© Laurenz Albe 2021 Users with an Oracle background consider tablespaces very important and are surprised that you can find so little information about them in PostgreSQL. This article will explain what they are, when they are useful and whether or not you should use them. What is a tablespace Essentially, a tablespace in PostgreSQL […]

© Laurenz Albe 2021 PostgreSQL commit ee28cacf61 has added new options for the target_session_attrs connection parameter. This article explores how the new options can be used to simplify high availability and horizontal scaling solutions. What is target_session_attrs? The PostgreSQL client shared library libpq has support for connection strings to more than one database server: In […]

© Laurenz Albe 2021 PostgreSQL v14 has new connection statistics in pg_stat_database. In this article, I want to explore one application for them: estimating the correct size for a connection pool. New connection statistics in v14 Commit 960869da080 introduced some new statistics to pg_stat_database: session_time: total time spent by sessions in the database active_time: time […]

© Laurenz Albe 2020 After all the technical articles I have written, I thought it would be nice to write about PostgreSQL sociology for a change. Language and community A community like PostgreSQL has no clearly defined borders. There is no membership certificate; you belong to it if you feel that you belong. That said, […]

© Laurenz Albe 2020 Streaming replication in PostgreSQL is a well-established master-slave replication technique. It is simple to set up, stable and performs well. So many people are surprised when they learn about replication conflicts — after all, the standby server is read-only. This article describes replication conflicts and tells you how to deal with […]

© Laurenz Albe 2020   Recently, while troubleshooting PostgreSQL performance problems, I ran into problems with subtransactions twice. So I thought this was a nice topic for another blog post. What are subtransactions? Everybody knows database transactions. In PostgreSQL, which is operating in autocommit mode, you have to start a transaction that spans multiple statements […]

  We all know that in PostgreSQL we cannot drop an object if there are view dependencies on it: Some people like it because it keeps the database consistent; some people hate it because it makes schema modifications more difficult. But that’s the way it is. In this article I want to explore the mechanics […]

© Laurenz Albe 2019   As announced by the glibc mailing list and discussed by Daniel Vérité, version 2.28 of the GNU C library will ship with many changes to the collations. PostgreSQL uses the operating system’s collations by default. When this version hits your Linux operating system as part of a routine bugfix upgrade, […]

  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 […]

UPDATE 12.07.2022: The “exclusive backup” method of calling pg_start_backup(‘label’) before backup and pg_stop_backup() afterwards has been removed in PostgreSQL v15. This article describes the problems with the old method and discusses the options for those who still use this backup method. I include scripts below to help you. The “exclusive” backup method Before pg_basebackup was […]

Why vacuum? Post UPDATED 12.07.2022: Whenever rows in a PostgreSQL table are updated or deleted, dead rows are left behind. VACUUM gets rid of them so that the space can be reused. If a table doesn’t get vacuumed, it will get bloated, which wastes disk space and slows down sequential table scans (and – to […]