Some weeks ago, in the light of PostgreSQL v12 release, I wrote a general overview on various major version upgrade methods and benefits of upgrading in general – so if upgrading is a new thing for you I’d recommend to read that posting first. But this time I’m concentrating on the newest (available since v10) […]

After reading this post you will be able to write your first Reinforcement Learning program to solve a real life problem – and beat Google at it. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained a lot of attention due to its ability to surpass humans at numerous table games like chess, checkers and Go. If you are […]

© Laurenz Albe 2019   “Durability”, the D of ACID, demands that a committed database transaction remains committed, no matter what. For normal outages like a power failure, this is guaranteed by the transaction log (WAL). However, if we want to guarantee durability even in the face of more catastrophic outages that destroy the WAL, […]

PostgreSQL uses shared_buffers to cache blocks in memory. The idea is to reduce disk I/O and to speed up the database in the most efficient way possible. During normal operations your database cache will be pretty useful and ensure good response times. However, what happens if your database instance is restarted – for whatever reason? […]

Did you know that your temporary tables are not cleaned up by autovacuum? If you did not, consider reading this blog post about PostgreSQL and autovacuum. If you did – well, you can still continue to read this article. Autovacuum cleans tables automatically Since the days of PostgreSQL 8.0, the database has provided this miraculous […]

Parallel queries were introduced back in PostgreSQL 9.6, and the feature has been extended ever since. In PostgreSQL 11 and PostgreSQL 12, even more functionality has been added to the database engine. However, there remain some questions related to parallel queries which often pop up during training and which definitely deserve some clarification. Estimating the […]

Many of you might have wondered why some system views and monitoring statistics in PostgreSQL can contain incomplete query strings. The answer is that in PostgreSQL, it’s a configuration parameter that determines when a query will be cut off: track_activity_query_size. This blog post explains what this parameter does and how it can be used to […]