PODCAST

Postgres FM

Nikolay Samokhvalov and Michael Christofides

A weekly podcast about all things PostgreSQL

technology tech news

All Episodes

30:32

Hash indexes

Postgres FM ·

2023/12/15

Nikolay and Michael discuss hash indexes in Postgres — what they are, some brief history, their pros and cons vs btrees, and whether or when they recommend using them.Update: the idea Nikolay mentioned at the end of this episode turns out to be a little fraught (and as such, inadvisable). Here are some links to things they mentioned:Index types (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/indexes-types.html Re-introducing hash indexes in PostgreSQL (blog post by Haki Benita and Michael)

39:04

Constraints

Postgres FM ·

2023/12/08

Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL constraints — the six different types we have, how to add and modify them, including on large tables with high TPS. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Constraints (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-constraints.htmlUnique index vs unique constraint issue (2017) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CANNMO%2B%2B7%2BuVMj%2BZPGKB_zuRpKE0sNthy2Z-_oKSS%3DoE3_rN7QA%40mail.gmail.com Our episode on NULLs

52:09

Events

Postgres FM ·

2023/12/01

Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL events — whether in-person or online, large conferences or small meet-ups, as well as some strong opinions based on their experiences attending, speaking, and organising them. Here are some links to things they mentioned:PGSQL Phriday #014: PostgreSQL Events https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/pgsql-phriday-014-postgresql-events/ PGCon https://www.pgcon.org/ Highload https://highload.rs/ The San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup Group

24:12

Subtransactions

Postgres FM ·

2023/11/24

Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL subtransactions — what they are, and four issues they can cause at scale. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Subtransactions (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/subxacts.html SAVEPOINT (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-savepoint.html PostgreSQL Subtransactions Considered Harmful (blog post by Nikolay) https://postgres.ai/blog/20210831-postgresql-subtransactions-considered-harmful Subtransactions and performance

45:58

Companion databases

Postgres FM ·

2023/11/17

Nikolay and Michael discuss companion databases — when and why you might want to add another database management system to your stack (or not), and some specifics for analytics, timeseries, search, and vectors. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Heap were using Postgres + Citus for analytics as of 2022 https://www.heap.io/blog/juggling-state-machines-incident-response-and-data-soup-a-glimpse-into-heaps-engineering-culture Heap recently moved their core analytics to SingleStore

43:45

Blue-green deployments

Postgres FM ·

2023/11/10

Nikolay and Michael discuss blue-green deployments — specifically an RDS blog post, how similar this is (or not) to what they understand to be blue-green deployments, and how applicable the methodology might be in the database world more generally. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Fully managed Blue/Green Deployment in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

38:04

Data model trade-offs

Postgres FM ·

2023/11/03

Nikolay and Michael discuss data model trade-offs — some cases where you might want to (gasp) de-normalize, and which PostgreSQL internals are at play. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Our episode on JSON https://postgres.fm/episodes/json PostgreSQL limits https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/limits.htmlBoyce–Codd normal form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyce–Codd_normal_form Our episode on over-indexing https://postgres.fm/episodes/over-indexing Heap-Only Tuples (HOT)

34:36

Under-indexing

Postgres FM ·

2023/10/27

Nikolay and Michael discuss under-indexing — how to tell if this applies to you, some general and specific cases, as well as some tricky ones. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Indexes (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/indexes.html random_page_cost https://postgresqlco.nf/doc/en/param/random_page_cost/Sequential scans https://www.pgmustard.com/docs/explain/sequential-scan pg_stat_user_tables https://pgpedia.info/p/pg_stat_user_tables.html pg_stat_statements

42:45

Over-indexing

Postgres FM ·

2023/10/20

Nikolay and Michael discuss over-indexing — what we mean by it, the regular issues people discuss about it, as well as a novel one Nikolay has come across and benchmarked recently. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Nikolay’s tweet on over-indexing https://twitter.com/samokhvalov/status/1713101666629927112 Heap-Only Tuples (HOT) optimization https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/storage-hot.html Our episode on index maintenance

35:38

Query hints

Postgres FM ·

2023/10/13

Nikolay and Michael discuss query hints — what they are, what we do and don't have in PostgreSQL, and some other things in and around the ecosystem to be aware of. Here are some links to some extra things they mentioned:Query planning (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-query.html Statistics used by the planner (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/planner-stats.html default_statistics_target

