Michael Christofides

You all should check out @michristofides.com's new PostgreSQL monitoring tool: pgcustard.com It's early days, but it has already helped me identify some issues that I was unaware of earlier.

€10 for a frontier AI subscription are gone in one workday. €10 for my book SQL Performance Explained has a lasting impact on you*. sql-performance-explained.com Learning fundamentals that don't change always has a lasting effect. * you also need to read it, which takes about 1 day ;)

The upcoming Postgres 19 is set to include extra EXPLAIN info in several places: 🚦 An "IO" parameter (async info) 💡 Generated and supplied hint info (pg_plan_advice) ♻️ Memoize estimate fields 🪵 WAL full page image bytes We've added support for them all in @pgmustard.com 🎉

Nice to see that JIT will now be off by default from Postgres 19: git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=po...

pgMustard Pro now includes 1,000 API credits 🎉 Bulk-analyse plans, plug into your LLM workflows, or build something we haven't thought of yet. Docs: pgmustard.com/docs#api

New blog post: Read efficiency issues in Postgres queries If you've got a query that's slowly degrading in performance, you might have a read efficiency issue. The root cause could be table bloat, index bloat, or data locality degradation. www.pgmustard.com/blog/read-ef...

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

Our Read Efficiency tips are now more efficient to read! 📝 Better wording, mostly for clarity 🔬 More specific to the scan type, and therefore shorter in most cases 🌟 Improved scoring, especially for Bitmap Heap Scans More details: www.pgmustard.com/changelog

If you have any Postgres performance issues, I'd love to hear about them and try to help: pgmustard.com/office-hours

We've revamped our "Operation on Disk" tips ✨ * Made them clearer * Made them more succinct (in most cases) * Improved the scoring * Mention hash_mem_multiplier (when relevant) * Show "Operation in Memory" in more cases, with the memory used * Updated the linked blog post

Big performance problems 🤝 tiny CS tricks Our latest blog breaks down how bloom filters helped us take an API from 5s to 0.3s - even with millions of alerts in play. If you’re fighting slow queries or Postgres under pressure, this one’s worth a look: go.incident.io/r9jgcI9

Today is the day -- end-of-life for Postgres 13 www.postgresql.org/support/vers...

Explain is a powerful tool in Postgres. If you care about performance, get comfortable running `explain` and `explain analyze` commands regularly, and learn how to interpret its output. This blog is a great intro. www.depesz.com/2013/04/16/e...

I'm not sure @ankane.bsky.social is human - maybe some kind of open source being from the future 😂 I said to a colleague - "we'll see, but it's ankane, so it's entirely possible it'll get done soon". Less than an hour later, it was updated 🤯

New blog post: "What do the new Index Searches lines in EXPLAIN mean?" In Postgres 18 you'll start seeing things like "Index Searches: 1" on each of your index scans. We looked into what they mean, and how that information can be helpful. www.pgmustard.com/blog/what-do...

2 million indexes! You’ve gotta listen to this in context of this Gadget episode with Harry — but that’s a wild figure! 😳 postgres.fm/episodes/gad...

Sometimes the trick to optimizing database queries is simple: Don't do stupid stuff.

The upcoming Postgres 18 is set to include some nice improvements to EXPLAIN: * BUFFERS on by default with ANALYZE 🎉 * Fractional "actual rows" (huge in some cases) * Quite a few new fields (including the very cool Index Searches) We've now added support for all of them. 💛

Amazing post on making Postgres slower (yes, slower!) on purpose. byteofdev.com/posts/making... #postgres #postgresql Favorite bit: "random_page_cost = 1e300" LOL! Well done

Really non-trivial case with MultiXacts and brilliant RCA and level of transparency from the Metronome team – great example of what to do with new types of #PostgreSQL incidents! enjoyed discussion a lot! www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KoP...

PostgresFM with Sugu, co-creator of Vitess, originally created to shard MySQL in YouTube, and then used by GitHub, Pinterest, Slack, Shopify, etc. Discussed his work at Supabase on Multigres, sharding for PostgreSQL. Enjoyed a lot!! Take it to a long hike or drive: youtu.be/KOepJivmWTg?...

