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You are here: Home1 / Blog2 / Álvaro Herrera
Álvaro Herrera

About Álvaro Herrera

Álvaro has been developing PostgreSQL for a decade and a half. In his lifetime he has got many features in almost all major versions since 7.2, and plans to continue doing so, as long as there are people to share database war stories over beers. His knowledge of the database internals has allowed him to recover many corrupted databases, and plans never to do that again... though plans fail as frequently as users forget to take backups.

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PostgreSQL 13: LIMIT … WITH TIES

September 16, 2020 /4 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL 13 /by Álvaro Herrera

A simple description of the new WITH TIES standard feature in PostgreSQL 13.

PostgreSQL 13: Don’t let slots kill your primary

July 30, 2020 /0 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL 13 /by Álvaro Herrera

One of the interesting new features in PostgreSQL for some time now is the ability to control removal of WAL files using replication slots. The dark side is that replication slots can cause disks to fill up with old WAL, killing the main production server. In this article I explain PostgreSQL replication slots, and how a new feature in PostgreSQL 13 helps prevent this problem.

Researching PostGIS slowness (2019 edition)

February 27, 2020 /2 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by Álvaro Herrera

Just as last year was ending, one of our long-time customers came to us because one of their long-existing PostgreSQL queries involving PostGIS geometry calculations was much slower for specific values.  We researched the problem and found out how to solve it; read on! What we found as the cause of the problem will surprise […]

Managing another PostgreSQL Commitfest

October 15, 2019 /1 Comment/in 2ndQuadrant, Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by Álvaro Herrera

I have written about managing a PostgreSQL commitfest before. During the PostgreSQL 13 development cycle, I did it again. This time I used a different strategy, mostly because I felt that there was excessive accumulation of very old patches that had received insufficient attention. So apart from bugfixes (which are always special cases), I focused […]

PostgreSQL 12: Foreign Keys and Partitioned Tables

October 14, 2019 /7 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by Álvaro Herrera

Now that PostgreSQL 12 is out, we consider foreign keys to be fully compatible with partitioned tables. You can have a partitioned table on either side of a foreign key constraint, and everything will work correctly. Why do I point this out? Two reasons: first, when partitioned tables were first introduced in PostgreSQL 10, they […]

PostgreSQL 11: Patch Reviewers for Partitioning Patches

September 28, 2018 /0 Comments/in Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by Álvaro Herrera

We seldom credit patch reviewers. I decided to pay a little homage to those silent heroes for a few of them: here’s the list of people who were credited as having reviewed the patches mentioned in my previous article for PostgreSQL 11. The number in front is the number of times they were credited as reviewers. […]

Partitioning Improvements in PostgreSQL 11

September 19, 2018 /6 Comments/in Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by Álvaro Herrera

A partitioning system in PostgreSQL was first added in PostgreSQL 8.1 by 2ndQuadrant founder Simon Riggs. It was based on relation inheritance and used a novel technique to exclude tables from being scanned by a query, called “constraint exclusion”. While it was a huge step forward at the time, it is nowadays seen as cumbersome […]

Talk slides: Partitioning Improvements in PostgreSQL 11

August 9, 2018 /0 Comments/in Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by Álvaro Herrera

I spent a couple of days in São Paulo, Brazil last week, for the top-notch PGConf.Brazil 2018 experience. This year I gave a talk about improvements in the declarative partitioning area in the upcoming PostgreSQL 11 release — a huge step forward from what PostgreSQL 10 offers. We have some new features, some DDL handling […]

XMLTABLE in PostgreSQL

March 8, 2017 /14 Comments/in Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by Álvaro Herrera

I just committed a patch by Pavel Stěhule that adds the XMLTABLE functionality to PostgreSQL 10.  XMLTABLE is a very useful feature dictated by the SQL/XML standard, that lets you turn your XML data into relational form, so that you can mix it with the rest of your relational data. This feature has many uses; keep reading for […]

Column Store Plans

April 25, 2016 /5 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by Álvaro Herrera

Over at pgsql-general, Bráulio Bhavamitra asks: I wonder if there is any plans to move postgresql entirely to a columnar store (or at least make it an option), maybe for version 10? This is a pretty interesting question. Completely replacing the current row-based store wouldn’t be a good idea: it has served us extremely well […]

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