© Laurenz Albe 2023 CLUSTER is sometimes the last resort to squeeze performance out of an index scan. Normally, you have to repeat CLUSTER regularly to maintain good performance. In this article, I will show you how you can get away without re-CLUSTERing even in the face of concurrent UPDATEs. Thanks to Steven Hulshof for […]

Did you ever wonder why VACUUM does not make your PostgreSQL tables smaller? Did you ever wonder why VACUUM does not shrink data files? Well, maybe this is the article you have been looking for. The point is: usually, space is not returned to the operating system after a cleanup and it is important to […]

I’ve recently seen some really broad tables (hundreds of columns) in a somewhat inefficiently structured database. Our PostgreSQL support customer complained about strange runtime behavior which could not be easily explained. To help other PostgreSQL users in this same situation, I decided to reveal the secrets of a fairly common performance problem many people don’t […]

© 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 The comprehensive JSON support in PostgreSQL is one of its best-loved features. Many people – particularly those with a stronger background in Javascript programming than in relational databases – use it extensively. However, my experience is that the vast majority of people don’t use it correctly. That causes problems and unhappiness […]

Temporary tables have been around forever and are widely used by application developers. However, there is more to temporary tables than meets the eye. PostgreSQL allows you to configure the lifespan of a temporary table in a nice way and helps to avoid some common pitfalls. CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE … By default, a temporary table […]

© Laurenz Albe 2020 Many people consider recursive queries a difficult topic. Still, they enable you to do things that would otherwise be impossible in SQL. This articles gives a simple introduction with examples and shows the differences to Oracle’s implementation of recursive queries. Common table expressions (WITH clauses) A common table expression (CTE) can […]

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 […]

Did you know that your temporary tables are not cleaned up by autovacuum? Autovacuum cleans tables automatically Since the days of PostgreSQL 8.0, the database has provided the miraculous autovacuum daemon which is in charge of cleaning tables and indexes. In many cases, the default configuration is absolutely ok and people don’t have to worry […]

  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 […]

In PostgreSQL, a view is a virtual table based on an SQL statement. It is an abstraction layer, which allows to access the result of a more complex SQL fast an easily. The fields in a view are fields from one or more real tables in the database. The question many people now ask if: […]

High availability in PostgreSQL: When running an application in production, it might happen that the data structure has to be changed once in a while. Adding columns, dropping columns, etc. might simply be necessary once in a while. However, changing data structures should not be done mindlessly – there are some things you have to […]