In the previous blog post, we discussed the different Windows build variants that PostgreSQL supports. In this post, we’ll discuss how, as a Unix-based developer, you can check whether your patch might work on Windows. (For simplicity, I’ll say “Unix” to mean Linux, BSD, macOS, and similar.) First, there are a few ways to check your patch without having to have Windows at all. If your patch...

As a PostgreSQL developer, I occasionally need to make my code work on Windows. As I don’t normally use Windows and don’t have a permanent Windows installation around, this has always been a bit cumbersome. I have developed a few techniques to make this easier, and I figure they are worth sharing. And actually this text became quite long, so this will be a series of several blog posts. The first...

PostgreSQL supports SSL, and SSL private keys can be protected by a passphrase. Many people choose not to use passphrases with their SSL keys, and that’s perhaps fine. This blog post is about what happens when you do have a passphrase. If you have SSL enabled and a key with a passphrase and you start the server, the server will stop to ask for the passphrase. This happens automatically from within...

I have developed a particular Git workflow for maintaining PostgreSQL feature branches and submitting patches to the pgsql-hackers mailing list and commit fests. Perhaps it’s also useful to others. This workflow is useful for features that take a long time to develop, will be submitted for review several times, and will require a significant amount of changes over time. In simpler cases, it’s...

It’s time. About a year ago, we published PostgreSQL 10 with support for native logical replication. One of the uses of logical replication is to allow low- or no-downtime upgrading between PostgreSQL major versions. Until now, PostgreSQL 10 was the only PostgreSQL release with native logical replication, so there weren’t many opportunities for upgrading in this way. (Logical replication can also...

In this article, I want to introduce the ICU support in PostgreSQL, which I have worked on for PostgreSQL version 10, to appear later this year. Sorting Sorting is an important functionality of a database system. First, users generally want to see data sorted. Any query result that contains more than one row and is destined for end-user consumption will probably want to be sorted, just for a...