PODCAST

Postgres FM

Nikolay Samokhvalov and Michael Christofides

A weekly podcast about all things PostgreSQL

technology tech news

All Episodes

47:42

To 100TB, and beyond!

Postgres FM ·

2024/06/07

Michael and Nikolay are joined by three special guests for episode 100 who have all scaled Postgres to significant scale — Arka Ganguli from Notion, Sammy Steele from Figma, and Derk van Veen from Adyen. They cover how their setup has evolved, what their plans are for the future, and get into the weeds of some fun and interesting challenges along the way!Links to some of the things discussed: Arka Ganguli from Notion https://postgres.fm/people/arka-ganguliSammy Steele from Figma

32:17

Sponsoring the community

Postgres FM ·

2024/05/31

Michael is joined by Claire Giordano, Head of Postgres Open Source Community Initiatives at Microsoft, to discuss several ways to contribute to the Postgres community — from core contributions, to extensions, to events, and (of course) podcasts. Here are some links to things they mentioned:What’s new with Postgres at Microsoft (blog post by Claire) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/what-s-new-with-postgres-at-microsoft-2024-edition/ba-p/4140085 Citus

50:20

Full text search

Postgres FM ·

2024/05/24

Nikolay and Michael discuss full text search in Postgres — some of the history, some of the features, and whether it now makes sense to try to replace or combine it with semantic search. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Full Text Search https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/textsearch.htmltsearch2 https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/tsearch2.htmlDictionaries https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/textsearch-dictionaries.html RUM index https://github.com/postgrespro/rum Okapi

39:46

Minor releases

Postgres FM ·

2024/05/17

Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres minor releases — how the schedule works, options for upgrading to them, and the importance of reading the release notes. Here are some links to things they mentioned:PostgreSQL 16.3, 15.7, 14.12, 13.15, and 12.19 released (announcement) https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-163-157-1412-1315-and-1219-released-2858/ PostgreSQL versioning policy https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/ PostgreSQL 14.4 release notes (most recent minor

29:00

Custom vs generic plan

Postgres FM ·

2024/05/10

Nikolay and Michael discuss custom and generic planning in prepared statements — how it works, how issues can present themselves, some ways to view the generic plan, and some benefits of avoiding planning (not just time). Here are some links to things they mentioned:PREPARE https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-prepare.html track_activity_query_size https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-statistics.html#GUC-TRACK-ACTIVITY-QUERY-SIZE plan_cache_mode

45:23

LIMIT vs Performance

Postgres FM ·

2024/05/03

Nikolay and Michael discuss LIMIT in Postgres — what it does, how it can help with performance, and an interesting example where adding it can actually hurt performance(!) Here are some links to things they mentioned:LIMIT considered harmful in PostgreSQL (Twitter thread by Christophe Pettus) https://twitter.com/Xof/status/1413542818673577987 LIMIT and OFFSET (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-limit.html No OFFSET (by Markus Winand)

36:13

Buffers II (the sequel)

Postgres FM ·

2024/04/26

Nikolay and Michael return to the topic of using the buffers explain parameter — with a new analogy, some (conspiracy) theories of why it's still not on by default, and some related chat about the serialize parameter coming in 17. Here are some links to things they mentioned:BUFFERS by default (episode 4) https://postgres.fm/episodes/buffers-by-default Lightning talk by Michael at pgDay Paris (5 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfY-mSpUzaQ&t=1470s Waiting for SERIALIZE

44:28

Massive DELETEs

Postgres FM ·

2024/04/19

Nikolay and Michael discuss doing massive DELETE operations in Postgres — what can go wrong, how to prevent major issues, and some ideas to minimise their impact. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Article based on Nikolay’s talk, including batching implementation (translated to English) https://habr-com.translate.goog/en/articles/523536/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hist=true Our episode on WAL and checkpoint tuning

38:12

Logical replication common issues

Postgres FM ·

2024/04/12

Nikolay and Michael are joined by Sai Srirampur, CEO and Co-founder of PeerDB, to discuss how to overcome several logical replication issues. They discuss the protocol versions, minimising slot growth, minimising lag, and some tips and tricks for scaling things well. Here are some links to things they mentioned:PeerDB https://www.peerdb.io/Our episode on logical replication https://postgres.fm/episodes/logical-replicationExploring versions of the Postgres logical replication protocol (blog

44:31

Don't do this

Postgres FM ·

2024/04/05

Nikolay and Michael discuss several "Don't do this" lists about Postgres — picking out their favourite items, as well as some contentious ones that could be clearer, or not included. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Don’t do this (PostgreSQL wiki page) https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don't_Do_ThisHow to get into trouble using some Postgres features (how to by Nikolay)

