Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

With three locale providers (libc, icu and builtin), a PostgreSQL instance has potentially three different versions of Unicode at the same time. In this post, let's see when it matters and how to find which Unicode versions we are using.

Thank you to everyone who came to listen to my talk, "Postgres Partitioning Best Practices", at Euruko in Viana do Castelo, Portugal on 18 September 2025.

Thank you for all the questions and conversations, and thank you, especially, to the real-life Sofia - the person who found me to say

"Your talk described exactly what I went through, and I wish I'd been able to watch a talk like this before I started."

PostgreSQL 18 is around the corner and it is time to take a look at one of the most important improvements that have been added to the core engine. We are of course talking about the introduction of asynchronous I/O (AIO), which has been a huge topic over the years. 

Synchronous vs. asynchronous I/O

Let's dive into this and understand what the fuzz is all about. The standard I/O model works roughly like this:

pgwatch v4? Yes, after a long time of silence, we are finally releasing a new major version!

Why version 4?

What happened to pgwatch v3!? It was released less than a year ago!

If Firefox can have version 142 and Chrome version 139 (and those numbers are probably already outdated by the time of publishing), why should we care about strict versioning? 🙂

On a more serious note, we decided to stick to the PostgreSQL major versioning scheme, so pgwatch major releases will now follow PostgreSQL major releases.

I am glad we had an option to replay this talk from PG Day Chicago one more time! If you didn’t have a chance to join us, here is the recording – enjoy!

On 9th of September 2025, Dean Rasheed committed patch: Add date and timestamp variants of random(min, max).

I am excited to announce PostGIS 3.6 and GEOS 3.14.

The PostGIS spatial extension to PostgreSQL and the GEOS computational geometry library taken together provide much of the functionality of PostGIS, and are the open source focus of the (Crunchy Data) Snowflake PostGIS team.

How we built activity-aware Postgres clusters that hibernate automatically and save resources

Miles Richardson presented the WarehousePG project (an open source Greenplum fork) at the Apache Iceberg™ Europe Community Meetup in London, September 8. Watch the recording: youtu.be/lz6w9W1Ubps?si=upETJvoKD_zuHL0R

PGDay UK took place, September 9, at the Cavendish Conference Center.

Organizers:

• Chris Ellis
• Devrim Gunduz
• Dave Page

Talk Selection Committee:

Recently a great presentation “1000x: The Power of an Interface for Performance” from Joran Dirk Greef from TigerBeetle made the rounds. If I may summarize, the gist of the presentation was that the correct programming model can mean many orders of magnitude performance difference. As the presentation did not explore this, I wanted to see how far we get by adjusting our programming style on boring old relational databases.

PostgreSQL 19 changes this week New GUC debug_print_raw_parse Option max_retention_duration added for subscriptions COPY : hint added for COPY TO when a WHERE clause was provided, noting that COPY (SELECT ... WHERE ...) TO can be used instead PostgreSQL 18 changes this week

PostgreSQL 18 RC1 has been released ( announcement ). 

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© Laurenz Albe 2025

1. pgsql_tweaks is a bundle of functions and views for PostgreSQL

   1. Stefanie Janine: pgsql_tweaks 1.0.0 Released

      16. September 2025 - 0:00
      pgsql_tweaks is a bundle of functions and views for PostgreSQL

      The source code is available on Codeberg.
      You can install the whole package, or just copy what is needed from the source code.

      The extension is also available on PGXN.

      Version 1.0

      I decided to make this the 1.0 Version. The First commit is from 2017-08-11, the extension is now more than eight years old.