LIKE and ILIKE are two fundamental SQL features. People use those things all over the place in their application and therefore it makes sense to approach the topic from a performance point of view. What can PostgreSQL do to speed up those operations and what can be done in general to first understand the problem […]
© Laurenz Albe 2020 (Updated 2023-02-24) There are three join strategies in PostgreSQL that work quite differently. If PostgreSQL chooses the wrong strategy, query performance can suffer a lot. This article explains the join strategies, how you can support them with indexes, what can go wrong with them and how you can tune your joins […]
This blog is about table functions and performance. PostgreSQL is a really powerful database and offers many features to make SQL even more powerful. One of these impressive things is the concept of a composite data type. In PostgreSQL a column can be a fairly complex thing. This is especially important if you want to […]
© Laurenz Albe 2020 A frequently asked question in this big data world is whether it is better to store binary data inside or outside of a PostgreSQL database. Also, since PostgreSQL has two ways of storing binary data, which one is better? I decided to benchmark the available options to have some data points […]
When designing a database application, the layout of data in disk is often neglected. However, the way data is stored by PostgreSQL can have a major performance impact. Therefore it makes sense to take a look at what can be done to improve speed and throughput. In this post you will learn one of the […]
© Laurenz Albe 2020 (Last updated on 2023-01-24) 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 […]
By Kaarel Moppel 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 […]
Foreign data wrappers are one of the most widely used feature in PostgreSQL. People simply like foreign data wrappers and we can expect that the community will add even more features as we speak. As far as the postgres_fdw is concerned there are some hidden tuning options which are not widely known by users. So […]
By Kaarel Moppel – Last week the first release candidate of the upcoming Postgres version 11 was released, stating that everything is going more or less as planned – great news! The 11 release is promising a lot of very cool stuff as usual, including – better partitioning, more parallezation and JIT capabilities (which are […]
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 […]
As of PostgreSQL 11 postgres users have 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 is part of this elite club, which offers multi-core index creation that will dramatically improve the usability of large database deployments in the […]
Sorting is a very important aspect of PostgreSQL performance tuning. However, improving sort performance is often misunderstood or simply overlooked by many people. So, I decided to come up with a PostgreSQL blog showing how sorts can be tuned in PostgreSQL. Creating sample data To show how sorting works, I created a couple of million […]
