Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for Postgres FM
TechnologyNewsTech News

Postgres FM

Nikolay Samokhvalov and Michael Christofides

A weekly podcast about all things PostgreSQL

Play
Open in
  • 24 episodes
  • Avg 44 min
  • English

Episodes 24

NewestOldestLongest
All20Unplayed20In progress0Played0
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • #190
    Friday · 43 min

    ClickHouse Managed Postgres

    Nik and Michael are joined by Sai Srirampur to discuss ClickHouse's new managed Postgres service. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Sai Srirampur https://postgres.fm/people/sai-srirampur ClickHouse Managed Postgres https://clickhouse.com/cloud/postgres ClickPipes https://clickhouse.com/cloud/clickpipes walshadow https://github.com/ClickHouse/walshadow pg_clickhouse https://github.com/clickHouse/pg_clickhouse ClickHouse PostgreSQL powered by Ubicloud https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/clickhouse-postgresql-powered-by-ubicloud Hacking Postgres logical decoding sessions https://hacking.postgres.tv/topics/logical-decoding/ wal-rus https://github.com/ClickHouse/wal-rus pg_createsubscriber https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-pgcreatesubscriber.html ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #189
    September 11 · 38 min

    hot_standby_feedback

    Nik and Michael discuss hot_standby_feedback — what it controls, whether and when read replicas should be changed to on, and other settings you can change to help too. Here are some links to things they mentioned: hot_standby_feedback https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-replication.html#GUC-HOT-STANDBY-FEEDBACK hot_standby_feedback: experiments on PostgreSQL 17 (by Nik) https://console.postgres.ai/shared/brief/6018f69d-8975-48e3-8259-a72c77105572 Best practices for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL replication (blog post) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/best-practices-for-amazon-rds-postgresql-replication/ log_autovacuum_min_duration https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-logging.html#GUC-LOG-AUTOVACUUM-MIN-DURATION max_standby_streaming_delay https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-replication.html#GUC-MAX-STANDBY-STREAMING-DELAY WAIT FOR LSN https://www.postgresql.org/docs/19/sql-wait-for.html transaction_timeout https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-TRANSACTION-TIMEOUT Hot Standby Feedback should default to on in 9.3+ https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20121130190227.GJ3957%40awork2.anarazel.de ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #188
    August 21 · 50 min

    Estimating work_mem

    Nik and Michael are joined by Shaun Thomas to discuss estimating work_mem, memory management in general, and writing an extension to help. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Shaun Thomas https://postgres.fm/people/shaun-thomas work_mem https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-resource.html#GUC-WORK-MEM pg_stat_database https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#MONITORING-PG-STAT-DATABASE-VIEW ALTER ROLE SET configuration_parameter https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-alterrole.html#SQL-ALTERROLE-PARAMS-CONFIGURATION-PARAMETER hash_mem_multiplier https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-resource.html#GUC-HASH-MEM-MULTIPLIER Recent Postgres releases with 28 CVEs fixed https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-186-1711-1615-1519-1424-and-19-beta-3-released-3365/ Systemic Risks in the Managed PostgreSQL Industry (part 1 of 6, Mehmet Ince) https://mehmetince.net/part-1-6-systemic-risks-in-the-managed-postgresql-industry-extension-risks-are-real-exploiting-postgis-memory-corruption-bug-at-neondb-supabase-and-many-more/ Improving Postgres Connection Scalability: Snapshots (blog post by Andres Freund) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/improving-postgres-connection-scalability-snapshots/1806462 ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #187
    August 14 · 35 min

