The slides from my talk at PG Day at FOSDEM 2016 are now available.

The PostgreSQL statistics collector generates a lot of very important statistics about the state of the database. If it’s not working, autovacuum doesn’t work, among other problems. But it does generate a lot of write activity, and by default, that goes back onto the database volume.

Instead, always set stats_temp_directory to point to a RAM disk (which has to

I’ll be speaking about PostgreSQL High Availability at PGDay 2016 at FOSDEM.

The slides from my presentation, JSON Home Improvement at SCALE 14x, are now available.

More as an example than anything else, I wanted a function that would take two JSONB objects in PostgreSQL, and return how the left-hand side differs from the right-hand side. This means any key that is in the left but not in the right would be returned, along with any key whose value on the left is different from the

I gave a talk earlier this week about the new features in PostgreSQL 9.5. The headline feature, of course, is the new INSERT ... ON CONFLICT clause, aka “Upsert,” which allows an INSERT that has a key conflict to do an UPDATE (or just ignore the insert) instead.

A perfectly reasonable question was: “Does this work on COPY”?

How much and what to log in PostgreSQL is something that doesn’t really admit a single solution. Logging every connection can swamp a server, as can too low a setting of log_min_statement_duration. But there are two settings I always turn on: log_lock_waits, and log_temp_files (with log_temp_files being set to 0).

log_lock_waits will log any lock wait that

I’ll be presenting at the January San Francisco PostgreSQL Users’ Group meeting on what’s new in PostgreSQL 9.5. I hope you can join us!

At the point that there are two separate warnings advising you to turn off a configuration parameter in postgresql.conf, it’s probably a good idea to take the advice and disable it.

In theory, this parameter sets a maximum amount of data that will flow over an SSL connection before key renegotiation, to prevent an eavesdropping attacker from determining the

(First in a series of things I always do when setting up or configuring PostgreSQL.)

Since version 9.3, PostgreSQL has had the option to create new database clusters with data checksums. These are fast, simple checksums to verify that the data coming off of disk is what PostgreSQL expects it to be. The checksums don’t correct errors, but it