The elephant has been the symbol of PostgreSQL for many years now, referring to the robustness and strength as well as its reputed wisdom. Long may that association continue. Even after many years of protection, the elephant is being killed by poachers at an incredible rate of 20,000 per year, or approximately 1 elephant will be killed while you read this. The things we care about can be destroyed...

The 2018 StackOverflow survey has just been published, with good news for PostgreSQL. http://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-databases StackOverflow got more than 100,000 responses from people in a comprehensive 30 minute survey. PostgreSQL is the third most commonly used database, with 33% of respondents, slightly behind MySQL and SQLServer, yet...

Various limits on the PostgreSQL database are listed here: http://www.postgresql.org/about/ One of those limits is the Maximum Table Size, listed as 32TB. It’s been that way for many years now. Only problem is that it has always been wrong, slightly. And now its got much, much bigger. The table size is limited by the maximum number of blocks in a table, which is 2^32 blocks. The default block size...

The PostgreSQL Developer Meeting went well with attendees from UK, Czechia, US, Russia and Germany. The meeting is in Brussels, near the FOSDEM conference. Andreas Seltenreich was the new face at the meeting. Andreas’ sqlsmith tool has found many PostgreSQL bugs, so we discussed extending that for the latest features in PostgreSQL 11. We discussed all of the patches in the queue and moved a few...

My colleague Alvaro Herrera has been working on a series of connected features for PostgreSQL 11. It’s worth explaining what these are rather than trying to piece together what is happening from reading commit messages. The overall idea is to allow Partitioned tables to have Referential Integrity, by way of Primary Keys and Foreign Keys, as well as some additional tweaks. To achieve that, we need...

Spectre and Meltdown have caused severe alarm in recent days. You may have read about up to 30% impact on PostgreSQL databases, which I believe to be overstated because of misunderstandings in the media. Let’s dig into this in more detail. TL;DR Summary: no PostgreSQL patch required, -7% performance hit In response to these new security threats various OS patches have been released. Various...

The annual DBEngines ranking have just been updated, with PostgreSQL winning the “DBMS of the Year 2017” award. http://db-engines.com/en/blog_post/76 PostgreSQL was a runner up last year. http://db-engines.com/en/blog_post/67 So across the year, we have made more gains in popularity than all other databases. Looking at the detail we see that all of the other 4 databases that make up the Top 5 have...

You’re clever, which means you’re mostly right about things. But everybody is wrong sometime, so how long does it take for you to change your mind? People don’t often change their minds quickly. A snap answer is always whatever you were thinking currently. If it was a No, you say No. If it was a Yes, you say Yes. If you answer too quickly you can’t possibly have taken in what was being said to you...

Sometimes people ask about certain Oracle High Availability features and whether they exist in PostgreSQL. In most cases, very similar features exist. The reason for the similarity is that PostgreSQL and Oracle have very similar architectures and so the mechanisms to protect data have also developed along the same lines. For example, Oracle Data Guard is streaming replication of the transaction...

Someone recently tweeted about the fantastic news that MySQL fixed a bug. Now in my world, bugs get fixed quickly and well. Bugs happen and they need to be fixed. It never occurred to me that we should ever tweet or blog about the fixing of a bug. I guess I assume it’s just quality: bugs get fixed, no drama – people depend upon us to do just that so that the (literally) millions of PostgreSQL...