© Renée Albe 2022 Case-insensitive search is a much-requested feature, partly (I suspect) to maintain compatibility with Microsoft SQL Server. There are several solutions to the problem, one of which is to use case-insensitive ICU collations. This works like a charm, except if you want to perform pattern matching. So let’s have a closer […]

© Laurenz Albe 2022 Recently, I could help solve a “mysterious” performance problem for a customer. The problem turned out to be a badly chosen query parameter type, which led to poor query performance. After working on this customer’s case, I realized that the meaning of the data type of a query parameter is not […]

© Laurenz Albe 2022 It is known that high network latency is bad for database performance. PostgreSQL v14 has introduced “pipeline mode” for the libpq C API, which is particularly useful to get decent performance over high-latency network connections. If you are using a hosted database in “the cloud”, then this article might be interesting […]

© Laurenz Albe 2022 Table partitioning is one of the best-liked features out of the more recent PostgreSQL developments. However, there is no support for automatic partition creation yet. This article shows what you can do to remedy that. Use cases for automatic partition creation There are essentially two use cases: Create partitions triggered by […]

© Laurenz Albe 2021 Customers have often asked me what I think of “Entity-attribute-value” (EAV) design. So I thought it would be a good idea to lay down my opinion in writing. What is entity-attribute-value design? The idea is not to create a table for each entity in the application. Rather, you store each attribute […]

© Laurenz Albe 2021 Most database tables have an artificial numeric primary key, and that number is usually generated automatically using a sequence. I wrote about auto-generated primary keys in some detail in a previous article. Occasionally, gaps in these primary key sequences can occur – which might come as a surprise to you. This […]

Over the years, many of our PostgreSQL clients have asked whether it makes sense to create indexes before – or after – importing data. Does it make sense to disable indexes when bulk loading data, or is it better to keep them enabled? This is an important question for people involved in data warehousing and […]

© Laurenz Albe 2021 PostgreSQL v12 brought more efficient storage for indexes, and v13 improved that even more by adding deduplication of index entries. But Peter Geoghegan is not done yet! PostgreSQL v14 will bring “bottom-up” index entry deletion, which is targeted at reducing unnecessary page splits, index bloat and fragmentation of heavily updated indexes. […]

Index missing? When an index is missing, good performance won’t be kissing a PostgreSQL user looking for efficiency but instead feels like a legacy. To satisfy a DBA’s desire and thirst, let us load some data first. pgbench is the tool of the day but the next listing will explain that anyway: Loading millions of […]

When I recently stumbled on an article comparing some main properties, and also the read-write performance of two very popular pieces of caching software, often used to speed up applications heavy on database queries, I immediately felt an itch – how would it actually look for PostgreSQL vs Redis vs Memcached on the performance side? […]

PostgreSQL contains some hidden gems which have been around for many years and help to silently speed up your queries. They optimize your SQL statements in a clever and totally transparent way. One of those hidden gems is the ability to synchronize sequential scans. Actually, this feature has been around for 15+ years, but has […]

© Laurenz Albe 2021 EXPLAIN ANALYZE is the key to optimizing SQL statements in PostgreSQL. This article does not attempt to explain everything there is to it. Rather, I want to give you a brief introduction, explain what to look for and show you some helpful tools to visualize the output. How to call EXPLAIN […]