Hacking Workshop for April/May 2026

I'm planning to hold a single hacking workshop for April and May combined, covering Masahiko Sawada's talk, Breaking away from FREEZE and Wraparound, given at PGCon 2022. 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 Sawada-san for agreeing to join us.

pg_plan_advice: Plan Stability and User Planner Control for PostgreSQL?

I'm proposing a very ambitious patch set for PostgreSQL 19. Only time will tell whether it ends up in the release, but I can't resist using this space to give you a short demonstration of what it can do. The patch set introduces three new contrib modules, currently called pg_plan_advice, pg_collect_advice, and pg_stash_advice.

Hacking Workshop for March 2026

For next month's hacking workshop, I'm scheduling 2 or 3 discussions of Tomas Vondra's talk, Performance Archaeology, given at 2024.PGConf.EU. 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 as always to Tomas for agreeing to attend the sessions.

Who Contributed to PostgreSQL Development in 2025?

Here is another annual blog post breaking down code contributions to PostgreSQL itself (not ecosystem projects) by principal author. I have mentioned every year that this methodology has many limitations and fails to capture a lot of important work, and I reiterate that this year as usual. Nonetheless, many people seem to find these statistics helpful, so here they are.

Hacking Workshop for February 2026

For next month, I'm scheduling 2 or 3 discussions of Amit Langote's talk, Hacking Postgres Executor For Performance, given at PGConf India 2025. 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 Amit for agreeing to attend the sessions.

The Future of the PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop

The PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop will be taking a well-earned Christmas break in December of 2025. The future of the workshop is a little bit unclear, because I'm continuing to have a bit of trouble finding enough good talks online to justify doing one per month: the best source of talks for the event is pgconf.dev, but not all of those talks are about hacking on PostgreSQL, and not all of those that are about hacking are equally interesting to potential attendees. Also, we've already eaten through much of the backlog of older hacking-related talks that are posted online. Many conferences have few hacking-related talks, or just don't post any videos (which are expensive and time-consuming to produce).

Hacking Workshop for November 2025

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.)

Hacking Workshop for October 2025

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.

Hacking Workshop for September 2025

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.

One Year of Hacking Workshops

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.

PostgreSQL Hacking + Patch Review Workshops for July 2025

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.

Hacking Workshop for June 2025

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.

Mentoring Applications and Hacking Workshop for April 2025

Here are a few mentoring-related updates.

PostgreSQL Hacking + Patch Review Workshops - March 2025

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.

Who Contributed to PostgreSQL Development in 2024?

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.

PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - February 2025

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.

2025.pgconf.dev needs your submissions!

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?

PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - January 2025

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.

PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - December 2024

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.

Why pg_dump Is Amazing

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.