Normally, when you drop a column from PostgreSQL, it doesn’t have to do anything to the data in the table. It just marks the column as no longer alive in the system catalogs, and gets on with business.

There is, however, a big exception to this: ALTER TABLE … SET WITHOUT OIDS. This pops up when using pg_upgrade

This topic pops up very frequently: “Should we use UUIDs or bigints as primary keys?”

One of the reasons that the question gets so many conflicting answers is that there are really two different questions being asked:

• “Should our keys be random or sequential?”
• “Should our keys be 64 bits, or larger?”

I’ll be speaking on Database Antipatterns and How to Find Them at SCaLE 2023, March 9-12, 2023 in Pasadena, CA.

I’m very happy that I’ll be presenting “Extreme PostgreSQL” at PgDay/MED in Malta (yay, Malta!) on 13 April 2023.

The slides from my talk at the February 2023 SFPUG Meeting are now available.

I’m very pleased to be talking about real-life logical replication at Nordic PgDay 2023, in beautiful Stockholm.

There’s a particular anti-pattern in database design that PostgreSQL handles… not very well.

For example, let’s say you are building something like Twitch. (The real Twitch doesn’t work this way! At least, not as far as I know!) So, you have streams, and you have users, and users watch streams. So, let’s do a schema!

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Previously, I wrote that you should never lock tables. And you usually shouldn’t! But sometimes, there’s a good reason to. Here’s one.

When you are doing a schema-modifying operation, like adding a column to a table, PostgreSQL needs to take an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock on the table while it is modifying the system catalogs. Unless it needs to

In PostgreSQL, NUMERIC is a variable length type of fixed precision. You can have as many digits as you want (and you want to pay the storage for). DOUBLE PRECISION is a floating point type, with variable precision.

Sometimes, the question comes up: How much slower is NUMERIC than DOUBLE PRECISION, anyway?

Here’s a quick, highly unscientific

If you have something interesting to day about PostgreSQL, we [would love to get a proposal from you]. Even if you have never spoken before, consider responding to the CfP! PgDay 2020 is particularly friendly to first-time and inexperienced speakers. You’re among friends! If you use PostgreSQL, you almost certainly have opinions and experiences that others would love to hear