on Kubernetes, this question shows up fast:

“Should PostgreSQL run on Kubernetes too?”

The worst answers are the confident ones:

What Is Table Bloat?

Table bloat in PostgreSQL refers to the phenomenon where "dead tuples" generated by UPDATE or DELETE operations remain uncollected by VACUUM, causing data files to grow unnecessarily large.

For VACUUM to reclaim dead tuples, it must be guaranteed that those tuples "cannot possibly be referenced by any currently running transaction." If old transactions persist for any reason, VACUUM's garbage collection stops at that point.

Introduction

PostgreSQL is the most advanced open source database system and it is widely used across many industries. Among its many strengths, extensibility places PostgreSQL in a unique spot. CNPG has been supporting extensions; however, this traditionally required building custom container images to include the necessary extensions.

This article is a shortened version. For the full writeup, go to https://github.com/ardentperf/pg-idle-test/tree/main/conn_exhaustion

This test suite demonstrates a failure mode when application bugs which poison connection pools collide with PgBouncers that are missing peer config and positioned behind a load balancer.

You saved my life. There’s not one day when I don’t use MERISE. An experienced developer told me this six months after attending my masterclass. When a senior pro says this with half a year of hindsight, it’s not just politeness. It’s because they’ve seen how much damage a lack of methodology can do in the long run. The Death of Data Modeling? 🔗Lately, I’ve noticed a frustrating trend. Many schools are skipping data modeling entirely.

When it comes to database optimization, developers often reach for the same old tools: rewrite the query slightly differently, slap an index on a column, denormalize, analyze, vacuum, cluster, repeat. Conventional techniques are effective, but sometimes being creative can really pay off!

In this article, I present unconventional optimization techniques in PostgreSQL.

Choosing a correct datatype mapping while migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL is very important to avoid migration failures. Especially when we have date and time involved, it is very important to understand the behavior in both Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Here is another annual blog post breaking down code contributions to PostgreSQL itself (not ecosystem projects) by principal author. I have mentioned every year that this methodology has many limitations and fails to capture a lot of important work, and I reiterate that this year as usual. Nonetheless, many people seem to find these statistics helpful, so here they are.

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This post appeared first on the Dalibo blog.

Brest, France, 19 January 2026

We recently encountered a strange optimizer behaviour, reported by one of our customers:

Customer: “Hi Dalibo, we have a query that is very slow on the first execution after a batch process, and then very fast. We initially suspected a caching effect, but then we noticed that the execution plan was different.”

Unless you've built a massive real-time notification system with thousands of distinct channels, it is easy to miss the quadratic performance bottleneck that Postgres used to have in its notification queue. A recent commit fixes that with a spectacular throughput improvement.

We just had the first meetup of 2026, and all I can say is a huge thank you to Ryan Booz and all attendees, both in person and virtual!

I was so happy to see many familiar faces, as well as first-timers. We had great attendance (one of those rare situations when I didn’t order enough pizza :)). Ryan Booz, who, as I previously mentioned, is one of the few out-of-towners who dare to face Chicago winter weather, presented a great talk on configuring Postgres for effective logging and query-optimization analysis.