Robert Haas

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 agreeing to serve as host. (I normally host, but am taking a month off. We will also skip December due to the end-of-year holidays.)

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 is too experienced. We have everyone from total newcomers to interested committers.

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 inexperienced to join us, and nobody is too experienced. We have everyone from total newcomers to interested committers.

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 of hacking workshops, both the good and the maybe not quite as good. So here goes.

Read more »

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 in future months, as well! As usual, nobody is too inexperienced to join us, and nobody is too experienced. We have everyone from total newcomers to interested committers.

Read more »

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, I do not intend this as a comprehensive picture of contributions to the project, or even to development activity; and I lack the data to fairly divide credit for a single commit between multiple individuals. Nevertheless, I am very grateful to all the people who have expressed appreciation for these posts, or told me about the value that they derived from them. Thank you so much.

Read more »

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 author of the talk to join us; thanks to Heikki for agreeing to join us this month.

Read more »

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 these events over the years that I've been participating, I very much want our future events to be as good as those in the past, or, hopefully, even better. But what makes a good event, and what kind of talk should you submit?

Read more »

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 Munro, Andrey Borodin). It has been absolutely great having them join the workshops.

Read more »

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 anticipate that both Melanie and I will be present for the discussions.

Read more »

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 talk a little more about why I believe that pg_dump is both amazingly useful for solving all kinds of PostgreSQL-related problems and also just a great piece of technology.

Read more »

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 narrative deeply frustrating, for two reasons.

Read more »

Read more »

Our talk for September 2024 will is by Andrey Borodin on his Youtube Channel "Byte Relay." The talk is Walk-through of Implementing Simple Postgres Patch: From sources to CI. I picked this talk for two reasons: first, in the poll I ran in the PostgreSQL Hacker Mentoring Discord, it got almost as many votes as the talk we did this month on the query planner. Second, I wanted to have at least some content that was targeted toward newer developers.

Read more »

Sometimes, people post patches to pgsql-hackers and... nothing happens. No replies, no reviews, nothing. Other times, people post to patches to pgsql-hackers and a bunch of discussion ensues, but nothing gets committed. If you're the sort of person who likes to write patches for PostgreSQL, or if you're being paid to do so, you'd probably like to avoid having these things happen to you. In this blog post, I'm going to explain what I think you should do maximize the chances of a good outcome (no guarantees!).

Read more »

I'm pleased to be able to formally announce the PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop, as well as our first two topics, planned for August and September 2024. 

Read more »