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Ibrar AhmedThis blog was first authored in 2020. We’ve updated it in 2025 for clarity and relevance, reflecting current practices while honoring their original perspective. PostgreSQL offers a rich set of indexing features, and while there’s no shortage of articles explaining how indexes work, one challenge often goes overlooked: maintenance. Over time, unused or duplicate indexes […]
This blog was first authored by Ibrar Ahmed in 2023. We’ve updated it in 2025 for clarity and relevance, reflecting current practices while honoring their original perspective. PostgreSQL’s flexibility gets a lot of credit. Performance too. But what really sets it apart, especially for teams with growing systems or changing requirements, is extensibility. With tools […]
This blog was first authored by Ibrar Ahmed in 2020. We’ve updated it in 2025 for clarity and relevance, reflecting current practices while honoring their original perspective. If you’re running PostgreSQL and suddenly hit an error you don’t recognize, you’re in good company. Most issues aren’t actually bugs; they’re things like permissions problems, connection failures, […]
This blog was first authored by Ibrar Ahmed in 2020. We’ve updated it in 2025 for clarity and relevance, reflecting current practices while honoring their original perspective. Picture this: you’re running what should be a simple query, and PostgreSQL returns completely unexpected results. You double-check your syntax, verify your data, and everything looks correct. The […]
This blog was first authored by Ibrar Ahmed in 2021. We’ve updated it in 2025 for clarity and relevance, reflecting current practices while honoring their original perspective. You think your PostgreSQL setup is secure. That is, until you actually try to document it. That’s usually when the questions start. Who has access to what? Are […]
This blog was first authored by Ibrar Ahmed in 2018. We’ve updated it in 2025 for clarity and relevance, reflecting current practices while honoring their original perspective. If your PostgreSQL performance seems to be lagging, you’re not imagining things. It probably started out fine. You installed it, spun up a few apps, and everything just […]
This blog post was originally published in January 2023 and was updated in March 2025. In PostgreSQL, the VACUUM command is a critical maintenance task essential to optimize database performance and reclaim wasted disk space. Using the PostgreSQL VACUUM command involves removing deleted or outdated row versions (“dead tuples”) from tables and indexes, and optionally […]
This blog was originally published in December of 2022 and updated in February of 2024. Encrypting data at rest in a database management system (DBMS) refers to securing data by encrypting it when it is not being used or accessed. This is often done to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access or theft. With transparent […]
Database security is crucial to protecting sensitive information stored in a database. A critical aspect is authentication, which refers to verifying the identity of a user trying to access the database. The authentication process is typically accomplished through usernames and passwords and includes other factors such as security tokens and one-time passwords. Database Administrators (DBAs) […]
PostgreSQL is a fantastic database, but if you’re storing images, video, audio files, or other large data objects, you need to “toast” them to get optimal performance. This post will look at using The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique (TOAST) to improve performance and scalability. PostgreSQL uses fixed-sized pages, which makes it challenging to store huge data […]
PostgreSQL-14 was released in September 2021, and it contained many performance improvements and feature enhancements, including some features from a monitoring perspective. As we know, monitoring is the key element of any database management system, and PostgreSQL keeps updating and enhancing the monitoring capabilities. Here are some key ones in PostgreSQL-14. Query Identifier Query identifier […]
Security is everybody’s concern when talking about data and information, and therefore it becomes the main foundation of every database. Security means protecting your data from unauthorized access. That means only authorized users can log in to a system called authentication; a user can only do what they are authorized to do (authorization) and log […]
Understanding query performance patterns is essentially the foundation for query performance tuning. It, in many ways, dictates how a database cluster evolves. And then there are obviously direct and indirect cost connotations as well. PostgreSQL provides very detailed statistics through a number of catalog views and extensions that can be easily added to provide more […]
Note: PostgreSQL 14 has been released. Please visit PostgreSQL 14 – Performance, Security, Usability, and Observability for additional information. It’s exciting times in the PostgreSQL world with the version 14 beta released a few days ago. It’s now time to look under the hood and find out what has changed from version 13, see what […]
On September 30, 2021, PostgreSQL 14 was released. Need a primer? Umair Shahid recently put together a great overview, PostgreSQL 14 – Performance, Security, Usability, and Observability. Foreign Data Wrapper based on SQL-MED is one the coolest features of PostgreSQL. The feature set of foreign data wrapper is expanding since version 9.1. We know that […]
Recently, I wrote an overview about what you need to know about PostgreSQL security. For this post, I want to write about PostgreSQL authentication. It is divided into three categories: 1. PostgreSQL Internal Authentication, 2. OS-based Authentication, and 3. External Server-Based Authentication. In most cases, PostgreSQL is configured to be used with internal authentication, so […]
Some time ago, I required a specific version of PostgreSQL. After searching on all the repositories, I was unable to find that specific version. It seems that the PostgreSQL community removes the old package when a new minor version comes. For example, if you need the 12.2 version but the 12.3 version is out, it’s […]
There have been many big features added to PostgreSQL 13, like Parallel Vacuum, de-duplication of indexes, etc., and a complete list can be found at PostgreSQL 13 release notes. Along with the big features, there are also small ones added, including dropdb –force. Dropdb –force A new command-line option is added to dropdb command, and […]
PostgreSQL 13 is released with some cool features, such as index enhancement, partition enhancements, and many others. Along with these enhancements, there are some security-related enhancements that require some explanation. There are two major ones: one is related to libpq and the other is related to postgres_fdw. As it is known that postgres_fdw is considered […]
Indexes are one of the core features of all the database management systems (DBMS). Indexes have a very long history in PostgreSQL, which has quite a rich set of index features. PostgreSQL has B-Tree, Hash, GIN, GIST, and BRIN indexes. And because the development around indexes is still going on, PostgreSQL 13 provides some enhancements. […]