    pgrust

    Nik and Michael are joined by Michael Malis, co-creator of pgrust, to discuss their Postgres rewrite, including reliability problems, compatibility testing, faster analytics, and a new JIT-compiled query engine. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Michael Malis https://postgres.fm/people/michael-malis pgrust https://github.com/malisper/pgrust The four horsemen behind Postgres outages (blog post by Michael Malis) https://malisper.me/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-postgres-outages Rebuilding Postgres for faster analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD (blog post by Michael Malis) https://malisper.me/how-we-made-postgres-hundreds-of-times-faster-the-query-engine/ kani https://github.com/model-checking/kani Antithesis https://antithesis.com fsyncgate mailing list thread https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAMsr%2BYHh%2B5Oq4xziwwoEfhoTZgr07vdGG%2Bhu%3D1adXx59aTeaoQ%40mail.gmail.com How AI Changes the Economics of JIT Compilers (blog post by Michael Malis) https://malisper.me/how-ai-changes-the-economics-of-jit-compilers/ Umbra DB https://umbra-db.com ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #186
    August 7 · 44 min

    MVCC

    Nik and Michael are joined by Radim Marek to discuss MVCC, including his recent article on how Postgres chose to implement it compared to other systems. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Radim Marek https://postgres.fm/people/radim-marek BoringSQL https://boringsql.com PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's (blog post by Radim) https://boringsql.com/posts/mvcc-bad-bad/ PostgreSQL MVCC documentation https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/mvcc-intro.html PostgreSQL Storage Internals series by Radim https://boringsql.com/guides/postgresql-storage-internals/ PgQue https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque The next ten years of Postgres (talk slides by Álvaro Herrera) https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfde2026/sessions/session/7744/slides/866/edb-keynote-pgconfde-2026.pdf Episode on RegreSQL https://postgres.fm/episodes/regresql DryRun MCP https://github.com/boringsql/dryrun ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #185
    July 31 · 46 min

    Xata

    Nik and Michael are joined by Tudor Golubenco, CTO of Xata, to discuss their architecture, progress, and open source tooling. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Tudor Golubenco https://postgres.fm/people/tudor-golubenco Xata https://xata.io Xata is now open source https://xata.io/blog/xata-is-now-open-source DBLab Engine https://postgres.ai/docs/database-lab pgstream https://github.com/xataio/pgstream Xata acquires Privacy Dynamics for advanced anonymization https://xata.io/blog/xata-acquires-privacy-dynamics Tonic AI https://www.tonic.ai A thousand Postgres branches for one dollar https://xata.io/blog/a-thousand-postgres-branches-for-1 pgroll https://github.com/xataio/pgroll CloudNativePG https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg PGSimCity https://nikolays.github.io/PGSimCity DeltaX https://github.com/xataio/deltax ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #184
    July 24 · 39 min

    DBOS

    Nik and Michael are joined by Qian Li and Peter Kraft to talk about DBOS, an open source platform for durable workflows built on Postgres. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Qian Li https://postgres.fm/people/qian-li Peter Kraft https://postgres.fm/people/peter-kraft DBOS https://www.dbos.dev Temporal https://temporal.io Gadget's use of Postgres https://postgres.fm/episodes/gadgets-use-of-postgres Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY blog post from Recall AI https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-listen-notify-does-not-scale Postgres 19 commit that improves LISTEN/NOTIFY, avoiding waking backends that have no need to process the notification messages https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=282b1cde9 PgQue https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque pg_durable https://github.com/microsoft/pg_durable Absurd https://github.com/earendil-works/absurd LISTEN/NOTIFY performance considerations (docs patch submitted by Nik) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAM527d8oDVb2K%2BtTjpjLkd7g14HLDiwwnvv%3Drcn4BMEs%3DMatkQ%40mail.gmail.com#1b6fa752a96aad22bd8ef794fbaf3ea1 ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #183
    July 17 · 44 min

