Looking at the running processes list on a server where Postgres is running, one sees two writer processes amongst other background and client processes. One process is more specifically named wal writer though. But it is still confusing that there are 2 similarly named writers. What do they do? From my experiences from training purely […]

In version 9.6 PostgreSQL has introduced parallel queries. The ability to use more than just one CPU core per query is a giant leap forward and has made PostgreSQL an even more desirable database. With parallel queries many workloads can be speeded up considerably. In this article, I want to point out a small missing […]

During the last training session, a curious participant asked if there’s a way to easily expose the PostgreSQL database logs to users – and indeed, there’s a pretty neat way for SQL-based access! So this time, I’ll give you a quick demo on that. The approach, taking advantage of the File Foreign Data Wrapper extension, […]

There is a couple of different ways to implement database encryption – commonly on operating system, filesystem, file or column level, leaving out transport level encryption, which is supported since 15 years. Each of those approaches counters a different threat model, and one can easily imagine that in the case of databases, where the systems […]