Subqueries in FROM clauses get flattened into the outer query by default—but only if the resulting join problem stays small enough.

Guided by his leadership North Star of “performing for today while transforming for tomorrow,” Sanjiv Bajaj believes in breaking businesses to grow, while fostering an entrepreneurial ethos.

file_extend_method is an escape hatch wearing the costume of a tuning knob. It exists for one purpose: to let you turn off a PostgreSQL 16 optimization on the filesystems where that optimization...

PostgreSQL 18's `file_copy_method = clone` can copy a terabyte database in half a second on copy-on-write filesystems. Here's when and why you should use it.

extra_float_digits is the setting whose job changed out from under it. For most of PostgreSQL’s history it forced a choice between floating-point output that was easy to read and output that was...

Write a second PID file to a custom location—useful when your cluster manager expects PostgreSQL's PID at a specific path like `/run/postgresql/postgresql.pid`.

PostgreSQL 18 lets you store extensions anywhere with `extension_control_path`, ending the requirement to install them into the system directory.

PostgreSQL's `exit_on_error` GUC promotes every error to a session-terminating event—but this fail-fast illusion masks a destructive truth.

Event triggers fire on DDL and login events, not rows—and a buggy one can lock out every user, even superusers.

Windows PostgreSQL logs messages to the Event Log under a name you choose with `event_source`—but Windows won't understand that name until you register it with…

A twenty-year-old warning that stays silent on modern PostgreSQL—until it spots a real problem hiding in your connection settings.

TID scans only happen when you explicitly ask for them via `ctid`, making `enable_tidscan` a knob you'll almost certainly never touch.

Disable `enable_sort` to fix a slow sort? Wrong target. Slow sorts need more `work_mem` or better indexes—not this GUC.

enable_seqscan does not disable sequential scans. It cannot, and it was never meant to. The documentation says as much: sequential scans cannot be suppressed entirely, because sometimes reading...

You are rarely the only thing writing your SQL. Your ORM writes some of it, your nested views write more, and sooner or later one of them joins a table to itself on its own primary key. That join...

enable_presorted_aggregate is on, it has been on since PostgreSQL 16 introduced it, and the single most useful thing you will ever do with it is turn it off for exactly one query. Default on,...

Partitionwise join decomposes big joins into smaller per-partition pairs when both tables partition on the join key—but only if you enable it and meet strict…

PostgreSQL's unusual enable_* parameter that defaults off: partitionwise aggregation trades memory for speed, and only you know if that deal is worth it for…

PostgreSQL's partition pruning eliminates unnecessary partition scans in two distinct phases — at plan time and execution time — and you need to check…

Parallel hash joins pool worker memory to build one shared table instead of having each worker build its own copy—a distinction that matters enormously on…