Posts

  Functions defined as SECURITY DEFINER are a powerful, but dangerous tool in PostgreSQL. The documentation warns of the dangers: Because a SECURITY DEFINER function is executed with the privileges of the user that owns it, care is needed to ensure that the function cannot be misused. For security, search_path should be set to exclude […]

  PostgreSQL commit 74dfe58a5927b22c744b29534e67bfdd203ac028 has added “support functions”. This exciting new functionality that allows the optimizer some insight into functions. This article will discuss how this will improve query planning for PostgreSQL v12. If you are willing to write C code, you can also use this functionality for your own functions. Functions as “black boxes” […]

  Sometimes you want to enforce a condition on a table that cannot be implemented by a constraint. In such a case it is tempting to use triggers instead. This article describes how to do this and what to watch out for. It will also familiarize you with the little-known PostgreSQL feature of “constraint triggers”. […]

  It is a frequent complaint that count(*) is so slow on PostgreSQL. In this article I want to explore the options you have get your result as fast as possible. Why is count(*) so slow? Most people have no trouble understanding that the following is slow: After all, it is a complicated query, and […]

  Many people know that explicit table locks with LOCK TABLE are bad style and usually a consequence of bad design. The main reason is that they hamper concurrency and hence performance. Through a recent support case I learned that there are even worse effects of explicit table locks. Table locks Before an SQL statement […]

  The “exclusive backup” method of calling pg_start_backup(‘label’) before backup and pg_stop_backup() afterwards is scheduled for removal in the future. This article describes the problems with the old method and discusses the options for those who still use this backup method. The “exclusive” backup method Before pg_basebackup was invented, there was only one online file-system […]

pgbouncer is the most widely used connection pooler for PostgreSQL. This blog will provide a simple cookbook how to configure user authentication with pgbouncer. I wrote this cookbook using Fedora Linux and installed pgbouncer using the PGDG Linux RPM packages available from the download site. But it should work pretty similarly anywhere.   What is […]

Prepared transactions are disabled in PostgreSQL by default, since the parameter max_prepared_transactions has the default value 0. You don’t need prepared transactions in most cases. However, they can cause nasty problems, so I think that everybody who runs a PostgreSQL database should understand them. To illustrate these problems, I’ll show you how to use prepared […]

  Since I only recently learned about the concept of “killed index tuples”, I thought there might be some others who are not yet familiar with this interesting PostgreSQL concept. This may give you an explanation the next time you encounter wildly varying execution times for the same execution plan of the same PostgreSQL query. […]

  Foreign key constraints are an important tool to keep your database consistent while also documenting relationships between tables. A fact that is often ignored is that foreign keys need proper indexing to perform well. This article will explain that and show you how to search for missing indexes. Index at the target of a […]

After you ANALYZE a PostgreSQL table to collect value distribution statistics, you will find the gathered statistics for each column in the pg_stats system view. This article will explain the meaning of the correlation column and its impact on index scans. Physical vs. logical ordering Most common PostgreSQL data types have an ordering: they support […]

  Inspired by my co-worker’s recent blog post, I decided to revisit the old question of rules vs. triggers and run a little benchmark to see which one does better. About rules While triggers are well known to most application developers and database administrators, rules are less well known. The full name “query rewrite rule” […]