Month: August 2014
Shrink the storage footprint of PostgreSQL data
When writing data structures and table layouts, people usually don’t care about the order of columns. Why should they anyway? Columns can be reordered inside a SELECT at will, so why care? Well, you should care because the order of columns might have significant impact on the size of your table. That’s right: The size […]
pg_resetxlog: renamed to pg_resetwal, see update in blog
UPDATE September 2023: This feature is now called pg_resetwal, see the PostgreSQL documentation about it here. The blog below will be preserved for reference. See this blog by Laurenz Albe about corrupting databases to read more aboutpg_resetwal. PostgreSQL has proven to be one of the most reliable Open Source databases around. In the past we […]
Code size over time
With PostgreSQL 9.4 just around the corner and 8.4 just retired I thought it is time to review those years of development to see how the size of the PostgreSQL code base has evolved over time. In the past couple of years (I even already got to say “decades”) a lot of development has happened […]
Speed up PostgreSQL data loading with COPY (FREEZE)
UPDATED JULY 19, 2023 – When I do training here at CYBERTEC, people often ask how to load data fast and efficiently. There are many ways to achieve this. One way not too many know about is COPY (FREEZE). It makes sure that PostgreSQL can organize data nicely straight away by instantly writing hint bits […]
Speeding up things with hint bits
Post UPDATED June 2023: PostgreSQL is a highly sophisticated relational database system capable of performing wonderful operations. But, sophistication also means that there is a bit of complexity under the surface, which is not always well understood by users. One thing people usually don’t know about are hint bits. What are hint bits? Actually, they are […]