PODCAST

Postgres FM

Nikolay Samokhvalov and Michael Christofides

A weekly podcast about all things PostgreSQL

technology tech news

All Episodes

43:25

Slow count

Postgres FM ·

2024/09/13

Nikolay and Michael discuss why counting can be slow in Postgres, and what the options are for counting things quickly at scale. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Aggregate functions (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-aggregate.htmlPostgREST https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest Get rid of count by default in PostgREST https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/issues/273 Faster PostgreSQL Counting (by Joe Nelson on the Citus blog)

57:49

Skip scan

Postgres FM ·

2024/09/06

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Peter Geoghegan, major contributor and committer to Postgres, to discuss adding skip scan support to PostgreSQL over versions 17 and 18. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Peter Geoghegan https://postgres.fm/people/peter-geogheganPeter’s previous (excellent) interview on Postgres TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAPawr1DxhMEfficient Search of Multidimensional B-Trees (1995 paper by Harry Leslie, Rohit Jain, Dave Birdsall, and Hedieh Yaghmai)

45:27

Postgres Emergency Room

Postgres FM ·

2024/08/30

Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL emergencies — both the psychological side of incident management, and some technical aspects too. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Site Reliability Engineering resources from Google https://sre.googleGitLab Handbook SRE https://handbook.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/infrastructure/site-reliability-engineerKeeping Customers Streaming — The Centralized Site Reliability Practice at Netflix

50:19

Get or Create

Postgres FM ·

2024/08/23

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Haki Benita, a technical lead and database enthusiast who writes an excellent blog and gives popular talks and training sessions too, to discuss the surprisingly complex topic of trying to implement “get or create” in PostgreSQL — handling issues around idempotency, concurrency, and bloat. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Haki Benita https://hakibenita.com How to Get or Create in PostgreSQL (blog post by Haki)

56:32

Getting started with benchmarking

Postgres FM ·

2024/08/16

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Melanie Plageman, database internals engineer at Microsoft and major contributor and committer to PostgreSQL, to discuss getting started with benchmarking — how it differs for users and developers of Postgres, how and when it comes up during development, some tools and lessons, as well as what she's working on at the moment. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Melanie Plageman https://postgres.fm/people/melanie-plagemanMeanie’s Introduction to

39:15

Index-Only Scans

Postgres FM ·

2024/08/09

Nikolay and Michael discuss Index-Only Scans in Postgres — what they are, how they help, some things to look out for, and some advice. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Index-Only Scans and Covering Indexes (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/indexes-index-only-scans.htmlDiscussion on Twitter about JIT and Parallel Query defaults https://x.com/jer_s/status/1819749688184373742Postgres Wiki on Index-Only Scans https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Index-only_scansHeap Fetches

41:00

Why Postgres?

Postgres FM ·

2024/08/02

Nikolay and Michael discuss why they chose Postgres — as users, for their businesses, for their careers, as well as some doubts. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Our episode on why Postgres become popular https://postgres.fm/episodes/why-is-postgres-popularDatabase Systems: The Complete Book (by Hector Garcia-Molina, Jeff Ullman, and Jennifer Widom) http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/dscb.htmlOur episode on the Postgres startup ecosystem

45:16

Compression

Postgres FM ·

2024/07/26

Nikolay and Michael discuss compression in Postgres — what's available natively, newer algorithms in recent versions, and several extensions with compression features. Here are some links to things they mentioned:wal_compression https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-wal.html#GUC-WAL-COMPRESSIONOur episode on WAL and checkpoint tuning https://postgres.fm/episodes/wal-and-checkpoint-tuningSynthetic wal_compression and streaming replication wal size test

43:26

Out of disk

Postgres FM ·

2024/07/19

Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres running out of disk space — including what happens, what can cause it, how to recover, and most importantly, how to prevent it from happening in the first place. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Disk Full (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/disk-full.htmlpgcompacttable https://github.com/dataegret/pgcompacttable Our episode on massive deletes https://postgres.fm/episodes/massive-deletes Getting Rid of Data (slides from VLDB 2019

35:42

Postgres startup ecosystem

Postgres FM ·

2024/07/12

Nikolay and Michael discuss the Postgres startup ecosystem — some recent closures, some recent fundraising announcements, and their thoughts on where things are going and what they'd like to see. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Prediction from Dax Raad https://x.com/thdxr/status/1808972166752580039OtterTune shut down https://x.com/andy_pavlo/status/1801687420330770841Snaplet shutting down https://www.snaplet.dev/post/snaplet-is-shutting-downbit.io shut down

45:50

Four million TPS

Postgres FM ·

2024/07/05

Nikolay talks Michael through a recent experiment to find the current maximum transactions per second single-node Postgres can achieve — why he was looking into it, what bottlenecks occurred along the way, and ideas for follow up experiments. Here are some links to things they mentioned:How many TPS can we get from a single Postgres node? (Article by Nikolay) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-many-tps-can-we-get-from-single-postgres-node-nikolay-samokhvalov-yu0rcChat history with Postgres

37:40

Soft delete

Postgres FM ·

2024/06/28

Nikolay and Michael discuss soft deletion in Postgres — what it means, several use cases, some implementation options, and which implementations suit which use cases. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Soft deletion probably isn't worth it (blog post by Brandur) https://brandur.org/soft-deletionEasy alternative soft deletion (blog post by Brandur) https://brandur.org/fragments/deleted-record-insertOur episode on auditing https://postgres.fm/episodes/auditingCREATE FUNCTION …

51:21

Should we use foreign keys?

Postgres FM ·

2024/06/21

Nikolay and Michael discuss foreign keys in Postgres — what they are, their benefits, their overhead, some edge cases to be aware of, some improvements coming, and whether or not they generally recommend using them. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Foreign keys (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-constraints.html#DDL-CONSTRAINTS-FKOur episode about constraints: https://postgres.fm/episodes/constraintsGitLab migration helper add_concurrent_foreign_key

55:27

pgvectorscale

Postgres FM ·

2024/06/14

Nikolay is joined by Mat Arye and John Pruitt, from Timescale, to discuss their new extension pgvectorscale and high-performance vector search in Postgres more generally. Main links:https://github.com/timescale/pgvectorscalehttps://www.timescale.com/blog/pgvector-vs-pineconehttps://postgres.fm/people/matvey-aryehttps://postgres.fm/people/john-pruitt~~~What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our

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)

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Postgres FM

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