SELECT * FROM pgstef
Percona Transparent Data Encryption for PostgreSQL (pg_tde) is an open-source PostgreSQL extension that provides Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to protect data at rest. pg_tde ensures that data stored on disk is encrypted and cannot be read without the proper encryption keys, even if someone gains access to the physical storage media. A few months ago, Percona published a blog post describing…
A useful new feature was introduced on 11 December 2025: Allow expiration of the oldest full backup regardless of current retention. Details are available in commit bf2b276. Before this change, it was awkward to expire only the oldest full backup while leaving the existing retention settings untouched. Users had to temporarily adjust retention (or write a script) to achieve the same result.…
The TLS server provides an alternative to using SSH for protocol connections to remote hosts. In this demo setup, the repository host is named backup-srv, and the two PostgreSQL nodes participating in Streaming Replication are pg1-srv and pg2-srv. All nodes run on AlmaLinux 10. If you’re familiar with Vagrant, here is a simple Vagrantfile that provisions three virtual machines using these names: #…
pgBackRest is a popular backup and restore tool for PostgreSQL, known for easily handling even the largest databases and workloads. It’s packed with powerful features, but all that flexibility can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. In my earlier posts, I showed how to take backups from a standby server and how to set up a dedicated backup host. But there’s another great feature we haven’t explored…
As I mentioned in my last blog post, as your cluster grows with multiple standby servers and potentially automated failover (using tools like Patroni), it becomes more practical to set up a dedicated repository host, also known as a dedicated backup server. This backup server can then trigger backups and automatically select the appropriate node in case of failover, eliminating the need for manual…
Recently, we’ve received many questions about how to take backups from a standby server using pgBackRest. In this post, I’d like to clarify one of the most frequently asked questions and address a common misconception for new users. First of all, it’s important to understand that taking a backup exclusively from the standby server is not currently possible. When you trigger a backup from the…
Recently, while debugging a performance issue of a CREATE INDEX operation, I was reminded that PostgreSQL might produce temporary files when executing a parallel query, including parallel index creation, because each worker process has its own memory and might need to use disk space for sorting or hash tables. Thanks to Peter Geoghegan answering this pgsql-admin email thread. So, in order to try…
One of the most frequent questions I get is to actually explain the difference between differential and incremental backups in pgBackRest. As everyone might easily imagine, an incremental backup will only copy the database files (to keep it simple) that have been modified since the last successful backup. If you have a full backup every Sunday, and then an incremental every other day, the backup…
SFTP support has been added in the 2.46 release on 22 May 2022. In this demo setup, the SFTP host will be called sftp-srv and the PostgreSQL node pg-srv. Both nodes will be running on Rocky Linux 8. If you’re familiar with Vagrant, here’s a simple Vagrantfile to initiate 3 virtual machines using those names: # Vagrantfile Vagrant.configure(2) do |config| config.vm.box = 'rockylinux/8'…
With pgBackRest 2.41 just released, a new feature called backup annotations is now available. Let’s see in this blog post what this is about.