    pg_stat_log

    Nik and Michael are joined by Fabrízio Mello to discuss his new extension pg_stat_log. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Fabrízio Mello https://postgres.fm/people/fabrizio-de-royes-mello Timbira https://www.timbira.com.br PlanetScale https://planetscale.com pg_stat_log https://github.com/fabriziomello/pg_stat_log Custom Cumulative Statistics (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xfunc-c.html#XFUNC-ADDIN-CUSTOM-CUMULATIVE-STATISTICS Custom Cumulative Statistics (wiki page) https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/CustomCumulativeStats logerrors https://github.com/munakoiso/logerrors pgFouine https://www.postgresql.org/ftp/projects/pgFoundry/pgfouine/pgFouine pgBadger https://github.com/darold/pgbadger pg_stat_checkpointer https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#MONITORING-PG-STAT-CHECKPOINTER-VIEW pg_wait_sampling https://github.com/postgrespro/pg_wait_sampling RFC: pg_stat_logmsg (patch proposal by Joe Conway) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/89742024-d51a-c66b-90b9-67f837072cd2%40joeconway.com ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #182
    July 3 · 1 hr 13 min

    pgBackRest

    Nik and Michael are joined by David Steele to talk all things pgBackRest. Here are some links to things they mentioned: David Steele https://postgres.fm/people/david-steele pgBackRest https://pgbackrest.org pg_basebackup https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-pgbasebackup.html Barman https://pgbarman.org pgmoneta https://github.com/pgmoneta/pgmoneta WAL-G https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g Return pg_control from pg_backup_stop (patch proposal) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/86436ff9-eb98-4c8a-825e-3bcae022107b%40pgbackrest.org#e36e2ad2f410d1a9a1152e36aa66bb48 Add StorageReadMulti for prefetched multi-file/range reads from object stores (pgBackRest change that needs review) https://github.com/pgbackrest/pgbackrest/pull/2783 pg_hardstorage https://github.com/cybertec-postgresql/pg_hardstorage Why the cycle of open-source sustainability needs to be virtuous (blog post by Gabriele Bartolini) https://www.gabrielebartolini.it/articles/2026/04/why-the-cycle-of-open-source-sustainability-needs-to-be-virtuous ARIN https://www.arin.net Stefan Fercot https://pgstef.github.io/about pgBackRest sponsors at the time of recording: AWS, Supabase, pgEdge, Tiger Data, Percona, Eon, Xata, Dalibo, Data Egret ~~~ 00:00 – Intro & pgBackRest origin story 03:07 – Could pgBackRest live in Postgres core? Why it hasn't happened 11:37 – Primary vs. standby backups & corruption safety 20:36 – Measuring RPO & RTO in practice 26:20 – Checksum performance & S3 storage class tips 30:02 – Standby replay bottleneck 35:12 – Log shipping, streaming replication, and sharding 44:56 – Maintenance reality & the sponsorship crisis 47:41 – What's next: repo-to-repo backup & RPO-zero streaming 56:00 – Incremental backup 1:05:01 – Reliability philosophy 1:10:05 – Second maintainer, community growth & wrap-up ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #181
    May 29 · 46 min

    autovacuum

    Nik and Michael discuss autovacuum, including what it does, and the basics of why and how to tune it. Here are some links to things they mentioned: autovacuum https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/routine-vacuuming.html#AUTOVACUUM autovacuum configuration parameters https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-vacuum.html#RUNTIME-CONFIG-AUTOVACUUM What’s Missing in Postgres? (our episode with Bruce Momjian) https://postgres.fm/episodes/what-s-missing-in-postgres pg_squeeze (our episode with Antonín Houska) https://postgres.fm/episodes/pg_squeeze My queries to monitor autovacuum (post by Laurenz Albe) https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/monitor-autovacuum-my-queries/ Autovacuum Tuning Basics (post by Tomas Vondra, originally for 2nd Quadrant blog) https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/autovacuum-tuning-basics Zero autovacuum_vacuum_cost_delay, Write Storms, and You (post by Jeremy Schneider) https://ardentperf.com/2026/04/12/zero-autovacuum_cost_delay-write-storms-and-you/ Our episode on long-running transactions / xmin horizon https://postgres.fm/episodes/long-running-transactions ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #180
    May 15 · 43 min

    pg_flight_recorder

    Nik and Michael are joined by David Ventimiglia to discuss pg_flight_recorder, a new tool he created for monitoring a Postgres database from within. Here are some links to things they mentioned: David Ventimiglia https://postgres.fm/people/david-ventimiglia pg_flight_recorder https://github.com/dventimisupabase/pg_flight_recorder Supabase https://supabase.com pg_wait_sampling https://github.com/postgrespro/pg_wait_sampling pg_ash https://github.com/NikolayS/pg_ash pg_cron https://github.com/citusdata/pg_cron pg_tle https://github.com/aws/pg_tle ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #179
    May 8 · 47 min

