VP, Chief Database Scientist @ EnterpriseDB, PostgreSQL Major Contributor and Committer
I'm pleased to announce that David Rowley will be joining us in September to discuss his talk Optimizing code in the hot path; with examples from tuple deformation . If you're interesting in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. As always, thanks to David for agreeing to join the sessions. Read more »
I was hoping to usual resume the monthly cadence of hacking workshops in June, but it didn't quite happen, largely due to being a little exhausted after pgconf.dev. But, I'm pleased to announce that Melanie Plageman will be joining us to discuss her talk Additional IO Observability in Postgres with pg_stat_io . If you're interesting in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you…
I'm planning to hold a single hacking workshop for April and May combined, covering Masahiko Sawada's talk, Breaking away from FREEZE and Wraparound , given at PGCon 2022. If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to Sawada-san for agreeing to join us. Read more »
I'm proposing a very ambitious patch set for PostgreSQL 19. Only time will tell whether it ends up in the release, but I can't resist using this space to give you a short demonstration of what it can do. The patch set introduces three new contrib modules, currently called pg_plan_advice , pg_collect_advice , and pg_stash_advice . Read more »
For next month's hacking workshop, I'm scheduling 2 or 3 discussions of Tomas Vondra's talk, Performance Archaeology , given at 2024.PGConf.EU. If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks as always to Tomas for agreeing to attend the sessions. Read more »
Here is another annual blog post breaking down code contributions to PostgreSQL itself (not ecosystem projects) by principal author. I have mentioned every year that this methodology has many limitations and fails to capture a lot of important work, and I reiterate that this year as usual. Nonetheless, many people seem to find these statistics helpful, so here they are. Read more »
For next month, I'm scheduling 2 or 3 discussions of Amit Langote's talk, Hacking Postgres Executor For Performance , given at PGConf India 2025. If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to Amit for agreeing to attend the sessions. Read more »
The PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop will be taking a well-earned Christmas break in December of 2025. The future of the workshop is a little bit unclear, because I'm continuing to have a bit of trouble finding enough good talks online to justify doing one per month: the best source of talks for the event is pgconf.dev , but not all of those talks are about hacking on PostgreSQL, and not all of those…
For next month, I'm scheduling 2 or 3 discussions of Matthias van de Meent's talk, Improving scalability; Reducing overhead in shared memory , given at 2025.pgconf.dev ( talk description here ). If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to Matthias for agreeing to attend the sessions, and to Melanie Plageman for…
Next month, I'll be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of Thomas Munro's talk, Investigating Multithreaded PostgreSQL , given at 2025.pgconf.dev ( talk description here ). If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to Thomas for agreeing to attend the sessions. As usual, nobody is too inexperienced to join us, and nobody…
Next month, I'll be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of David Rowley's talk, Writing fast C code for a modern CPU (and applying it to PostgreSQL) , given at 2025.pgconf.dev ( talk description here ). If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to David for agreeing to attend the sessions. As usual, nobody is too…
I started running PostgreSQL Hacking Workshops just about one year ago, and I've run one each month, except for May, when we had pgconf.dev. Signups are now open for August , if you're interested in joining us for a discussion of Peter Geoghan's talk on Multidimensional search strategies for composite B-Tree indexes , but I'd also like to take a few minutes to summarize where we are after one year…
Next month, I'll be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of Tomas Vondra's talk, Fast-path locking improvements in PG18 , given at 2025.pgconf.dev ( talk description here ). If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to Tomas for agreeing to attend the sessions. We'll have plenty more 2025.pgconf.dev talks on the schedule…
Next month, I'll be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of Masahiko Sawada's talk, PostgreSQL meets ART - Using Adaptive Radix Tree to speed up vacuuming , from 2024.pgconf.dev . If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Read more »
Here are a few mentoring-related updates. Read more »
This month, I'm excited to tell you about the returning of the PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop along with a new Patch Review Workshop organized by Paul Jungwirth. Read more »
People continue to tell me on a semi-regular basis how much they appreciate these approximately annual posts, the first of which came out in April of 2017. I think this might be more because the project doesn't have enough official ways to recognize people than it is an endorsement of the particular thing that I've done here, the limitations of which I am always careful to mention. In particular,…
Please considering joining us next month (February 2025) for a discussion of Heikki Linnakangas's talk on The Wire Protocol , from PGCONF.EU 2024. For those not familiar with the concept, this hacking workshop is basically a virtual meetup: you watch the talk, and then you sign up to participate in one of two or three Zoom meetings where we discuss the talk. Usually, we're able to get the original…
The call for proposals for 2025.pgconf.dev has been extended to January 6, 2025, otherwise known as "very soon". I'm writing this post to encourage you to submit, if you haven't done so yet, regardless of whether you have submitted to 2024.pgconf.dev or its predecessor, PGCon , in the past. The event will only be as good as the content you (collectively) submit, and having found much value in…
Next month, I'l be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of Andres Freund's talk, NUMA vs PostgreSQL , given at PGConf.EU 2024. You can sign up using this form . I anticipate that both Andres and I will be present for the discussions, and I'd like to thank Andres and all of the other presenters who have made time to join the discussions and answer questions for their time (so far: Melanie Plageman, Thomas…
Next month, I'll be hosting a discussion of Melanie Plageman's talk, Intro to Postgres Planner , given at PGCon 2019. You can sign up using this form . To be clear, the talk is not an introduction to how the planner works from a user perspective, but rather how to hack on it and try to make it better and perhaps get your improvements committed to PostgreSQL. If you're interested, please join us. I…
I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago entitled Is pg_dump a Backup Tool? . In that post, I argued in the affirmative, but also said that it's probably shouldn't be your primary backup mechanism. For that, you probably shouldn't directly use anything that is included in PostgreSQL itself, but rather a well-maintained third-party backup tool such as barman or pgbackrest . But today, I want to…
Next month, I'll be hosting a discussion of a talk by Andy Pavlo, given for his Intro to Database Systems course at CMU. The title of the talk is "Memory & Disk I/O Management and the video link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoewwZwVmv4 . As usual, we have will have three sessions, and you can sign up to participate in one of them using this form . Read more »
Recently, I've been hearing a lot of experienced PostgreSQL users reiterate this line: " pg_dump is not a backup tool." In fact, the documentation has recently been updated to avoid saying that it is a backup tool, to widespread relief. Experienced PostgreSQL users and developers have been publicly called out for having the temerity to assert that pg_dump is, in fact, a backup tool. I find this…
This month, I'll be hosting a discussion of Thomas Munro's 2024.pgconf.dev talk, Streaming I/O and vectored I/O . As usual, there will be three sessions, and you can use this form to sign up for the session you prefer. However, if you do want to attend, please sign up right away, because our first session is scheduled for this Thursday. Read more »