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Tips and tricks to kick-start Postgres year 2020
Quite often when visiting customers or doing trainings, I see that people are quite happy seeing and learning about some little time-saving PostgreSQL tricks, commands or SQL snippets on the screen and they usually ask to slow down and explain or just say “wow, didn’t know you could do that”. As these tips and tricks […]
PSQL_EDITOR: Fighting with Sublime Text under Windows
This supposed to be just a short TIL entry about PSQL_EDITOR variable. While trying to figure out all possible pitfalls, I’ve decided to write a full blog post. You may skip to the summary though. All tests done on Windows 10 with PostgreSQL 12 installed. As you know, PostgreSQL ships with an interactive console tool […]
PostgreSQL: You might need to increase max_locks_per_transaction
“out of shared memory”: Some of you might have seen that error message in PostgreSQL already. But what does it really mean, and how can you prevent it? The problem is actually not as obscure as it might seem at first glance. max_locks_per_transaction is the critical configuration parameter you need to use to avoid trouble. […]
recovery.conf is gone in PostgreSQL v12
© Laurenz Albe 2019 The biggest change in PostgreSQL v12 from the viewpoint of backward compatibility is that recovery.conf has been absorbed into postgresql.conf. This article describes the changes and how you can adapt to them. Getting rid of recovery.conf Up to now, the presence of the file recovery.conf was the trigger for PostgreSQL to […]
Setting PostgreSQL configuration parameters
A lot has been written about configuring postgresql.conf, postgresql.auto.conf and so on. However, sometimes it requires to take a second look in order to understand, how PostgreSQL really handles configuration parameters. You will notice that PostgreSQL configuration offers more than meets the eye at first glance. So let us dive into PostgreSQL GUCs and configuration […]
Abusing PostgreSQL as an SQL beautifier
SQL is query a language that is usually pretty easy to read. However, if people don’t format their queries properly even SQL turns out to be a nightmare. That’s why developers often turn to an SQL beautifier to turn an ugly query into a nicely formatted string. Various tools are available on the web to […]
Discovering less-known PostgreSQL v12 features
Version 12 of PostgreSQL is not exactly fresh out of the oven, as the first minor release was already announced. However, I think it’s fair to say that this version can be still considered fresh for most users, and surely only a small percentage of users has upgraded. So I think it makes sense to […]
B-tree index improvements in PostgreSQL v12
Image © Laurenz Albe 2019 If you thought that the B-tree index is a technology that was perfected in the 1980s, you are mostly right. But there is still room for improvement, so PostgreSQL v12 (in the tradition of v11) has added some new features in this field. Thanks, Peter Geoghegan! In this article, I […]
effective_cache_size: What it means in PostgreSQL
Many PostgreSQL database users might have stumbled over the effective_cache_size parameter in postgresql.conf. But how can it be used to effectively tune the database and how can we speed up PostgreSQL using effective_cache_size? This blog will hopefully answer some of my readers’ questions and reveal the hidden power of this secretive setting. RAM, Linux, PostgreSQL […]
Open Street Map to PostGIS – The Basics
OSM to PostGIS – The Basics Ever wondered how to import OSM (OpenStreetMap) data into PostGIS [1] for the purpose of visualization and further analytics? Here are the basic steps to do so. There are a bunch of tools on the market— osm2pgsql; imposm; ogr2org; just to mention some of those. In this article I […]
Introduction and How-To: etcd clusters for Patroni
etcd is one of several solutions to a problem that is faced by many programs that run in a distributed fashion on a set of hosts, each of which may fail or need rebooting at any moment. One such program is Patroni; I’ve already written an introduction to it as well as a guide on how […]
PostgreSQL v12 initial query performance impressions
With the latest major version freshly released, it’s again time to gauge its performance. I’ve already been doing this for years, and I have my scripts ready, so it’s not too much work for me – but rather, for the machines. The v12 release, as always, adds quite a lot of nice stuff. Some […]