Postgres FM

Latest Episodes:

Citus + StackGres Oct 16, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael are joined by Álvaro Hernández to discuss sharding Postgres with Citus and StackGres, especially the new query router support that has been added very recently.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Álvaro Hernández https://postgres.fm/people/alvaro-hernandez-tortosa
Ongres https://ongres.com
Scaling Citus without limits: announcing Query Routers in StackGres https://stackgres.io/blog/scaling-citus-beyond-one-coordinator-announcing-query-routers-stackgres/
Open-source Citus matches PlanetScale's Neki at 10M QPS on half the data nodes https://stackgres.io/blog/open-source-citus-matches-planetscales-neki-at-10m-qps-on-half-the-data-nodes/
Postgres TV discussion about licenses with Álvaro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rcbyIjA4gI
Our episode with Sugu from Multigres https://postgres.fm/episodes/multigres
Our (first) episode with Lev from PgDog https://postgres.fm/episodes/pgdog
Citus https://github.com/citusdata/citus
Citus goes fully open source (2022) https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2022/06/17/citus-11-goes-fully-open-source/
6M requests per second using ClickHouse (blog post by Alex Bocharov / Cloudflare) https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-analytics-for-6m-requests-per-second-using-clickhouse/
pg_ash https://github.com/NikolayS/pg_ash
118 million queries per second on Neki (blog post by Florent Poinsard and Hirad Pourtahmasbi / PlanetScale) https://planetscale.com/blog/118-million-queries-per-second-on-neki
Analyzing the Limits of Connection Scalability in Postgres (blog post by Andres Freund) https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2020/10/08/analyzing-connection-scalability/

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

GSoC B-Tree Merge Sep 25, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael are joined by Salma El-Sayed and Kirk Wolak to discuss their in-progress and very ambitious Google Summer of Code project around adding Btree Merge support to Postgres.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Salma El-Sayed https://postgres.fm/people/salma-el-sayed
Kirk Wolak https://postgres.fm/people/kirk-wolak
Google Summer of Code https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com
PostgreSQL GSoC 2026 project ideas https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC_2026
CMU Intro to Database Systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjYMAgsGH-GtY5rJYZ6zjsd5
Kirk, NIK, and Andrey’s Hacking Postgres sessions on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH8y1BNPAKjKDdJA7sDmFWUkbbYux3TRz
B-tree Index Bloat Reduction - Approach & Questions (Hackers thread, with patches) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CANBEAPFq3YAOydjUS3xwcUG9L6e3WE5Z4nGPk_Q3RsjSFWTJNA%40mail.gmail.com
B-tree merge visualizer https://kirkw.github.io/explainers/btree-merge-explainer.html

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

ClickHouse Managed Postgres Sep 18, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael are joined by Sai Srirampur to discuss ClickHouse's new managed Postgres service.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Sai Srirampur https://postgres.fm/people/sai-srirampur
ClickHouse Managed Postgres https://clickhouse.com/cloud/postgres
ClickPipes https://clickhouse.com/cloud/clickpipes
walshadow https://github.com/ClickHouse/walshadow
pg_clickhouse https://github.com/clickHouse/pg_clickhouse
ClickHouse PostgreSQL powered by Ubicloud https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/clickhouse-postgresql-powered-by-ubicloud
Hacking Postgres logical decoding sessions https://hacking.postgres.tv/topics/logical-decoding/
wal-rus https://github.com/ClickHouse/wal-rus
pg_createsubscriber https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-pgcreatesubscriber.html

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

hot_standby_feedback Sep 11, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael discuss hot_standby_feedback — what it controls, whether and when read replicas should be changed to on, and other settings you can change to help too.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

hot_standby_feedback https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-replication.html#GUC-HOT-STANDBY-FEEDBACK
hot_standby_feedback: experiments on PostgreSQL 17 (by Nik) https://console.postgres.ai/shared/brief/6018f69d-8975-48e3-8259-a72c77105572
Best practices for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL replication (blog post) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/best-practices-for-amazon-rds-postgresql-replication/
log_autovacuum_min_duration https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-logging.html#GUC-LOG-AUTOVACUUM-MIN-DURATION
max_standby_streaming_delay https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-replication.html#GUC-MAX-STANDBY-STREAMING-DELAY
WAIT FOR LSN https://www.postgresql.org/docs/19/sql-wait-for.html
transaction_timeout https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-TRANSACTION-TIMEOUT
Hot Standby Feedback should default to on in 9.3+ https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20121130190227.GJ3957%40awork2.anarazel.de

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Estimating work_mem Aug 21, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael are joined by Shaun Thomas to discuss estimating work_mem, memory management in general, and writing an extension to help.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Shaun Thomas https://postgres.fm/people/shaun-thomas
work_mem https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-resource.html#GUC-WORK-MEM
pg_stat_database https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#MONITORING-PG-STAT-DATABASE-VIEW
ALTER ROLE SET configuration_parameter https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-alterrole.html#SQL-ALTERROLE-PARAMS-CONFIGURATION-PARAMETER
hash_mem_multiplier https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-resource.html#GUC-HASH-MEM-MULTIPLIER
Recent Postgres releases with 28 CVEs fixed https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-186-1711-1615-1519-1424-and-19-beta-3-released-3365/
Systemic Risks in the Managed PostgreSQL Industry (part 1 of 6, Mehmet Ince) https://mehmetince.net/part-1-6-systemic-risks-in-the-managed-postgresql-industry-extension-risks-are-real-exploiting-postgis-memory-corruption-bug-at-neondb-supabase-and-many-more/
Improving Postgres Connection Scalability: Snapshots (blog post by Andres Freund) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/improving-postgres-connection-scalability-snapshots/1806462