    PgQue

    Nik and Michael discuss Nik's new project PgQue, a descendent of Skype's PgQ, for running queue-like workloads in Postgres. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Our first episode on Queues in Postgres https://postgres.fm/episodes/queues-in-postgres PgQue https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817349 PgQ https://github.com/pgq/pgq pgmq https://github.com/pgmq/pgmq River https://riverqueue.com Keeping a Postgres queue healthy (blog post by Simeon Griggs / PlanetScale) https://planetscale.com/blog/keeping-a-postgres-queue-healthy Postgres Job Queues & Failure By MVCC (blog post by Brandur) https://brandur.org/postgres-queues My queries to monitor autovacuum (blog post by Laurenz Albe) https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/monitor-autovacuum-my-queries/ SELECT FOR UPDATE considered harmful (blog post by Laurenz Albe) https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/select-for-update-considered-harmful-postgresql/ Christophe Pettus blog post https://thebuild.com/blog/2026/05/03/pgque-two-snapshots-and-a-diff Our episode on pg_ash https://postgres.fm/episodes/pg_ash Rediscovering PgQ (Alexander Kukushkin slides) https://speakerdeck.com/cyberdemn/rediscovering-pgq Tick frequency tuning https://github.com/NikolayS/PgQue/blob/main/docs/tick-frequency.md ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #178
    April 24 · 44 min

    pg_wait_tracer

    Nik and Michael are joined by Dmitry Fomin to discuss his new tool pg_wait_tracer, as well as changes that could be made to core to allow wait event tracing with lower overhead, and on managed services. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Dmitry Fomin https://postgres.fm/people/dmitry-fomin pg_wait_tracer https://github.com/DmitryNFomin/pg_wait_tracer pg_wait_sampling https://github.com/postgrespro/pg_wait_sampling pg_10046 https://github.com/DmitryNFomin/pg_10046 Jeremy Schneider reply on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7414966981847748608 RDS for PostgreSQL wait event docs https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/PostgreSQL.Tuning.concepts.summary.html Custom wait events for extensions (added in PostgreSQL 17) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xfunc-c.html#XFUNC-ADDIN-WAIT-EVENTS Hacking Postgres with Dmitry, Kirk, and Nik (Part 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gtuc2lnnsE Hacking Postgres with Dmitry, Kirk, and Nik (Part 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kqpjnpl5Gc Tanel Poder https://tanelpoder.com/about/ USDT static tracepoints for wait event tracing (proof of concept by Nik) https://github.com/NikolayS/postgres/pull/18 Add wait_event_timing: Oracle-style wait event instrumentation (patch by Dmitry) https://github.com/DmitryNFomin/postgres/pull/1 PgQue benchmarks https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque/blob/main/docs/benchmarks.md The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis Techniques for Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation and Modeling (by Raj K. Jain) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259310412_The_Art_of_Computer_Systems_Performance_Analysis_Techniques_For_Experimental_Design_Measurement_Simulation_and_Modeling_NY_Wiley Performance modeling and design of computer systems queueing theory in action (by Prof. Mor Harchol-Balter) https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/PerformanceModeling/book.html Oracle Performance Firefighting (by Craig_Shallahamer) https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780984102303/Oracle-Performance-Firefighting-Craig-Shallahamer-0984102302/plp Process Mining: Data Science in Action (by Wil van der Aalst) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-49851-4 ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #177
    April 17 · 45 min