29:57

Stop and start Postgres faster

Postgres FM ·

2023/10/07

In this episode (recorded live on YouTube), Nikolay discusses Postgres shutdown and startup times – how to troubleshoot them and, when needed, optimize. Some extra things mentioned in this episode:#PostgresMarathon series – every day, Nikolay posts a new howto-style article https://twitter.com/hashtag/PostgresMarathonDay 2: Postgres shutdown and restart attempts https://twitter.com/samokhvalov/status/1707147450044297673Day 3: How to troubleshoot long Postgres startup

43:04

Backups

Postgres FM ·

2023/09/29

Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres backups — why we need them, what the options are, whether a dump is a backup or not, and some considerations for lowering RPO and RTO at scale. Here are some links to some extra things they mentioned:pg_dump https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-pgdump.html pg_basebackup https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-pgbasebackup.htmlpgBackRest https://github.com/pgbackrest/pgbackrest WAL-G https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g Barman

39:35

Postgres 16

Postgres FM ·

2023/09/22

Nikolay and Michael discuss the release of PostgreSQL 16 — the most important new features, what they mean for us as users, whether and when to upgrade, and more. Here are some links to some extra things they mentioned:Release notes https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/release-16.htmlNew Features With Examples (PDF from Noriyoshi Shinoda of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Japan)

43:01

Logical replication

Postgres FM ·

2023/09/15

Nikolay and Michael discuss logical replication — some history, initialization, change data capture, how to scale it, some limitiations, and ways that it is getting better. Here are some links to some things they mentioned:Logical replication https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/logical-replication.html GitLab upgraded multi-terabyte, heavily-loaded clusters with zero-downtime https://twitter.com/samokhvalov/status/1700574156222505276 pg_waldump

27:28

Our favourite v16 feature

Postgres FM ·

2023/09/08

Nikolay and Michael discuss their favourite feature each from the upcoming PostgreSQL 16 release. Here are some links to some things they mentioned:v16 draft release notes https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/release-16.htmlPGSQL Phriday #012 invitation from Ryan Booz https://www.pgsqlphriday.com/2023/08/pgsql-phriday-012/ Subscribe options for the podcast https://postgres.fm/subscribeA recent closed source ClickHouse feature

28:20

Connections

Postgres FM ·

2023/09/01

Nikolay and Michael discuss connections — the options, security and performance tradeoffs, and a few other things to be aware of. Here are some links to some things they mentioned:Episode on connection poolers https://postgres.fm/episodes/connection-poolers listen_addresses https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-connection.html#GUC-LISTEN-ADDRESSES SSLMODE Explained (blog post by Andrew Kane) https://ankane.org/postgres-sslmode-explained pg_hba.conf

42:33

Decoupled storage and compute

Postgres FM ·

2023/08/25

Nikolay and Michael discuss a listener question — about products that take Postgres and transform it to something that decouples compute from storage (RDS Aurora, GC AlloyDB, Neon etc.) and whether they see something like this landing upstream in the medium term.Here are some links to some things they mentioned:Amazon Aurora https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/Google Cloud AlloyDB for PostgreSQL https://cloud.google.com/alloydbNeon https://neon.tech/ Google Cloud Spanner

37:04

Self-managing

Postgres FM ·

2023/08/18

Nikolay and Michael discuss self-managing Postgres — both the practicalities of doing so, as well as some managed-service style tooling. Here are some links to some things they mentioned:Our episode on Managed services vs. DIY https://postgres.fm/episodes/managed-services-vs-diy WAL-G https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g pgBackRest https://pgbackrest.org/ Barman https://github.com/EnterpriseDB/barman Dead Man’s Snitch https://deadmanssnitch.com/ Netdata https://www.netdata.cloud/ Upgrades

39:45

Sharding

Postgres FM ·

2023/08/11

Nikolay and Michael discuss sharding Postgres — what it means, why and when it's needed, and the available options right now. Here are some links to some things they mentioned:PGSQL Friday monthly blogging event https://www.pgsqlphriday.com/Did “sharding” come from Ultima Online? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438399 Our episode on partitioning: https://postgres.fm/episodes/partitioningVitess https://vitess.io/Citus https://www.citusdata.com/ Lessons learned from sharding Postgres

37:01

Data types

Postgres FM ·

2023/08/04

Nikolay and Michael discuss data types in PostgreSQL — including system types, choosing between types, types provided by extensions, and more. Here are some links to some things they mentioned:Data Types (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype.html 10 tips for beginners https://postgres.ai/blog/20230722-10-postgres-tips-for-beginners Tid Scan (explain glossary) https://www.pgmustard.com/docs/explain/tid-scan Don’t do this (wiki)

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Postgres FM

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