My DBA Notebook

There is a misconception I keep running into, and it causes real harm in production.

At PGDay France (2018 or 2019, I honestly can’t remember which one), I shared my method for evaluating a Postgres extension: read the source code, and ask yourself whether you understand it well enough to fix a small bug.

A friend of mine, Lucas Draescher, submitted his first patch to PostgreSQL back in March.

I was reading Markus Winand’s latest post on ORDER BY history last week.

[2026-05-19 Edit: I am very happy to say I was wrong. pgBackRest is not dead.

Every year, PostgreSQL gets faster.

Thanks to my colleague Ozair, who sent me a JIRA ticket saying “I need to drop that huge column, what are the consequences?”

Thanks to Boris Novikov, who pointed me in the PAX direction in the first place and followed up with many insightful technical discussions.

I’ll be honest with you.

My friend Henrietta Dombrovskaya pinged me on Telegram.

As a PostgreSQL expert, one of the most common “ghosts” I hunt during database audits is the zombie session.

If you’ve ever run an insert statement in a terminal or an IDE, you’ve seen it: the cryptic insert 0 1 message.

Part 2 of the MERISE series New here?

Thanks to Boris Novikov, who pointed me in the PAX direction in the first place and followed up with many insightful technical discussions.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the latest hardware shifts, but we are officially entering the era of “Titan-Class Infrastructure.”

The Honor Part (That I’m Still Processing) 🔗Let me start with the big one: I was invited to the European Open Source Awards ceremony on Thursday evening.

If Darth Vader existed and decided to do to Earth what he did to Alderaan, everyone would lose data.

You saved my life.

I’ve used PostgreSQL for almost 20 years.

I normally don’t blog about my company EDB, but today I’d like to discuss the updated tuning guide I helped review.

This is the sketchnote from Álvaro Herrera’s talk The road to new SQL/JSON features.

This month’s PGSQLPhriday event is about UUId thanks to my post calling for a fight debate on the topic.

Today, I’m very proud and honored to host for the second time the great monthly PGSQL Phriday event!

If you’re one of my customers, you might know how I insist on monitoring your Postgres logs and digging into them to find precious insights on what’s going on with your Postgres.

Hello folks, This small post is about PGSQL Phriday #007, the “trigger” PGSQL Friday.

I couldn’t let you tell your opinions about triggers without giving mine!

This is not a blog post like the other.

Thanks to Grant Fritchey (https://www.scarydba.com/), PGSQL Phriday #006 is about the things you wish you knew while learning Postgres.

[2023-02-01 Edit: I somehow navigated the standard wrongly, so I edited this blog post.

For the first PGSQL Phriday of the year, my friend Hettie asked us to share a useful script we often use.

This week, PGSQL Phriday #2 is focused on backups, thanks to Andreas Scherbaum’s blog post.

Ryan Booz asked the community on Twitter to contribute to a challenge called “PGSQL Phriday” where we publish posts according to a theme.

PgconfEu 2022 in Berlin is coming very fast and one of my colleagues, who’s not very used to other pGConf Eu events asked what session we would recommend and why.

I was browsing the Postgres slack channel when I ran into this intriguing question from a member: How come my query SELECT TO_CHAR(POW(2,54), ‘9999999999999999999’) AS V0, TO_CHAR(POW(2,54)-1, ‘9999999999999999999’) AS V1; gives that result?

I don’t know if you’re aware that PostgreSQL Conference Europe (in Berlin this year) will have a daycare option for children.

Thanks to Vik Fearing’s talk about PostgreSQL and the standard SQL (a talk delivered so far at pgconf.de and pgconf.be, I discovered the reason we use a * in count(*) is pedantry.

Using a generated key is something DBAs often do, mainly for performance reasons.

Last week, I gave my “psql is awesome” conf talk for the last time.

As a consultant, I have to analyze various databases daily.

Hello everyone!

This was the most common cause of calls at night: your cluster ran out of space.

Months ago, I woke up with a fantastic idea: adding an option in pg_dump to export stored functions and procedures only.

[2021-02-28 Edit:Thanks to tapoueh, I found out you could do case insensitive text match using the ~* operator instead of lower(attribute) ~ <value>.

I ran several times into customers with huge writes spikes regularly.

I was browsing through the logical replication restrictions when I noticed that a primary key was not mandatory to be able to perform logical replication.

As a consultant, I frequently need to install Postgres for customers.

I was looking for something to add to my Christmas wish list (yes, my parents are retired and they asked for this wish list for the last 3 months) and I remembered I had seen a blog post a few years ago where you could print your own code on clothes.

[2020-04-19 Edit: I had forgotten two ways to change your Postgres setting: one setting a parameter inside a transaction by using set local parameter=value and another one is not valid for every parameter but you may set some of them at Postgres startup by

I love what Debian did to make Postgres administration tasks easier.

This is kind of frustrating… You’ve been at it for the best part of the day and you can’t figure it out.