    Schema design checklist

    Nik and Michael discuss a list of things to check when designing new schema in Postgres. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Use BIGINT in Postgres (blog post by Ryan Lambert) https://blog.rustprooflabs.com/2021/06/postgres-bigint-by-default Postgres 18 and UUIDv7 (blog post by Gwen Shapira) https://www.thenile.dev/blog/uuidv7 How to use UUID (how-to guide by Nik) https://postgres.ai/docs/postgres-howtos/schema-design/data-types/how-to-use-uuid Our episode on constraints https://postgres.fm/episodes/constraints Our episode on NULLs https://postgres.fm/episodes/nulls-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-and-the-unknown MultiXact member space exhaustion episode (with Metronome) https://postgres.fm/episodes/multixact-member-space-exhaustion Our Column Tetris episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/column-tetris Saving Space Basically for Free (blog post by James Coleman from Braintree) https://medium.com/paypal-tech/postgresql-at-scale-saving-space-basically-for-free-d94483d9ed9a Over-indexing episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/over-indexing Under-indexing episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/under-indexing Gadget's use of Postgres https://postgres.fm/episodes/gadgets-use-of-postgres Partitioning episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/partitioning RLS vs performance episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/rls-vs-performance ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #176
    April 3 · 43 min

    What’s Missing in Postgres?

    Nik and Michael are joined by Bruce Momjian to discuss his new talk "What’s Missing in Postgres?" Here are some links to things they mentioned: Bruce Momjian https://postgres.fm/people/bruce-momjian EDB https://www.enterprisedb.com What’s Missing in Postgres? (Bruce’s slides) https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/missing.pdf The Wonderful World of WAL (Bruce’s slides) https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/wal.pdf Getting started with benchmarking (our episode with Melanie Plageman) https://postgres.fm/episodes/getting-started-with-benchmarking Myths and Truths about Synchronous Replication in Postgres (talk by Alexander Kukushkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFn9qRGzTMc The Future of Postgres Sharding (Bruce’s slides) https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/sharding.pdf MultiXact member space exhaustion https://postgres.fm/episodes/multixact-member-space-exhaustion ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #175
    March 27 · 48 min

    Long-running transactions

    Nik and Michael discuss long-running transactions, including when they're harmless, when they cause issues, and how to mitigate those issues. Here are some links to things they mentioned: transaction_timeout https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-TRANSACTION-TIMEOUT Our episode on transaction_timeout https://postgres.fm/episodes/transaction_timeout Our episode on slow queries (which was also our first ever episode!) https://postgres.fm/episodes/slow-queries-and-slow-transactions Our episode on locks https://postgres.fm/episodes/locks lock_timeout https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-LOCK-TIMEOUT Transaction Isolation levels https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/transaction-iso.html pg_current_xact_id_if_assigned() https://pgpedia.info/p/pg_current_xact_id_if_assigned.html Monitor xmin horizon to prevent XID/MultiXID wraparound and high bloat (how-to guide by Nik) https://postgres.ai/docs/postgres-howtos/performance-optimization/monitoring/how-to-monitor-xmin-horizon idle_replication_slot_timeout https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-replication.html#GUC-IDLE-REPLICATION-SLOT-TIMEOUT PREPARE TRANSACTION https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-prepare-transaction.html log_autovacuum_min_duration https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/runtime-config-logging.html#GUC-LOG-AUTOVACUUM-MIN-DURATION PostgreSQL Subtransactions Considered Harmful (blog post by Nikolay) https://postgres.ai/blog/20210831-postgresql-subtransactions-considered-harmful statement_timeout https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-STATEMENT-TIMEOUT idle_in_transaction_session_timeout https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-IDLE-IN-TRANSACTION-SESSION-TIMEOUT lock_timeout https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-LOCK-TIMEOUT ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #174
    March 13 · 53 min

