Although Postgres may seem magical, it really isn’t. When data is stored in Postgres, Postgres in turn stores that data in regular files in the filesystem. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how Postgres uses files to … Read the rest
Category: Postgres
How to Write a Postgres SQL UDF
Being able to write a Postgres UDF (user-defined function) is a simple skill that goes a long way. SQL UDFs let you give a name to part or all of a SQL query and use that name to refer to … Read the rest
Postgres Upserts
Since Postgres 9.5, Postgres has supported a useful a feature called UPSERT. For a reason I can’t figure out, this feature is referred to as UPSERT, even though there is no UPSERT SQL command. In addition to being … Read the rest
Postgres Transaction Isolation Levels
This post is part 3 in a three part series exploring transaction isolation issues in Postgres. Part 1 introduced some of the common problems that come up with transaction isolation in Postgres. Part 2 introduced row level locks, … Read the rest
Postgres Row Level Locks
This post is part 2 in a three part series exploring transaction isolation in Postgres. Part 1 introduced some of the problems that come up under the default isolation settings. This part and the next one introduce common ways … Read the rest
Postgres Transactions Aren’t Fully Isolated
This post is part 1 of a three part series examining transaction isolation in Postgres. This post covers the issues the come up under the default Postgres settings. Parts 2 and 3 will cover the different ways to eliminate the … Read the rest
Postgres Window Functions
Postgres window functions are an extremely useful feature. They let you calculate a value for each row based on the values of other rows. For our examples, let’s say we have a table ints full of random numbers:
The most … Read the rest
SELECT DISTINCT ON … ORDER BY
A common problem I’ve seen that many people are unfamiliar with how to solve is obtaining all of the rows that are the maximum of one value grouped by another value. For example, you may have a pets table with … Read the rest
The Missing Postgres Scan: The Loose Index Scan
Postgres has many different types of scans builtin. The list includes sequential scans, index scans, and bitmap scans. One useful scan type Postgres does not have builtin that other databases do is the loose index scan. Both MySQL … Read the rest
Postgres Lateral Joins
Personally, lateral joins are one of my favorite Postgres features. They are simple, while at the same time they let you write queries that would be nearly impossible to write otherwise. I find it surprising lateral joins were only introduced … Read the rest