Expert PostgreSQL tutorials, tips, and performance optimization guides. Learn database administration, query optimization, and best practices for PostgreSQL 18 and beyond.
August closed with a run of PostgreSQL ecosystem news that matters well beyond the release calendar: a billion-scale vector search proof point on Aurora, a new managed Postgres service built specifically for AI agents, EXPLAIN support in Aurora DSQL, and fresh licensing math for the Postgres-vs-SQL Server decision. For Houston teams running Postgres across energy, […]
Vector search used to mean bolting a separate database onto your stack. Two open-source PostgreSQL extensions have changed that: pgvector and pgvectorscale. Both are free, both run inside Postgres, and both have shipped meaningful upgrades in the past year — pgvector is at v0.8.6 with iterative index scans and half-precision vectors, while pgvectorscale 0.9.0 added […]
OpenAI’s engineering team recently published “Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users” — a detailed account of how ChatGPT’s primary data store survives traffic that would flatten most databases. The headline: it’s one PostgreSQL primary handling every write, roughly 50 read replicas, and a stack of operational habits that keep the write path alive. […]
Full-text search is one of those features teams assume requires Elasticsearch or a separate search service. PostgreSQL has had it built in for years: tsvector, tsquery, GIN indexes, and relevance ranking are all part of the core database. For product catalogs, document libraries, log search, and site search up to millions of rows, it is […]
OpenAI’s engineers recently shared how PostgreSQL sits at the core of ChatGPT’s infrastructure, serving 800 million users. You do not need ChatGPT-scale traffic for the lesson to apply. In Houston, the same failure pattern shows up in energy trading dashboards, medical claims pipelines, and logistics telematics fleets: the database slows down under load long before […]
PostgreSQL 19 Beta 3 shipped August 13, 2026, with minor releases 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24. Here is what is new, and when AWS will offer 19 on RDS and Aurora.
pgvector has become the default way to add vector search to PostgreSQL, and for good reason: you keep embeddings next to the relational data they describe, in the same database you already back up, monitor, and trust. But there is a widening gap between the demo and the production workload, and it usually shows up […]
Monitoring is the backbone of every production PostgreSQL deployment. Whether you run Patroni-managed high availability on your own hardware or Amazon Aurora in the cloud, you cannot fix what you cannot see. Yet most monitoring setups I audit collect hundreds of metrics and alert on almost none of them — or worse, they page a […]
If your Houston startup or enterprise is still running PostgreSQL on a self-managed server, Amazon RDS is one of the fastest ways to cut operational overhead. AWS handles backups, patching, failover, and storage scaling, and its managed engine keeps you on supported versions — AWS publishes guidance on when new open source engine versions land […]
Somewhere in Houston, a query that used to run in 40 milliseconds now takes 40 seconds — and the dashboard the whole team depends on is timing out. Before you buy bigger hardware, tune shared_buffers, or rewrite anything, you need to see what the planner actually decided to do. That is what EXPLAIN is for: […]