    PostGIS

    Nik and Michael are joined by Regina Obe and Paul Ramsey to discuss PostGIS. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Regina Obe https://postgres.fm/people/regina-obe Paul Ramsey https://postgres.fm/people/paul-ramsey PostGIS https://postgis.net MobilityDB https://github.com/MobilityDB/MobilityDB pgRouting https://github.com/pgRouting/pgrouting Google BigQuery GIS public alpha blog post https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/whats-happening-bigquery-integrated-machine-learning-maps-and-more PostGIS Day 2025 talk recordings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuNO_cW2g-0&list=PLavJpcg8cl1EkQWoCbczsOjFTe-SHg_8m pg_lake https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/pg_lake GeoParquet https://geoparquet.org ST_DWithin https://postgis.net/docs/ST_DWithin.html Postgres JSONB Columns and TOAST: A Performance Guide https://www.snowflake.com/en/engineering-blog/postgres-jsonb-columns-and-toast FOSS4G https://foss4g.org OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org PgDay Boston https://2026.pgdayboston.org SKILL.md file https://github.com/postgis/postgis/blob/68dde711039986b47eb62feda45bb24b13b0ea37/doc/SKILL.md Production query plans without production data (blog post by Radim Marek) https://boringsql.com/posts/portable-stats PostgreSQL: Up and Running, 4th Edition (by Regina Obe, Leo Hsu) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/postgresql-up-and/9798341660885 ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #173
    March 6 · 42 min

    Plan flips

    Nik and Michael discuss query plan flips in Postgres — what they are, some causes, mitigations, longer term solutions, and the recent outage at Clerk. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Recent postmortem from Clerk https://clerk.com/blog/2026-02-19-system-outage-postmortem The real cost of random I/O (blog post by Tomas Vondra) https://vondra.me/posts/the-real-cost-of-random-io autovacuum_analyze_scale_factor https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-vacuum.html#GUC-AUTOVACUUM-ANALYZE-SCALE-FACTOR default_statistics_target https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-query.html#GUC-DEFAULT-STATISTICS-TARGET pg_hint_plan https://github.com/ossc-db/pg_hint_plan Aurora PostgreSQL query plan management https://docs.aws.amazon.comAmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/AuroraPostgreSQL.Optimize.Start.html pg_stat_plans https://github.com/pganalyze/pg_stat_plans pg_plan_alternatives https://jnidzwetzki.github.io/2026/03/04/pg-plan-alternatives.html Waiting for Postgres 19: Better Planner Hints with Path Generation Strategies https://pganalyze.com/blog/5mins-postgres-19-better-planner-hints ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #172
    February 20 · 32 min

    pg_ash

    Nik and Michael discuss pg_ash — a new tool (not extension!) from Nik that samples and stores wait events from pg_stat_activity. Here are some links to things they mentioned: pg_ash https://github.com/NikolayS/pg_ash pg_wait_sampling https://github.com/postgrespro/pg_wait_sampling Amazon RDS performance insights https://aws.amazon.com/rds/performance-insights Our episode on wait events https://postgres.fm/episodes/wait-events pg-flight-recorder https://github.com/dventimisupabase/pg-flight-recorder pg_profile https://github.com/zubkov-andrei/pg_profile pg_cron https://github.com/citusdata/pg_cron ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
  • #171
    February 13 · 36 min

    Comments and metadata

    Nik and Michael discuss query level comments, object level comments, and another way of adding object level metadata. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Object comments https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-comment.html Query comment syntax (from an old version of the docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.0/syntax519.htm SQL Comments, Please! (Post by Markus Winand) https://modern-sql.com/caniuse/comments “While C-style block comments are passed to the server for processing and removal, SQL-standard comments are removed by psql.” https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-psql.html marginalia https://github.com/basecamp/marginalia track_activity_query_size https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-statistics.html#GUC-TRACK-ACTIVITY-QUERY-SIZE Custom Properties for Database Objects Using SECURITY LABELS (post by Andrei Lepikhov) https://www.pgedge.com/blog/custom-properties-for-postgresql-database-objects-without-core-patches ~~~ 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 Google doc! ~~~ Postgres FM is produced by: Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai With credit to: Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

    • Transcript
Showing 1–20 of 24 episodes