Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

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.

© Laurenz Albe 2026

Over the years of training, consulting and supporting PostgreSQL users, I have come up with a number of queries to monitor autovacuum. Monitoring autovacuum is not a new requirement, so there are already many existing monitoring queries. However, not all of those queries are useful. So I thought it might be a good idea to write an article about my own collection, both as a reference for myself and as a service for PostgreSQL administrators everywhere.

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 After thirteen years, the most widely-deployed dedicated backup tool in the PostgreSQL ecosystem is no longer maintained.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…