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Most security conversations happen after something has already gone wrong. Last week, we got to have one before.
I facilitated a webinar for PostgresWorld on Security and Privacy Best Practices, alongside some of my colleagues from Command Prompt. We talked about breaches, roles, AI, tooling, and the everyday habits that keep systems safe. Here are my top ten takeaways.
#1 Be specific with your security.
Don’t enable everything “just because.” …
2026-09-17
pgColumnar 1.0-alpha4 release notes
Release date: 2026-09-17 Previous release: 1.0-alpha3 (2026-09-02)
pgColumnar is a columnar table access method for PostgreSQL. This is the fourth alpha. Its theme is layout and skipping. A table can now be laid out on the Hilbert curve, which keeps neighbouring keys closer together than Z-order does. A star-schema join now skips fact-table groups and rejects non-matching rows, and it does …
PostgreSQL’s long-standing recommendation to allocate 25% of system memory to shared_buffers dates back to version 8.3 (released in 2008) when typical system memory was measured in a handful of GB. Modern servers can provision hundreds of GB, and it is not unheard of to come across databases that approach 0.5 TB of RAM or more. The relationship between memory size, workload characteristics and buffer_pool performance is no longer obvious.
We …
Version 19: 71 commits on REL_19_STABLE. Version 20: 46 commits on master. Reverted out of 19: 74 commits, in 6 reverts. Six features tracked, 2 still shipping. Window closed at d8408e8d682.
71 commits landed on the 19 branch in nine days. The six reverts in the same window name 74 commits between them.
Six reverts, newest first.
Both reverts landed after Robert Haas asked the pgsql-hackers list on August 25 whether any of six heavily patched features should come out before 19 ships. One of the two was on his list. One was not.
PostgreSQL 14 reaches community end of life on November 12th, 2026. This post covers what EOL actually means and what your options are.
Benchmarking huge_pages on a 128 GB PostgreSQL 18 system shows throughput gains are modest — but page table overhead at 4KB pages can consume up to 20% of total RAM. Use PSI to find where your system is actually stalling before making the call. Part 2 of 3.
Release date: 2026-08-18
Previous release: 1.0-alpha (2026-08-04)
pgColumnar is a columnar table access method for PostgreSQL. This is the second alpha. It adds read-only Apache Iceberg support, reads and writes over S3-compatible object storage, a maintenance daemon, and a broad round of statistics, planner, performance, and security work. The on-disk native format (PGCN v1) is unchanged; existing tables are read and written as before.
This release requires one …
A pile of containers is not a shipment. A shipment is containers plus a manifest.
Apache Iceberg is the manifest. It is not a file format, it is a table format: a metadata layer that records exactly which Parquet files make up a table at every point in time. That one idea buys you things we used to think required a warehouse. Transactions on object storage, so writers never corrupt …
Tuning shared_buffers isn't just about peak throughput — it's about how much CPU and disk I/O a system consumes per unit of work. The 25% default can require up to 5x more disk I/O than very low or very high allocation. Part 1 of 3.