41:32

Postgres FM ·

2024/03/29

Nikolay and Michael have a high-level discussion on all things search — touching on full-text search, semantic search, and faceted search. They discuss what comes in Postgres core, what is possible via extensions, and some thoughts on performance vs implementation complexity vs user experience. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Simon Riggs https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7178702287740022784/Companion databases episode

40:49

Health check

Postgres FM ·

2024/03/22

Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres health checks — what they are, things to include, how often makes sense, and whether improvements to Postgres would increase or decrease the need for them. Here are some links to things they mentioned:MOT (car test in the UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOT_test Let's make PostgreSQL multi-threaded (discussion started by Heikki) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/31cc6df9-53fe-3cd9-af5b-ac0d801163f4%40iki.fi postgres-checkup

30:28

superuser

Postgres FM ·

2024/03/15

Nikolay and Michael discuss the superuser role in PostgreSQL — what it is, how and when it shouldn’t be used, and whether most cloud providers are right to not give us it (no prizes for guessing). Here are some links to things they mentioned:superuser (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/role-attributes.html#id-1.6.9.6.2.1.2.1.1Crunchy Data PostgreSQL Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG)

26:48

transaction_timeout

Postgres FM ·

2024/03/08

Nikolay and Michael discuss transaction_timeout (a recently committed addition for Postgres 17) — what it's for, how to get around not having it already, and whether it will replace the need to set statement_timeout globally in future. Here are some links to things they mentioned:transaction_timeout (devel docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-TRANSACTION-TIMEOUTCommit:

45:23

Rails + Postgres

Postgres FM ·

2024/03/01

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Andrew Atkinson, author of High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails, to discuss how Rails and Postgres work together — where the limits are, how people use the ORM, things that are improving, and some things we can do as a Postgres community to make it even better. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Planet Argon survey https://rails-hosting.com/2022/#databasesActive Record https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_basics.htmlPostgreSQL specific

35:25

Why isn't Postgres using my index?

Postgres FM ·

2024/02/23

Nikolay and Michael discuss a common question — why Postgres isn't using an index, and what you can do about it! Here are some links to things they mentioned:Why isn’t Postgres using my index? (blog post by Michael) https://www.pgmustard.com/blog/why-isnt-postgres-using-my-index Why isn’t Postgres using my functional index? (Stack Exchange question from Brent Ozar) https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/336019/why-isnt-postgres-using-my-functional-index enable_seqscan (and similar

34:07

Overhead of pg_stat_statements and pg_stat_kcache

Postgres FM ·

2024/02/16

Nikolay and Michael discuss the overhead of pg_stat_statements and pg_stat_kcache — mostly focusing on some interesting things Nikolay found while stress-testing some large spot instances up to and beyond 2m TPS(!) Here are some links to things they mentioned:pg_stat_statements https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstatstatements.htmlpg_stat_kcache https://github.com/powa-team/pg_stat_kcachepg_stat_statements overhead estimate in pganalyze FAQs https://pganalyze.com/faqWhat is the

32:09

Modern SQL

Postgres FM ·

2024/02/02

Michael is joined by Markus Winand, creator of use-the-index-luke.com and modern-sql.com, and author of SQL Performance Explained, to discuss Modern SQL — what Markus means by it, why it's important, some benefits, some examples, and at least one phrase that should be on a t-shirt. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Modern SQL (site) https://modern-sql.comUse the index, Luke! (site) https://use-the-index-luke.comSQL Performance Explained (book)

36:17

Bloat

Postgres FM ·

2024/01/26

Michael is joined by Chelsea Dole, Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead of the Data Storage Team at Brex, to discuss bloat. They cover what it is, why it's a problem, strategies for minimising it, and the options when it's really bad. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Managing your tuple graveyard (talk by Chelsea) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAgbzvGT6ckpgstattuple https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstattuple.html pg_class

49:06

pgvector

Postgres FM ·

2024/01/19

Michael is joined by Jonathan Katz, PostgreSQL Core Team member, Principle Product Manager at AWS, and also pgvector contributor, to discuss pgvector. They cover what it is, why it's so popular all of a sudden, some tuning and tradeoff guidance, and a look to the future. Here are some links to things they mentioned:pgvector https://github.com/pgvector/pgvectorOur episode on companion databases https://postgres.fm/episodes/companion-databasesVectors are the new JSON (talk by Jonathan)

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