PostgreSQL has tons of useful features and so it is somehow inevitable that some of it goes forgotten every now and then. In my case that’s exactly what happens a lot with a cool piece of functionality called “auto_explain”, which is a module in the contrib package. So I thought I’ll just write a short […]

We have recently published a patch to provide full database encryption for PostgreSQL. Many business critical applications require full encryption to match legal or business requirements. As more and more customers asked for this, we decided to tackle this important issue. The idea behind our patch is to store data on disk in encrypted format […]

Since BRIN indexes have been introduced in PostgreSQL 9.5, many people have gladly adopted this new index type. A lot has been written about this new feature and a lot of positive feedback has been reported. While BRIN indexes are clearly a success and definitely a win, some people tend to exaggerate and use them […]

The WAL compression feature With the launch of Postgres 9.5 a new setting called “wal_compression” was introduced, that should decrease the IO load on behalf of CPU load. That is a desirable compromise considering typical constraints of modern hardware. But somehow the feature didn’t get the publicity it deserved – it wasn’t even mentioned in the […]

Recently there have been a couple of very exhaustive and rather technical posts on Planet Postgresql on the topic of bloat. Bloat in short, for those new to Postgres,  is an unescapable by-product of Postgres’ excellent concurrency-enablement model called MVCC (multi-version concurrency control), that creates new copies of rows when you update data in a concurrent […]

Many PostgreSQL users are running their favorite database engine on Linux or some other UNIX system. While Windows is definitely an important factor in the database world, many people like the flexibility of a UNIX-style command line. One feature used by many UNIX people is “watch”. watch runs commands repeatedly, displays their output and errors […]