3 years of PostgresFM 🥳 And now, @michristofides.com being back from 2-week break, and we've recorded our 150th episode A very interesting one, don't miss -- this Friday

Postgres Meetup for All tomorrow www.meetup.com/postgres-mee...

Amazing talk by Alexander Kukushkin about caveats and myths and truths of sync replication in Postgres. Everyone who works or plans to work with sync replication must watch it! www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFn9...

There are a couple of online #PostgreSQL events today that look like they'll be great: 16:00 UTC — 10 Costly Database Performance Mistakes (and How to Fix Them) with Andy Atkinson www.meetup.com/postgres-mee... 19:00 UTC — 12 years of Postgres Weekly with Peter Cooper aka.ms/TalkingPostg...

Hello, Bluesky!

I have the great pleasure to announce the release of PostgreSQL Mistakes and How to Avoid Them in all formats! 🎉 To celebrate, @manningbooks.bsky.social is offering a Deal of the Day: 45% off my book and other selected titles! 👉 mng.bz/WrEx #PostgreSQL #Postgres #TechBooks #Database #OpenSource

Next week (14th) I'll be joining the excellent Postgres Meetup for All to demo and discuss troubleshooting slow queries using EXPLAIN and external tools: www.meetup.com/postgres-mee... If you or your team could do with an intro or refresher, it would be great to see you there!

I'm proud to announce that I'm teaching a 1-day Postgres performance tuning class at the PASS Summit this year! Registration is open now, and if you register before May 13, you save big with early bird rates. passdatacommunitysummit.com/sessions/1103

Proud to be sponsoring PGDay UK. It’s lovely having a local event and it’s been great each time I’ve attended. It’ll be in London again on September 9th. Let me know if you’ll be there too! P.s. they’re currently looking for speakers (and sponsors!)

Tomas Vondra is one of #PostgreSQL hackers with strong focus on performance and query optimization. Enjoyed this session a lot 📺 www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyMH... 🎙️ postgres.fm/episodes/per... It was inspired by this talk: "Where do performance cliffs come from?" www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzdA...

While editing a podcast episode, I cringed twice whilst being confidently wrong about things. I need to work on that, or I need to stop criticising LLMs (or both!)

After 6 years of hoping someone else would write this, I've finally succumbed to the little marketing devil on my shoulder and written about Postgres query plan visualization tools. It's hard to imagine someone more biased about any topic, but here goes: www.pgmustard.com/blog/postgre...

Resisting the urge to document everything everywhere blog.jooq.org/resisting-th...

It's incredibly common to see a Postgres query plan with all scans using indexes, and to think it's probably already optimal. I've written a new post for the pgMustard blog about why that often isn't the case, and some things you can look out for: www.pgmustard.com/blog/index-s...

I'm honoured to have been added to the PostgreSQL Contributors list, along with Nikolay Samokhvalov! www.postgresql.org/community/co... Thank you to everyone who makes Postgres what it is. I'm chuffed to be recognised as playing a small part in helping such a wonderful project ☺️✌️🐘

We just published an episode of Postgres FM on pg_squeeze with the wonderfully humble Antonín Houska. If you’re currently managing bloat manually or with pg_repack, I highly recommend checking this out: postgres.fm/episodes/pg_...

PgBouncer 1.24.0 is out, with many improvements. And prepared statement support is now turned on by default! github.com/pgbouncer/pg...

If you've become your company's designated Postgres expert, learning to navigate Postgres source code can be a useful skill, even if you're not a C programmer. For instance, the docs do not specify how the optimizer works, but there is a detailed readme in the source: github.com/postgres/pos...

If you have any Postgres performance issues, I'd love to hear about them and try to help: www.pgmustard.com/office-hours

One of my better subject lines 🎄

"Enable BUFFERS with EXPLAIN ANALYZE by default" on #PostgreSQL 18. Yes ! git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=po...

If you ever need to tidy up poor audio (especially speech, eg for podcasts) I highly recommend Auphonic: auphonic.com It can make echoey audio sound almost like a studio, and it can even remove things like sirens (when we have New York based guests), which blows my mind 👏

For anyone looking for a podcast app for iOS I can’t recommend Overcast highly enough. The rewrite of it recently scared me, but it’s somehow now even better than it was before, and it keeps adding useful features that I didn’t know I needed (like “Go back” when accidentally jumping 😍)

How do you do, fellow kids?