Over the years many people have asked for “timetravel” or “AS OF”-queries in PostgreSQL. Oracle has provided this kind of functionality for quite some time already. However, in the PostgreSQL world “AS OF timestamp” is not directly available. The question now is: How can we implement this vital functionality in user land and mimic Oracle […]

Security is a super important topic. This is not only true in the PostgreSQL world – it holds true for pretty much any modern IT system. Databases, however, have special security requirements. More often than not confidential data is stored and therefore it makes sense to ensure that data is protected properly. Security first ! […]

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 […]

After years of software development, some might still wonder: What is a NULL value? What does it really mean and what is its purpose? The general rule is: NULL basically means “undefined”. Many books state that NULL means “empty” but I think that is not the ideal way to see things: If you wallet 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 […]

The ability to run transactions is the core of every modern relational database system. The idea behind a transaction is to allow users to control the way data is written to PostgreSQL. However, a transaction is not only about writing – it is also important to understand the implications on reading data for whatever purpose […]

If you happen to be an SQL developer, you will know that joins are really at the core of the language. Joins come in various flavors: Inner joins, left joins, full joins, natural joins, self joins, semi-joins, lateral joins, and so on. However, one of the most important distinctions is the difference between implicit and […]

Machine Learning in 10 Lines Every person that reads newspapers, magazines or any other media of general interest has at least a basic idea of what Machine Learning is. And this is not only a fashion, Machine Learning is already part of our everyday life and will be much more in the future: from personalized […]

  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 […]

PostgreSQL will shortly be released and it is therefore time to take a look at one of the most important new features provided by PostgreSQL 11: The ability to create indexes in parallel. For many years various commercial database vendors have already offered this feature and we are glad that PostgreSQL has become part of […]