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

pgrust Aug 14, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael are joined by Michael Malis, co-creator of pgrust, to discuss their Postgres rewrite, including reliability problems, compatibility testing, faster analytics, and a new JIT-compiled query engine.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Michael Malis https://postgres.fm/people/michael-malis
pgrust https://github.com/malisper/pgrust
The four horsemen behind Postgres outages (blog post by Michael Malis) https://malisper.me/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-postgres-outages
Rebuilding Postgres for faster analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD (blog post by Michael Malis) https://malisper.me/how-we-made-postgres-hundreds-of-times-faster-the-query-engine/
kani https://github.com/model-checking/kani
Antithesis https://antithesis.com
fsyncgate mailing list thread https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAMsr%2BYHh%2B5Oq4xziwwoEfhoTZgr07vdGG%2Bhu%3D1adXx59aTeaoQ%40mail.gmail.com
How AI Changes the Economics of JIT Compilers (blog post by Michael Malis) https://malisper.me/how-ai-changes-the-economics-of-jit-compilers/
Umbra DB https://umbra-db.com

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

MVCC Aug 07, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael are joined by Radim Marek to discuss MVCC, including his recent article on how Postgres chose to implement it compared to other systems.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Radim Marek https://postgres.fm/people/radim-marek
BoringSQL https://boringsql.com
PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's (blog post by Radim) https://boringsql.com/posts/mvcc-bad-bad/
PostgreSQL MVCC documentation https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/mvcc-intro.html
PostgreSQL Storage Internals series by Radim https://boringsql.com/guides/postgresql-storage-internals/
PgQue https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque
The next ten years of Postgres (talk slides by Álvaro Herrera) https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfde2026/sessions/session/7744/slides/866/edb-keynote-pgconfde-2026.pdf
Episode on RegreSQL https://postgres.fm/episodes/regresql
DryRun MCP https://github.com/boringsql/dryrun

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Xata Jul 31, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael are joined by Tudor Golubenco, CTO of Xata, to discuss their architecture, progress, and open source tooling.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Tudor Golubenco https://postgres.fm/people/tudor-golubenco
Xata https://xata.io
Xata is now open source https://xata.io/blog/xata-is-now-open-source
DBLab Engine https://postgres.ai/docs/database-lab
pgstream https://github.com/xataio/pgstream
Xata acquires Privacy Dynamics for advanced anonymization https://xata.io/blog/xata-acquires-privacy-dynamics
Tonic AI https://www.tonic.ai
A thousand Postgres branches for one dollar https://xata.io/blog/a-thousand-postgres-branches-for-1
pgroll https://github.com/xataio/pgroll
CloudNativePG https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg
PGSimCity https://nikolays.github.io/PGSimCity
DeltaX https://github.com/xataio/deltax

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

DBOS Jul 24, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael are joined by Qian Li and Peter Kraft to talk about DBOS, an open source platform for durable workflows built on Postgres.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Qian Li https://postgres.fm/people/qian-li
Peter Kraft https://postgres.fm/people/peter-kraft
DBOS https://www.dbos.dev
Temporal https://temporal.io
Gadget's use of Postgres https://postgres.fm/episodes/gadgets-use-of-postgres
Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY blog post from Recall AI https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-listen-notify-does-not-scale
Postgres 19 commit that improves LISTEN/NOTIFY, avoiding waking backends that have no need to process the notification messages https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=282b1cde9
PgQue https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque
pg_durable https://github.com/microsoft/pg_durable
Absurd https://github.com/earendil-works/absurd
LISTEN/NOTIFY performance considerations (docs patch submitted by Nik) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAM527d8oDVb2K%2BtTjpjLkd7g14HLDiwwnvv%3Drcn4BMEs%3DMatkQ%40mail.gmail.com#1b6fa752a96aad22bd8ef794fbaf3ea1

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

pg_stat_log Jul 17, 2026

Show notes

Nik and Michael are joined by Fabrízio Mello to discuss his new extension pg_stat_log.

Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Fabrízio Mello https://postgres.fm/people/fabrizio-de-royes-mello
Timbira https://www.timbira.com.br
PlanetScale https://planetscale.com
pg_stat_log https://github.com/fabriziomello/pg_stat_log
Custom Cumulative Statistics (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xfunc-c.html#XFUNC-ADDIN-CUSTOM-CUMULATIVE-STATISTICS
Custom Cumulative Statistics (wiki page) https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/CustomCumulativeStats
logerrors https://github.com/munakoiso/logerrors
pgFouine https://www.postgresql.org/ftp/projects/pgFoundry/pgfouine/pgFouine
pgBadger https://github.com/darold/pgbadger
pg_stat_checkpointer https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#MONITORING-PG-STAT-CHECKPOINTER-VIEW
pg_wait_sampling https://github.com/postgrespro/pg_wait_sampling
RFC: pg_stat_logmsg (patch proposal by Joe Conway) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/89742024-d51a-c66b-90b9-67f837072cd2%40joeconway.com

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by: